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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Then he saw them. Not quite the Messiah and Elijah, but almost as awesome. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah and the nazir, surrounded by paratroopers. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah stood, erect, as if emulating the uprightness of the young men around him. Eyes closed, hands clasped together, steadying himself.

  The rabbi embraced Shtiglitz. Then they stood together, stroking each other’s shoulder in silence.

  Jewish history’s most sealed gate had opened. Anything could happen now.

  EXHAUSTED, GRIEVING, EXULTANT, paratroopers crossed the Temple Mount and rushed down to the Western Wall.

  Hanan Porat too was looking for a way to get to the Wall. The Temple Mount may have been the locus of holiness, center of the universe, but Hanan craved the Wall, where Jews had prayed for this moment. As he ran down the steps, he told a friend, “We are writing the next chapter of the Bible.”

  The narrow space before the Wall—barely five meters wide and twenty meters long—filled with soldiers. Rabbi Goren was lifted onto shoulders. He tried to blow the shofar but was too overcome. “Rabbi,” said an officer, a kibbutznik, “give me the shofar. I play the trumpet.” Goren complied. The sound that emerged resembled the blast of a bugle.

  A kibbutznik asked Hanan Porat to teach him an appropriate prayer. Hanan replied, “Just say the Shema”—the basic Jewish prayer that begins, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one,” and which any Orthodox child can recite. But the kibbutznik had never heard of the Shema. “Repeat after me,” said Hanan, and they said the prayer together.

  MOTTA AND ARIK came down to the Western Wall. Arik was unmoved. What did he have to do with this outbreak of piety among the paratroopers, of all people? Arik heard some of the soldiers speaking about a “miracle” and felt uneasy. What miracle? The Jews had won because they stopped waiting for miracles and learned to protect themselves.

  Motta watched the nazir. The old man in long brown jacket and fedora was standing before the Wall, rigid with awe. Not even his lips moved in prayer. He seemed to merge with the stones, thought Motta, an implacable presence, just like the Jews. Motta didn’t approach the Wall, didn’t know the gestures of devotion. But watching the nazir, he felt himself touching the stones vicariously. He took out his diary and wrote, “I was bound to [the nazir] from a distance. . . . Through his body, which seemed paralyzed, I felt the Jewish heartbeat.”

  UDI ADIV WATCHED Rabbi Goren hoisted above a circle of dancing soldiers and felt repelled. People died so that Goren can prance before his holy stones—

  Despite himself, though, something about this place moved him. He leaned against the row of Arab houses in the narrow lane and, for the first time in his life, confronted antiquity. The kibbutz celebrated youth, the future, not nostalgia. This stone alley, with its gray light: he felt a longing that disoriented him. He was an Israeli, a new creature; if he thought about his Jewish identity at all, it is the way a human being relates to the fetus he once was, as mere unconscious prelude. In Udi’s vocabulary, Jewish was equated with the ills of exile: rootless, parasitic, superstitious. Yet here, in the Western Wall’s solitary dignity, was beauty. In this world of stone, he felt softness; in this quarry of memory, peace.

  Udi looked on as soldiers caressed the Wall and buried their heads in its crevices. He felt no need to unburden himself to these stones, no urge even to touch them. He was grateful to be alive and intact, grateful that the murderous flashes of light had stopped. The confinement of this small space felt soothing. Once, exiled Jews had unburdened themselves to the Wall in defeat; now an Israeli soldier received comfort here in his unwanted victory.

  YOEL BIN-NUN HAD no idea how long he had been on the Temple Mount—an hour? a day?—before his unit was dispatched to secure the Old City market.

  The men walked along the Via Dolorosa, then turned right toward the Damascus Gate. On the stone walls were posters of Nasser and of Ahmed Shukeiry, the Palestinian leader who had vowed to throw the Jews into the sea.

  Suddenly a young man emerged from a narrow metal door. Running. Straight toward them.

  Yoel and several others fired. The young man fell.

  “What are you doing!” shouted a soldier.

  “He could have had a grenade,” replied Yoel.

  The wounded man writhed on the stone pavement. People appeared and dragged him inside a doorway.

  “HEVREH, HAVE YOU completely lost it?” Yoske Balagan said when he arrived at the Western Wall. “Whoever heard of such a thing, paratroopers weeping?”

