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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Hanan assumed the role of organizing the “children,” as they called themselves even now, in their early twenties. He ensured that they continued to meet socially, reinforcing the hope of return. On Independence Day, he had brought the Kfar Etzion children to Mercaz, where they heard Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s prophetic outburst and were received by the nazir, who blessed them with the hope of returning to the homes of their fathers.

  IT WAS MIDDAY as Hanan began walking into the terraced hills, toward Kfar Etzion. A surprising breeze softened the strong sun. He had imagined this moment so often. And now, at age twenty-four, he was returning as a victor, a liberator of Jerusalem. He could almost see the houses and cowshed and synagogue just ahead. He wasn’t sure whether those images came from his own childhood recollections, or whether they had been borrowed from stories; his consciousness had been so absorbed into the collective memory that it no longer mattered.

  After about a mile he came to an abandoned Jordanian army camp: the site of Kfar Etzion. In the total silence he could hear his footsteps. He searched for the houses, but there were only army barracks, resembling long metal tubes. Even the orchards and vineyards were gone. Nothing left, not even the memory of our presence—

  The wind scattered papers on the ground. There was no shade against the midday sun.

  Hanan came to the oak tree. He stood beneath the powerful branches and felt small and helpless. He caressed the trunk, rested his head against it, his own Western Wall.

  YOEL BIN-NUN’S PRIVATE GRIEF

  THE PEOPLE OF Israel were on the move. They posed for photographs before burned Soviet tanks in Sinai, explored Syrian army bunkers on the Golan Heights, and marveled at how vulnerable Israeli farmers had been just below. Reverently they touched ancestral tombs, of Abraham and Sarah in Hebron, Rachel in Bethlehem. They were an uprooted generation, their parental graves left behind in a hundred exiles; Holocaust survivors lacked even parental graves. Now all that had been lost seemed somehow restored.

  The symbol of that restoration was the paratroopers at the Wall. The iconic image, taken by photographer David Rubinger, showed three paratroopers standing before the Wall and looking into the distance, humbled by awe. They were men of the 66th Battalion, and they had fought on Ammunition Hill.

  The IDF’s newspaper published a poem by lyricist Haim Hefer: “This Wall has heard many prayers / This Wall has seen many walls crumble / But this Wall never saw paratroopers weep . . . / Perhaps it’s because the boys of nineteen / who were born together with the state / carry on their backs—two thousand years.”

  In fact, the paratroopers weren’t the only Israeli soldiers who deserved credit for reuniting Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Brigade—composed of reservists who lived in Jerusalem—had fought in the city’s southern neighborhoods, while the tanks of the Harel Brigade had fought in northern Jerusalem. Half the Israeli casualties in the battle for Jerusalem were from those units. But their contribution was obscured by the mythic power of the paratroopers on the Temple Mount and at the Western Wall.

  TO BE AN Israeli in the summer of 1967 was to be a hero. Everyone had a share in the victory: the high school students who had distributed mail, the pensioners who’d enforced the blackout, even the ultra-Orthodox who had violated the Sabbath to fill sandbags. An instant documentary film on the war played to packed theaters; when an ultra-Orthodox soldier appeared on-screen, secular Israelis cheered. With the magnanimity of victors, Israelis forgave each other their ideological flaws.

  How did we do it? Israelis asked themselves, sharing the wonder expressed around the world. In six days, a country of less than three million had defeated three Arab armies, conquered mountains and ancient market labyrinths and desert expanse. Israel had more than tripled its size, from 8,000 to 26,000 square miles. And not just “territories,” but Judea and Samaria: when Jews in exile had prayed to be restored to the land of Israel, they’d meant Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron.

  Bookstores displayed instant photo albums of the victory, as if Israelis needed some explanation of how the nation had moved in barely one month from fears of a second holocaust to military mastery of the Middle East. Kiosks sold necklaces with bullets and hung signs that read, “All Honor to the IDF.” Moshe Dayan half smiled from falafel stands. The new slang for stepping on the gas was, “Ben-Tzur, drive!”—Motta’s cry to his driver as they crashed through the Lions’ Gate.

  The war seemed to end Israelis’ great unspoken question: Could a country under permanent siege by its neighbors, and whose wildly diverse population hadn’t functioned together as a nation for two thousand years, overcome the odds and survive? The answer of June 1967 seemed unequivocal: Israel was here to stay.

