And yet, he confessed, there was one occasion when he too couldn’t join in the dancing, and kept aloof from the people’s celebration. It happened on the night in 1947 when the UN voted for partition of the land of Israel into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. “The whole nation flowed into the streets to celebrate its feelings of joy,” he said. “[But] I couldn’t go out and join in the rejoicing. I sat alone, and burdened. In those first hours I couldn’t make my peace with what had happened, with the terrible news that the word of God in the book of the Prophets had now been fulfilled: ‘They divided my land!’ ”
And now he suddenly cried out: “Where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is our Shechem—have we forgotten it? And where is our Jericho—have we forgotten it? And where is the other bank of the Jordan River? Where is every clod of earth? Every piece of God’s land? Do we have the right to cede even a centimeter of it? God forbid! . . .
“In that state, my whole body was stunned, wounded and severed into pieces. I couldn’t celebrate. ‘They divided my land!’ They divided the land of God! . . . I couldn’t go outside to dance and rejoice. That is how the situation was nineteen years ago.”
Total silence. The students had never heard such grief, such outrage, from their rabbi.
“A day or two later the sage Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Harlap came to my house. . . . We sat together . . . stunned and silent. We communed for a few moments. We recovered and we said together as one, ‘It is God Who did this, it is wondrous in our eyes.’ ”
Yoel sat toward the back of the room, pulling at his short brown beard. What, he wondered, was the meaning of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s outburst? For nineteen years, the rabbi had encouraged his students to celebrate God’s generosity to His people without equivocation, had suppressed his pain over the brokenness of the land. Why the sudden cry now? And what a cry! As if the wound had just been inflicted. For Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, nothing was random. What was he trying to tell them?
THE NEXT EVENING, as Israel was concluding its Independence Day celebrations of family barbeques and the annual Hebrew song contest and military parade and Bible quiz, the radio reported that Egypt’s president, Nasser, had begun mobilizing troops. The Israeli government responded with a partial mobilization of the reserves.
Yoel went to see Esther. She was working as house mother in a school for blind children, practically next door to Mercaz. Esther had rarely seen Yoel so agitated. What did the news portend? Were we heading for war? And was Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s outburst the night before somehow connected to today’s news? “Esther, you should have heard him: ‘Where is our Hebron? Where is our Jericho?’ I’ve never heard such a cry in my life. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah wasn’t speaking. He was roaring.”
Chapter 3
BORN TO SERVE
AN EXEMPLARY KIBBUTZNIK
ARIK ACHMON, chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, was at work in the accounting department of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot when the call came from Motta Gur, commander of the brigade: I need to see you now.
The IDF, Motta explained when they met, was planning a preemptive strike in the Sinai Desert. The 55th would be parachuting behind Egyptian lines and taking the coastal town of El Arish, the most fortified position on the way to the Suez Canal. Arik’s job was to write a preliminary assessment of Egyptian strength in El Arish. For now, continued Motta, the plan was to be kept secret, even from Arik’s own intelligence staff. Motta gave him two days to produce a report. “Get to work,” said Motta.
Arik had just experienced the most intense year of his life. He had divorced, assumed care of his two children on weekends, quit his kibbutz for the city, begun full-time studies at Tel Aviv University, and was working half-time. And he was learning how to function as chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, devoting most of the free time he didn’t have to what he called “on-the-job training.” He’d begun studying for final exams in his economics classes, but now that would have to wait.
Arik found a temporary replacement for his job at the newspaper, told his professors he couldn’t take finals—“army matters,” he said, without explaining—and began knocking on doors at IDF intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv. Even an experienced intelligence officer would have had difficulty coping with Motta’s deadline. Though Arik assumed he was as competent as anyone and better than most, he was not experienced. Until ten months ago he’d been a company commander, with no background in intelligence. And now he was about to help Motta plan a war in a matter of days.
ARIK ACHMON HAD been waiting for this moment all his life.