  Even at military funerals, the paratrooper ethos was to remain stoic. Yoske had fought on Nablus Road, retrieving a wounded soldier under machine gun fire. But he hadn’t lost his self-control. And yet here were some of his friends, weeping.

  “Yoske,” one said, “we just heard the numbers.” Nearly a hundred dead, a third of the brigade wounded.

  Yoske approached the Wall and stood in silence, for once at a loss for words. The guardian of the paratroopers’ secular ethos felt emotions he couldn’t explain.

  He approached Rabbi Goren. “Do you remember me, Rabbi?” asked Yoske. “I stole your wife’s pajamas at the seder you conducted for the paratroopers in 1957.”

  “What I remember,” replied Goren genially, “was you lunatics responding to my blessings with ‘Sachtein’ [To your health, in Arabic].”

  Pointing to Goren’s shofar, Yoske pleaded, “Rabbi, don’t shoot me with that.” Goren laughed. Yoske felt reconciled with the faith of his fathers.

  NAOMI SHEMER WAS in a date grove in Sinai, waiting to sing for the troops, when she heard a radio broadcast of the paratroopers at the Western Wall. They were singing her song, “Jerusalem of Gold.” But the words of lament for the inaccessible parts of the city had become outdated; the song needed a new stanza.

  Borrowing a soldier’s back, she wrote: “We’ve returned to the wells / the market and the square / A ram’s horn calls out on the Temple Mount in the Old City.”

  MEIR ARIEL RAN down the steps leading to the Western Wall. Any moment, he thought, it’s going to hit me: here I am, fulfillment of two thousand years of longing.

  He paused at the final step. The narrow space before the Wall was packed with soldiers. Some were writing notes and placing them between the stones. Some were praying. Meir checked himself: No longing, no exultation. Nothing. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. What kind of Jew am I?

  Chapter 7

  “JERUSALEM OF IRON”

  THE MORNING AFTER

  SPORADIC GUNFIRE CEASED. The Jordanian soldiers who remained in the Old City surrendered or else slipped into civilian clothes. Paratroopers patrolled the empty market and the Arab neighborhoods outside the walls. Arab men were randomly detained, but most were soon released. A doctor from the 55th Brigade helped an Arab woman give birth.

  The Arab population—close to 70,000 people, 25 percent of the population of reunited Jerusalem—was under curfew, at the mercy of an unknown enemy. From many windows hung pieces of white cloth, improvised flags of surrender.

  What would they have done to us and our families, paratroopers said to each other, if they had won the war?

  IN DAZED JOY, thousands of Jews headed for the Western Wall. Simply walking several hundred meters across the city’s border seemed to defy a law of nature. Not all the mines had been cleared, and one man lost a leg; but nothing could stop the crowds.

  Meir Ariel watched them moving toward the Wall. “People of Israel!” he called out to no one in particular. “Now you can enter the Old City. But before you came here, a hail of lead entered the bodies of my friends.”

  An ultra-Orthodox Jew at the Wall told Yoske Balagan, “We prayed the whole time for you.”

  “Thank you very much,” replied Yoske. “But I’m more grateful to the IDF, which equipped me with an Uzi.”

  A REPORTER FOR the Yiddish radio station circulated among the paratroopers, asking if anyone spoke mama loshen, the mother tongue. Yoske directed him to Aryeh Weiner, the kibbutznik from Netzer Sereni who had come alone t
o Israel on a refugee boat at age twelve. Weiner had just placed a note in a crack between the stones, which contained this prayer: “I hope I win the lottery.”

  “How did you get here?” the reporter asked him.

  “We parachuted into the Old City,” Weiner lied, unable to speak straight-faced in Yiddish.

  Weiner’s version was transmitted to the Yiddish-speaking world: The paratroopers had descended onto the Holy City like angels.

  SOME ISRAELIS CAME TO LOOT. They smashed windows and pried open the shutters of shops on Salah a-Din Street, just outside the Old City walls, filling their cars with groceries and clothes. Paratroopers found themselves patrolling to thwart not only Arab attacks but Israeli plundering. “Jerusalem of gold?” one paratrooper shouted at looters. “Jerusalem of shit!”

  Among themselves, paratroopers argued the moral gradations of looting. Was it permitted to take food from a grocery if you intended to eat it immediately, but not permitted to hoard? Could one take cheap tourist memorabilia, like postcards, but not electronic goods? One paratrooper argued: Why should civilians loot when we who fought get nothing? Another paratrooper, who had helped himself to food in a shuttered Arab grocery, searched for the owner to pay him.

