Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Arik called together the veterans of Company A. “There are standing orders about keeping kosher in the army,” he said. “From now on those orders are going to be obeyed. No mixing milk and meat utensils. No nonkosher meat in the kitchen.”

  “Have you gone totally crazy?” said Yoske. “This is the paratroopers!”

  “Yoske, I know you don’t like the way I think or do things generally. But this is how it’s going to be.”

  “Since when did Arik Achmon become a friend of the dosim?”

  “I’m not going to allow any soldiers under my command to feel uncomfortable. There’s going to be basic respect. You can set up a burner near my tent and do what you want there.”

  Arik stopped referring to religious soldiers as dosim. They were people of values. Underneath the kippah, they’re just like us—

  ARIK THE KIBBUTZNIK: THE END

  ARIK WAS APPOINTED manager of Netzer’s agricultural sector. Unlike previous managers, Arik continued to wear his work clothes, ready to fix a tractor. Once a week he worked in the fields; a manager, he said, should know his organization from within.

  When that two-year position ended, Arik was assigned to the cotton fields. What a waste, he thought. How was it possible to advance professionally on the kibbutz when you were removed from a position in which you proved yourself, just because of some ideological principle of rotation? How would the kibbutz be able to hold its most talented people when they felt stifled at every turn? And how much longer could he bear those endless weekly meetings—an ocean of words and a desert of ideas, as he put it, where the decisions of his life were subjected to majority vote, and every nudnik got his democratic say about whether and what Arik should study at university? If I had an honorable way out of here, I would grab it—

  And then his marriage to Rina collapsed.

  Belatedly, Arik had tried to consider her needs. They divided domestic tasks, and he cleaned the house. When Rina got permission from the kibbutz to study at university, Arik assumed responsibility for their daughter, Tsafra.

  Rumors began reaching Arik that Rina had been spotted on campus with a young man. Arik didn’t confront her, hoping it would pass. When they finally talked, he persuaded her to give their marriage another try. In 1964 their son, Ori, was born. But that only created the need for more arrangements.

  Arik had tried to change, become a good husband and father. At the beginning, he was sure, there had been love. They still respected each other. But distance had become habit. He had tried too late to salvage the “family mission.”

  ARIK WAS CALLED up for reserve duty on the Syrian border. It was early summer 1966. There had been shooting attacks against Israeli farmers, and the IDF had retaliated against Syrian positions. There were fears too that Syria would renew attempts to dry up Israel’s main water reservoir, the Sea of Galilee, whose sources were in the Syrian-controlled Golan Heights. The Middle East seemed to be drifting again toward war.

  At night, looking into the blackness where the hills of Syria and Jordan converged, he realized: It’s over. His marriage, and also his life on the kibbutz. He had given his best to Givat Brenner, and then to Netzer. But in the end the problem wasn’t the Stalinists of Givat Brenner or the survivors of Netzer, but Arik himself—the ultimate kibbutznik, who never missed a weekly meeting, who was always on call for the movement, who always had a rational solution for increasing efficiency in the cowshed and the cotton fields. Yet he had forcibly collectivized himself against his nature. The truth? Communal life was never for me—

  Divorce was the one reason for leaving the collective that kibbutzniks accepted. Arik asked for a leave of absence—he would need to keep a room in Netzer to see his two children on weekends—and enrolled in the economics department of Tel Aviv University.

  In August 1966, at age thirty-three, with two suitcases containing all his possessions, he headed for the sand dunes of North Tel Aviv, the near-deserted extremity of the city where a new university was rising. He waived the kibbutz’s offer to pay his tuition, which would have obligated him to return to Netzer after his studies. Instead, he received a grant of 1,500 lira for ten years of work, enough to cover a semester’s tuition and two months’ rent for a room near campus.

  PREPARING FOR WAR

  THE 28TH BATTALION was absorbed into a new brigade of paratrooper reservists, the 55th. It included another two newly formed battalions, in addition to auxiliary units of medics and non-combat logistical staff, some two thousand men altogether. Motta Gur was appointed commander. In the 1950s Motta had formed a unit of new immigrants into one of the IDF’s best fighting forces, proving that not only native-born Israelis could fight. He’d led a raid on a terrorist base in Gaza, and then, with Egyptian soldiers in pursuit, ran several kilometers toward the Israeli border, carrying a dead soldier on his back. He was soft-spoken, calm under pressure, willing to be corrected by his men, ambitious—precisely the qualities Arik valued in himself.