Growing up in the years before statehood on Givat Brenner, a kibbutz south of Tel Aviv, Arik had longed to take his place among the heroes of Israel. Arik and his friends would eavesdrop on the meetings of the commanders of the Palmach, the Jewish community’s elite commando force, young men with careless hair and kaffiyehs around their necks who regularly convened in Givat Brenner (which was named for a Hebrew writer killed in an Arab pogrom). The kibbutz boys would listen to the Palmachniks sing, in Hebrew, the rousing and melancholy songs of the Red Army’s war against Hitler: “Cossack horsemen galloping to battle! Hey hey hey!” “A fire is burning in our land, the enemy is at the gates.” Arik knew their names—Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin—the way teenagers elsewhere followed sports heroes. Afterward, when seven Arab armies attacked the newborn Jewish state, it was largely the Palmachniks who had beaten them back. Many of those young men whom Arik saw in Givat Brenner didn’t return from the front.
Above all, there was Sereni. Enzo Sereni, an Italian-born Jew with a doctorate in philosophy, had left behind a family fortune to become a kibbutznik. It was even rumored that he was an aristocrat, and the soft-spoken Sereni certainly seemed like one among the blunt pioneers from Poland and Lithuania. He had once considered converting to Christianity and becoming a monk; instead he chose to serve his despised people, satisfying his monastic tendencies in the austerity of Givat Brenner. Sereni and his wife, Ada, were the unofficial house parents in Givat Brenner’s children’s home. Arik loved Sereni’s bedtime stories about his travels through prewar Nazi Germany to help young Jews escape and to Iraq to help Jews organize against pogroms. At night in the children’s home—bare walls, bare floor, four iron cots to a room—Sereni would sing, in a rousing voice, the Italian Communist anthem “Avanti Popolo!” (Onward, Masses!), and the children would shout along, leaping on their cots. “Bolsheviks,” he called them tenderly. A pacifist, Sereni refused to carry a weapon or even a stick on guard duty. He walked the neighboring Arab villages, befriending mukhtars and peasants. As a boy Arik had feared the Arabs: one of his earliest memories was of hiding under a bed while Arabs fired at the kibbutz. But, walking with Sereni, he learned that if you looked people in the eye and respected them as neighbors or as adversaries, there was no reason to be afraid.
With World War II, Sereni conceded defeat: it was no longer possible to be a pacifist. At age forty, he volunteered for commando duty with the British army. In 1943, when Arik was ten, Sereni disappeared on his last journey—part of a small group of Zionist pioneers who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in a forlorn attempt to rescue Jews. Sereni and seven of his friends, including the poet Hannah Szenes, were captured. Sereni was sent to Dachau and died there, among the Jews he had tried to save—but of course not quite one of them, thought Arik, because Sereni had chosen his fate, had died a soldier.
With the founding of the state in 1948, Arik, age fifteen, began training to defend his home. As the Egyptian army advanced on Givat Brenner, its teenagers were taught hand-to-hand combat, how to crawl through rugged terrain at night and slip behind enemy lines; at the shooting range, Arik attained sniper level. The young people dug trenches and served as runners between the watchtowers. The barely equipped Israeli army brought three World War I–era cannons on wheels to defend Givat Brenner; the cannons were nicknamed “Napoleonchiks,” little Napoleons, because they were small but bombastic, creating more noise than damage. Tel Nof, the base f
or the tiny Israeli air force, was near Givat Brenner, and every day Arik would watch the skies as the entire fleet of four Messerschmitts took off, then count them as they returned. Egyptian Spitfires attacked Tel Nof; Israeli soldiers fired back with rifles.
For all of Arik’s intimacy with the military, he’d remained a spectator. The Egyptian army was stopped several kilometers before reaching Givat Brenner, and the war passed him by. A friend of Arik’s, only two years older than him, joined a rescue patrol setting out from the kibbutz and was killed in battle. Arik wished that he were two years older and able to prove himself too.