  Yoel Bin-Nun’s unit was patrolling in East Jerusalem when they noticed an Israeli walking with a big radio on his shoulder. Yoel’s officer, a kibbutznik, grabbed the radio, threw it to the ground, and smashed it with his boot. Yoel caught his eye and offered a grateful smile.

  MOTTA SENT ARIK to escort David Ben-Gurion to the Western Wall. The country’s first prime minister and his wife, Paula, had been brought to the old border by Ezer Weizman, the former air force commander and now IDF’s chief of operations. Weizman said that the Ben-Gurions would ride with him, and that Arik should follow. “I represent the paratroopers,” Arik said. “I want to be with Ben-Gurion.” Weizman wasn’t used to taking orders, let alone from a major, but he wasn’t about to argue with one of Motta’s men the day after the reunification of Jerusalem. Arik and Ezer exchanged jeeps, and Arik sat beside Ben-Gurion.

  Ben-Gurion, kibbutznik’s floppy hat atop his white winged hair, was silent. To Arik, he seemed in shock. Arik too preferred silence: he had just learned the names of the fallen from his old unit, Company A. Paula, though, didn’t stop talking. She asked Arik about a relative of hers whom she thought was in the 55th Brigade, and Arik assured her he wasn’t. She insisted he was.

  Arik had always seemed to just miss his moment. But now he was exactly where he was meant to be. Whatever failures he had experienced and whatever disappointments still awaited him, he had had the privilege of being among the liberators of Jerusalem.

  ADA GEVA FOUND a note in her cubby in the dining room: “A friend of Avital’s called to say he’s been lightly wounded.” Of course “lightly wounded,” thought Ada; what else would Avital say?

  Without visible reaction, as if she’d expected this news all along, she returned to her room and packed a bag. Then she went to tell Avital’s parents. “I’m going to see him,” she said. “In the middle of a war?” asked Kuba. “How will you get there?” “Hitching,” she replied.

  She began walking toward the road. Kuba borrowed a kibbutz car and drove her to Jerusalem.

  In the Bikur Cholim hospital, the halls were crowded with wounded men on mattresses. Some were screaming; most were still. Ada was impressed with the calmness of the staff. The way it’s supposed to be—

  She approached the nurses’ station. There was no list of the wounded, and no one could tell her where Avital was. And so Ada and Kuba went from room to room. Ada, nearsighted, peered at the wounded. Which one is mine? They’re all mine—

  She saw a head entirely bandaged, except for lips, nostrils, and a single eye. She squeezed between the beds, bent down, and kissed the luminous blue eye of the boy of the orchards.

  TO THE SYRIAN FRONT

  THE EGYPTIAN AND JORDANIAN ARMIES were routed. The IDF had reached the Suez Canal and the Jordan River—conquering the West Bank, ancient Judea and Samaria. Hebron, Nablus, Bethlehem—biblical geography had suddenly converged with the borders of modern Israel.

  There was fighting on the Syrian front. The Syrians were shelling kibbutzim in the Galilee, and after initial hesitation, Defense Minister Dayan ordered the IDF to take the Golan Heights.

  Motta and Arik went to IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv to get their next assignment. Stay in Jerusalem and keep the peace, they were told; other units will take over from here. Motta insisted on joining the Golan battle. When Israel is at war, he argued, the paratroopers don’t patrol the home front.

  And so the men of the 55th boarded buses again, this time heading north. Some joked: now they want us to take Damascus. Most sat or smoked in silence.

  Meir Ariel wrote. He was completing the takeoff on “Jerusalem of Gold” that he’d begun in the Rockefeller. His Hebrew was elegant, eccentric: “In your darkness, Jerusalem,” the song began. The complicated word he chose for “in your darkness,” b’machshakayich, was hardly part of daily speech. Meir borrowed it from the Psalms: “The dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence.” Had Meir the kibbutznik been reading Psalms during the war, seeking divine protection?

  He invented words—like the verb ragum, literally “mortared,” by which he meant, under mortar attack: “The battalion, mortared, pushed onward / all blood and smoke / and mother after mother entered / into the community of the bereaved.”