  “Arik,” said Motta, “I want an intelligence officer who doesn’t play by the book. Someone capable of creative thinking. I sifted through all the available candidates,” he added dryly, “and you won by default.”

  Motta was offering him the position of chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, a leap from company commander to the brigade’s fourth highest position. Arik had no experience in intelligence. And he was trying to start a new life. He had signed up for a full load of courses and was working part-time in the Yediot Aharonot advertising department, spending weekends with his children in Netzer. Motta was asking him to risk stretching beyond his breaking point, to abandon any pretense of a normal life and be on constant call.

  “I’m about to begin university studies,” Arik protested feebly.

  “With me you won’t do much studying,” said Motta.

  Of course Arik could say no: this was the reserves, and he was a civilian. But Motta wasn’t asking for Arik’s consent; he knew Arik wouldn’t refuse.

  Arik went to see an old friend who now headed the IDF course for intelligence officers. “How do I do this?” asked Arik. His friend handed him three books on intelligence gathering. “Read these,” he said. “Next week we have a three-day drill in the desert for the graduates of our latest course. Come.” Arik read, then went to the drill. When it ended, his friend said, “Now you are an intelligence officer.”

  NASSER’S TROOP BUILDUP along the border intensifed; war seemed inevitable. Motta asked Arik to gather available intelligence for the area around El Arish, the coastal town in Sinai where the paratroopers would land in the event of war. Arik collected maps, aerial photographs, and reports of Egyptian troop movements. Two days after being given the assignment, Arik presented Motta with a ten-page handwritten paper summing up the available data.

  Arik said nothing about his war preparations to Yehudit Hazan, the psychology student he was dating. He had met Yehudit at officers’ school in the early 1950s. Fellow kibbutzniks, they’d been part of the same circle. Now they were both in their early thirties, divorced with children. After only a few months together, they were discussing marriage.

  Yehudit, who’d been granted study leave by her kibbutz, was the daughter of Yaakov Hazan, the leader of Hashomer Hatzair. She bore that distinction uneasily; Arik recalled how in the army she had tried not to divulge her last name, to avoid the taint of privilege. She was smart, empathic, tough. And she wasn’t intimidated by Arik’s high opinion of his own capabilities. I’m not easily impressed, thought Arik, but with Yehudit I’ve met my match. She’s actually as intelligent and disciplined as I am. My equal in every way, except that she’s a better person—

  Nearly thirty-four, Arik was older than most of the reservists of the 55th Brigade. A receding hairline emphasized the proportioned momentum of his face: forehead sloping toward upturned nose, chin repeating that same confident thrust. Sometimes, though, his lower lip would recede behind his upper lip and reveal a boyish hesitation.

  There was one complication in the marria
ge plans of Arik and Yehudit: she didn’t want to leave her kibbutz, Mishmar Ha’Emek, which her parents had helped found. Yehudit was the only one of her siblings who still lived there. “It will devastate my father if I leave,” she said.

  “Everything will work out,” Arik reassured her.

  He didn’t tell her that there was no way he was returning to the farm.

  Chapter 4

  A TIME OF WAITING

  “JERUSALEM OF GOLD”

  MAY 1967. ON the streets of Cairo, demonstrators waved banners of skulls and crossbones and chanted, “We want war!” Caricatures in the Arab world’s government newspapers fantasized about the coming victory. An Egyptian cartoon showed a hook-nosed Jew being strangled by a Star of David; a Syrian cartoon showed a pile of skulls in the smoking ruins of Tel Aviv. One ad in an Egyptian newspaper depicted a hand plunging a knife into a Star of David, and was signed, “Nile Oils and Soaps Company.”