MEANWHILE, ARIK TRIED to be an exemplary kibbutznik. As a boy in the children’s house, the parallel communal society where Givat Brenner’s young people were encouraged to run their own lives without adult interference, he had volunteered for every position—the work committee that assigned after-school tasks, the culture committee that planned hikes, the social committee that resolved disputes among children and between children and teachers. At age eleven, Arik had been chosen to work after school in the cowshed, the “commando unit” of the kibbutz workforce, as he proudly called it. While his friends tended the vegetable garden around the children’s house, Arik worked long and unpredictable hours, milking the cows by hand and hauling fifteen-liter buckets of milk, just like an adult. The boy knows how to work, they said of him, the ultimate kibbutz compliment. Arik relished that moment when, straight from the cowshed, still in his dirty khaki work clothes, he made his entry into the children’s dining room in the middle of dinner.
He thinks he’s better than anyone else, some complained. It was true: Arik sensed he was more analytical, less emotional, and calmer under pressure than the others. For all his communal devotion, friends perceived in him an aloofness, the emotional equivalent of ideological heresy. Arik exasperated his friends. He could be so helpful, so dependable. But so damn inconsiderate of others’ feelings! And that look: all he had to do was stare at you with a slight tilt of his head, a corner of his mouth considering a smirk, to leave you feeling worthless. He seemed to gaze at the world from a distance, a wary observer. Friends knew better than to expect sympathy from him. Sympathy, he felt, only nurtured weakness.
Arik’s arrogance was encouraged by his mother. Hannah Achmon was the ultimate kibbutznik, so devoted to the commune’s nursery that she had deferred having her own children until the first of Givat Brenner’s children reached first grade. But she compensated for that selflessness with a fierce possessiveness toward Arik. There has never been, and will never be, a child born who is more successful than my Arik, she announced to the other mothers. When there was a family problem, Hannah turned to her teenage son rather than to her husband, Yekutiel, whom she dismissed as ineffectual. And she encouraged Arik’s three younger siblings to turn to Arik too.
Arik was the most diligent worker among the young people, the best debater in class. Arik sensed he was destined for greatness—not the self-centered fame of the capitalist world, of course, but a greatness drawn from proximity to epic events.
WHEN ARIK TURNED seventeen, the perfect world of his childhood began to devour itself. It was 1951, and Givat Brenner was torn over whether the new state of Israel should align with the Soviet Union or the West. Givat Brenner’s Marxists declared the Soviet Union under Stalin as the hope for world redemption, and demanded that progressive, egalitarian Israel choose the right side of history. The Red Army, some predicted, would soon be marching triumphantly into the Middle East.
Opposing the Marxists was Mapai, the pro-Western social democratic party headed by prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Like his parents, Arik was a Mapainik—a besieged minority in Givat Brenner. At the kibbutz’s weekly meetings, Stalinists denounced them as enemies of socialism, poisoners of the youth. Three years earlier the comrades had been prepared to die together defending their commune from the Egyptian army; now Mapainiks and Stalinists couldn’t even share a table in the communal dining room.
Arik’s class was about to graduate from high school and be inducted, in a public ceremony, into kibbutz membership. No young person had ever refused to participate. But for Arik, Givat Brenner was no longer home. The Mapainiks, including his parents, were openly talking about seceding, a process that was happening on other kibbutzim too.
“So what if it’s a farce?” a friend argued. “Take the membership and leave. That’s what I’m doing. Just don’t break ranks, don’t embarrass the hevreh [the gang].”
“I’m not going to lie to myself and to the whole kibbutz and pretend that everything is fine,” Arik said. “End of discussion.”
ON A FRIDAY EVENING in the summer of 1951, members gathered on the kibbutz’s highest hill for the induction ceremony of the graduates. Past ceremonies were accompanied by an orchestra and choir, a stage covered with blue-and-white Zionist flags and revolutionary red flags. Now, though, with the impending split, the stage was bare, and a lone accordionist tried to rouse the listless comrades seated on folding chairs on the grass.
The graduates mounted the stage, girls in white blouses and blue skirts, boys in embroidered collarless shirts. Barefoot, paired, boys holding girls by the waist, they leaped to the songs of the pioneers, rousing songs of determination and hope, subverted by a melancholy minor key.