  Meir had intended to rebuke Naomi Shemer’s naïveté; but he too couldn’t help celebrating Jerusalem: “In your darkness Jerusalem / we found a loving heart / when we came to expand your borders / and disperse a foe.” The refrain couldn’t sustain its bleakness: “Jerusalem of iron / and of lead and of blackness / to your walls we summoned freedom.”

  THE CONVOY OF BUSES stopped along the Boulevard of the Kibbutzim, a two-lane road of palm trees behind which spread some of the country’s leading kibbutzim. Just ahead was the Sea of Galilee, and beyond it, the Golan Heights.

  Many of the paratroopers were from kibbutzim in the area. Word instantly spread, and hundreds of mothers and fathers and wives appeared. There were relieved embraces with husbands and sons. And there were hushed conversations about the wounded and the dead.

  Quietly, the bereaved walked slowly back toward the gates of their kibbutzim, to share their grief with the collective.

  THE LAST WAR

  THE IDF CONQUERED the Golan Heights before the 55th Brigade managed to reach the front. By Saturday, June 10, the Six-Day War was over.

  On Sunday morning, June 11, after a Shabbat rest in kibbutzim in the north, the paratroopers rode back to Jerusalem, to be discharged. On Meir’s bus they sang the song he had taught them over Shabbat: “Jerusalem of iron / and of lead and of blackness.” This is our song, friends told him. Perhaps because it was written by one of them; perhaps because it protested sentimentality, but affirmed the war’s justness.

  The buses took a shortcut through the Jordan Valley, until a few days earlier Jordanian territory. On one side of the narrow road were the desert hills of the West Bank, on the other, the plains of Jordan and mountains beyond. The border was unmarked, the Middle East open.

  Along the road were lines of refugees, barefoot children and women balancing all of their possessions in bundles on their heads. The buses stopped, and soldiers got off to offer water. Some refugees, suspicious, drank from the canteens only after the men drank first.

  Arik rode back to Jerusalem with Motta. “The wars are over,” said Arik.

  Surely now the Arabs would understand the futility of trying to destroy Israel. “You’ve been retired, Motta,” he added, smiling. “But don’t worry, I’ll help you find a civilian job.”

  THE ROW OF RAMSHACKLE HOUSES facing the Western Wall was bulldozed, and now a large plaza, white with dust, replaced the alley that had been able to accommodate at most a few dozen people. The several hundred residents of the Mughrabi Quarter, as the cluster of houses was kno
wn, were moved to a refugee camp on the northern edge of the city.

  When Udi Adiv’s unit passed the area near the Wall, he was stunned. The stone alley with its gray filtered light, the intimacy and the mystery—gone. In its place a plaza as flat and glaring as the cotton fields of his kibbutz. Udi looked at the piles of rubble that had once been homes, and thought, Whatever the Zionists touch, they destroy—

  THE NEW EXPANSE at the Wall disturbed Yoel Bin-Nun too. But Yoel saw it as an act of surrender. Clearly the government was trying to divert Jewish attachment to the Mount by creating a pilgrimage site below, so that each of the faiths would have its own ample area. How could the Western Wall—a mere retaining wall of the Temple, without intrinsic holiness—possibly replace the Mount? And how could a victorious Israel forfeit its claim to Judaism’s holiest site?

  Yoel devised a plan: the area around the Dome of the Rock would be cordoned off, while along the edge of the Mount, where pilgrims are permitted by Jewish law to step, a synagogue would be built.

  Yoel would have happily shared his plan with the government. But no one was asking his opinion.

  A HERO OF ISRAEL

  IN THE AMPHITHEATER on Mount Scopus, weeds grew in the cracked stone benches, and thistles covered the sloping earth. Nearby were the empty buildings of the original Hebrew University campus, abandoned in 1948.

  But now the amphitheater was getting an instant facelift. It was Monday, June 12, and tonight some of Israel’s leading performers were to assemble on its stage for a victory concert in honor of the 55th Brigade. And so paratroopers were cleaning benches and clearing debris.

  In a small grove near the amphitheater, Arik sat under a pine tree, dealing with arrangements for the discharge of the brigade. He was interrupted by an officer from the 28th Battalion. “Arik, listen, Meir Ariel has written an important song, something like ‘Jerusalem of Gold’ but from our point of view. I’ve asked him to sing it tonight but he refuses. I know he respects you; I need you to talk to him.”