  Barely twenty kilometers wide at its narrowest point, which happened to be around the coastal area containing most of its population, Israel could be severed in minutes. The claustrophobia that Israelis had tried to ignore—extending kibbutz fields and housing projects to the very edge of the border—was now unavoidable. The nation could field an impressive force in war—300,000 soldiers and reservists—but only at the cost of wholly mobilizing its barely three million people. The combined Arab armies confronting Israel had nearly twice as many soldiers, four times as many planes, and nearly five times as many tanks.

  As young men began disappearing from Israel’s streets and fields, high school students and pensioners volunteered to take their place, working as mailmen and harvesters. The army requisitioned tour buses, taxis, private cars. Gradually, civilian Israel was absorbed into military Israel.

  Shelters in apartment buildings were swept clean, trenches dug around houses, windows taped against shattering. Pits were dug in parks, in preparation for mass graves.

  Aside from emptying grocery shelves—a resurgence of the refugee instinct—Israelis responded without panic. Hitching soldiers barely had to extend their hand before drivers would stop. So many high school students and pensioners volunteered for the postal service that mail was often delivered two or three times a day. Even thieves contributed to the national effort: as war approached, apartment break-ins stopped.

  On May 22, a week after the crisis began, Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s southern shipping route to the east. The 55th Brigade began calling up its men.

  YOEL BIN-NUN WAS haunted by his rabbi’s lament on Independence Day: “They divided my land!” Something like a heavenly voice, Yoel was convinced, had exploded in Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. At night, in a restless half-sleep, Yoel imagined Israeli soldiers entering Jericho and Hebron.

  The Mercaz study hall was emptying. And then an emissary from the army appeared for Yoel. He packed a knapsack with phylacteries, a pocket Bible, a book by Rabbi Kook. Before heading out to his meeting point, he went to the school for the blind near Mercaz, to say good-bye to Esther. She wasn’t there, so he left a note: “To Esther, shlomot, peace upon you! I’m off to my unit. Don’t leave Jerusalem. Great things are going to happen here. Until we meet again, Yoel.”

  THE RESERVISTS OF the 55th Brigade left young wives and girlfriends and boarded buses covered with the dust of back roads. They were brought to citrus orchards near Lod Airport, on the Jordanian border, below the hills of the West Bank. Pup tents lined the dirt paths between the trees in even rows, divided and subdivided into battalions and companies, each company with its own field kitchen.

  The orchard was young, and its low-hanging branches provided thin shade against the strong sun. In the humidity of the coastal plain, men stripped to undershirts and spent the midday hours burrowed in tents, so small one could barely sit upright inside them. The only relief was provided by makeshift showers, cold water pouring from pipes. There were no outhouses: white tape marked areas where soldiers relieved themselves. The orchards filled with clouds of gnats, so bold that the men had to cover their mouths when they yawned.

  Of the brigade’s 2,000 men, only one requested sick leave. Far more typically, reservists whom doctors determined weren’t fit to jump refused to be sent home. One officer appeared for duty in a cast. Young men studying abroad flew back to Lod Airport and, without stopping at home, hitched directly to the orchards.

  Despite rumors of an imminent Israeli offensive in Sinai, the reservists stayed put. They dug trenches around the encampment, stood guard duty, took refresher courses in first aid and explosives, cleaned and recleaned their Uzis and Belgian FN rifles, whose long steel barrels rusted easily and required constant attention. They played backgammon and chess and amused themselves by listening to Radio Cairo’s Hebrew broadcasts, which warned the Jews to flee. They laughed at the bad Hebrew and laughed, too, at the threats. Of course we’ll win, they reassured each other; the only question is the cost.

  They argued constantly, Israeli style—not to convince an opponent but to bolster one’s certainties. Was prime minister Levi Eshkol right to try to exhaust the diplomatic option, or was he showing weakness? Should we listen to the Americans and show restraint? Can we go to war without American backing?

  Whatever the differences among them, they shared a growing sense of aloneness, of Jewish isolation. Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, sought help in Western capitals, but no nation was prepared to stand with Israel. France, Israel’s closest ally, turned against the Jewish state. The United States, which had promised to defend Israel’s access to the Straits of Tiran when Israel withdrew from the Sinai Desert after the 1956 war, was preoccupied with Vietnam. And the UN was the UN. We can only depend on ourselves, said the young reservists, and on our fellow Jews in the Diaspora. Angry and anxious, the young Israelis increasingly sounded like the old Jews of exile they were meant to replace.