Arms folded, Arik stood to one side. From here he could see the kibbutz spread below, receding in the darkness. Spread on the slopes were the houses of the veterans, long concrete buildings with four doors leading to four identical one-room apartments. And beside them, outhouses and public showers. Farther down the hill, the children’s houses with red-shingled roofs. And the wheat fields and orange groves. And the cowshed, whose odor permeated the kibbutz, carried even now by the night’s cool breeze. And just behind where Arik stood, Sereni House, holding the hero’s archives.
A kibbutz veteran addressed the graduates. “You now face the challenge of continuing our path,” he said, “of ensuring the very existence of the collective.” He read out the names of the new members, pausing after each to allow the audience to affirm the young person’s candidacy. Arms that in previous induction ceremonies had been raised like flagpoles were now limp. “There remains a shadow of doubt concerning . . . Arie Achmon,” he continued, invoking Arik’s formal name. “I hope the situation will be clarified soon.”
Arik felt all eyes against him. Mapainik, secessionist. Was he imagining it, or was there hatred in their stares? He told himself he didn’t care. And, no, there was no “shadow of doubt,” no situation awaiting clarification. For the first time in his life, Arik Achmon had stepped out of line.
ON THE BORDER
TWO MONTHS LATER, Arik was drafted. He returned to Givat Brenner during leaves, but that arrangement was temporary. Givat Brenner was heading for a split, and Arik’s parents would soon be leaving.
Like most kibbutz recruits, Arik assumed he would join Nahal, the unit that combined military training with agricultural work on the border. But the kibbutz movement had other plans for him. In every draft, the movement chose three of its most promising young people to help infuse the kibbutz spirit among the new immigrants in the Golani infantry brigade. The movement chose Arik. He was mortified: What did he care about immigrant absorption? I’m a soldier, not a social worker. Still, he didn’t challenge the order: He had been raised to serve. Humiliated, he went to Golani.
In Golani, Arik encountered the new Israel that was rising in the immigrant camps, Jews from Yemen and North Africa who had never heard of a kibbutz and who couldn’t understand what Arik meant by communal property. How could everyone own everything and no one own anything?
And then there were the other refugees, Holocaust survivors. Sabon, “soap,” Arik and his friends called them, after the rumor that the Nazis had made soap out of Jewish flesh. Arik felt little connection to what had happened to Jews in Europe. Almost all of his family had come to the land of Israel before the war; they had intuited the flood, built their ark. As for those who had drowned: well, they
too could have saved themselves. There had to be something wrong, he thought, with so many people who allowed themselves to be killed so easily.
IT WAS A time of crisis. The new state was overwhelmed with Jewish refugees from Europe and from the endangered diasporas of the Arab world, crowding into tent camps and shantytowns. Meanwhile Palestinian refugees slipped across the open border, killing and wounding. We promised the Jews a safe refuge, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared, and we must keep that promise.
But the IDF, which hadn’t recovered from its devastating losses in the 1948 war, wasn’t coping. In one border skirmish, seven Israeli soldiers were killed and one Jordanian soldier wounded, a disastrous ratio for a vastly outnumbered nation; as an added humiliation, the Israeli bodies were seized and dismembered. Hundreds of Palestinian infiltrators—many unarmed, who came to steal, not kill—were shot by IDF soldiers and by farmers, but that too failed as deterrence.
Desperate, the army tried to impose a nightly curfew on Palestinian villages across the border in Jordan from which infiltrators had emerged; anyone leaving their homes would be shot.
On a moonless winter night in 1952, Arik and six other soldiers, under the command of a corporal with no combat experience, set out from their base in central Israel and crossed the unmarked border into the West Bank.
After four kilometers they came to a village. They took cover on a hill overlooking the dirt road and lay there in the cold. After perhaps an hour they heard men’s voices, loud and joking. “Fire!” said the commander. Prematurely: the targets were out of range. A soldier threw a grenade; it didn’t explode. “Move out!” shouted the commander.
Why weren’t they charging? But the order was given, and Arik joined the others in humiliating retreat. As they entered the gate of their base, the soldiers sang an improvised ditty, “We went out to fight, we ran in flight.”
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 6