  WHEN THEY TIRED of talking politics, they argued religion.

  “How can you believe in God after the Holocaust?” a kibbutznik demanded of Yoel Bin-Nun.

  “How can you not believe in God when He returned us to the land of Israel after the Holocaust?” said Yoel.

  “Prove to me that God exists,” the kibbutznik challenged.

  “Prove to me that He doesn’t,” Yoel countered.

  ARIK ACHMON SPENT his days shuttling between central headquarters in Tel Aviv and southern command headquarters in the desert city of Beersheba. When the updates he sought on Egyptian troop movements weren’t forthcoming, he turned to an acquaintance in intelligence who provided the information. For Arik, there was always a friend in the right place. At night he returned to the big tent in the orchards, where his staff of ten reservists would incorporate the new material into their scenarios. They were soon able to identify every minefield, tent camp, and even sandbag position in El Arish.

  Arik couldn’t bear the endless speculations among the men and the anxious huddling around transistor radios for news updates. One of his soldiers evoked the possibility of another Holocaust, and Arik waved his hand dismissively. “Of course they would destroy us if they could,” he said. “But we won’t give them the pleasure.”

  Regretfully Arik acknowledged the likelihood that he wouldn’t experience frontline combat in the imminent war. Arik was now part of Motta’s inner circle. Arik would help direct the battle from behind the lines, at Motta’s side.

  In the nine months since being appointed Motta’s intelligence officer, he had come to respect Motta more than any commander. Like Arik, Motta combined absolute confidence in his own judgment—he intended to one day become chief of staff—with a readiness to admit when proven wrong. During strategy sessions, even Motta’s driver felt free to question him. And Motta knew how to reassure his men: when a young reservist in the orchards admitted he was terrified of being dropped behind enemy lines, Motta recounted his own fears as a young soldier during a nighttime jump and how relieved he was when the jump was canceled.

  Arik’s respect for Motta was rec
iprocated. Motta wrote in his diary: “What’s good about Arik: He understands the importance of precision in presenting facts, and doesn’t draw hasty conclusions.” In matters of life and death, Motta could depend on Arik.

  ONE NIGHT, AFTER reviewing the latest invasion plans, Arik went for a walk through the orchards with Moisheleh Stempel-Peles, Motta’s deputy commander. They passed men sitting beside campfires, drinking Turkish coffee, arguing about the government, singing softly.

  Squat, thick-necked, Moisheleh had spent the Holocaust years as a child wandering with his family through the Soviet Union. In the paratroopers, he had won a medal for valor during a retaliatory raid against a Gaza police station: under fire, he rushed to the building’s entrance to replace a defective explosive.

  When Motta first told Arik that he’d chosen Moisheleh as his deputy, Arik was unimpressed. “That blockhead?” said Arik. Moisheleh’s opinion of Arik had been no better: a shvitzer, thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, and meanwhile he’s never experienced real combat. But in their nights together, each had learned to respect the other. Moisheleh was smarter, and Arik tougher, than either had realized.

  They walked together in silence. “Arik, I want to tell you something,” Moisheleh said. During the 1956 Sinai campaign, he continued quietly, he had ordered his men to beat bound Egyptian POWs. “I wanted to toughen them, teach them how to be real soldiers. Now I look at myself and can’t believe what an animal I was.”

  Arik nodded, grateful for Moisheleh’s trust in him.

  PRESIDENT NASSER PROMISED the imminent end of the Jewish state. Radio Cairo’s Hebrew announcer urged Jews to start packing.

  Israel counterattacked with song. The new hits playing from the tinny transistor radios in the orchards were rousing, defiant. One song promised that, just as the people of Israel had emerged from all the “narrow straits” of their history, so too would they emerge from the crisis over the Straits of Tiran. Another song ridiculed Nasser’s boast that he was waiting for the IDF’s chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin: “Nasser is waiting for Rabin ayayay!” The tune was so upbeat, the anticipated victory so tangible, that just hearing that song was enough to cheer the paratroopers.