  In celebrating their military prowess, Israelis were celebrating existence. For Jews to have learned to fight so well, so soon after they had died in their helpless millions, was an affirmation of their life force. The world hadn’t changed: not only was Auschwitz possible, but so was an assault on its survivors. No matter: the Jews had changed.

  AFTER A MORNING of Talmud study, Yoel Bin-Nun walked up the road from Mercaz to the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. He entered the gate and joined the procession of the bereaved.

  There were lone soldiers walking slowly with bowed heads, groups of kibbutzniks with firm steps, Holocaust survivors in straw fedoras, Moroccan women in kerchiefs, Iraqi men in berets. The uphill path was flanked by walls of porous rock. Stone stairs carved into the hill led to areas with newly planted pine trees, each area devoted to the fallen of another war. Rows of identical marble stones were engraved with name, date of birth, date of death, and, when appropriate, date of immigration to Israel. Instead of flower beds there were patches of ivy, muted colors in a garden of stone.

  How could Yoel possibly make sense of his multiple shatterings? He had entered the heights and the depths, had emerged illumined and burned. He felt none of the euphoria of victory. The very tone of the national self-congratulation offended him. The crude jokes about Arab cowardice, the souvenirs Israelis bought in Arab markets like trophies: What was this vulgarity, this idolatrous cult of power? How dare Israelis say, “All honor to the IDF,” as if this were a man-made miracle?

  He ascended a long flight of stairs and found the newly cleared area for the fallen of the Six-Day War. Dozens of rectangular patches of earth were lined in even rows. Tombstones had not yet been laid; instead, each patch was marked by a sign with the name of a buried soldier. Yoel paused to read the signs: “Tobol,” “Leibovitch,” “Turgeman,” names drawn from North Africa and Eastern Europe, ingathered in Jerusalem.

  He lingered by the grave marked “Yosef Yechezkel Yochai”—Yossi, the medic who had been killed just before his wedding. Yoel recalled how they’d danced with him in the paratroopers’ makeshift synagogue, how Yisrael Diamant, who fell on Nablus Road, had lifted Yossi on his shoulders. Swaying slowly, Yoel recited a psalm for their souls.

  THIS IS THE TIME

  “NU, DEAR FRIENDS,” said Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, “what should we study now?”

  Several dozen students, many sitting on the floor, crowded into the rabbi’s small salon. Tape remained on the windows, a wartime precaution against blasts.

  Hanan Porat broke the silence. “Rabbeinu”—Our rabbi and master—he said, “hasn’t the time come to study the laws of the Temple?”

  For a religious Jew who prayed three times a day for the Temple to be rebuilt, that was not an unexpected question in the summer of 1967.

  “Hanan,” replied the rabbi enigmatically, “we will be learning the laws of war for many years to come.”

  “But the Temple Mount is in our hands!” protested Hanan.

  “Hanan,” he repeated, “we will be learning the laws of war for many years to come.”

  But Hanan is right! thought Yoel. This is the time! Any generation of believing Jews would have known how to read the signs. Redemption was the heart of Judaism: a holy people consecrated to a holy land, at its center a holy city and a holy mountain—a tactile s
anctity, because redemption must happen in this world. And now, in six days of re-creation, all that had been broken had been made whole. Surely even the most stubborn skeptics would now understand that God was in this story.

  THE MERCAZ STUDY HALL filled with hundreds of celebrants. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had summoned an “Assembly of Thanksgiving,” and the yeshiva’s dining room, which had accommodated the crowds for his Independence Day speech, was hardly adequate now. On the dais sat the president of Israel, Zalman Shazar. In the front row sat the novelist and Nobel laureate Shai Agnon.

  Mercaz—“the center”—had finally fulfilled its ambitious name. From the beginning of the crisis, which Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had seemed to intuit in his Independence Day speech, to the war’s astonishing culmination, when he and the nazir were the first civilians at the Western Wall, Mercaz had been central to the greatest moment in Israel’s history. Mercaz felt vindicated in its most daring theological premise: that secular Zionism was a trustworthy repository of the redemptive process. The secular state that had tried to sever the people of Israel from the God of Israel had instead confirmed faith. For Mercaz, the kibbutznik paratroopers at the Wall were a revelation. Who could have imagined kibbutzniks praying at the symbol of piety and exile?

  Rabbi Zvi Yehudah entered the study hall. Students held each other by the shoulders and danced before him. “Raise your heads, gates,” they sang, “and admit the glorious King.”

  The rabbi spoke from a lectern draped with an Israeli flag. In covering a lectern that held holy books with the flag of secular Israel, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah was saying: This flag is no less holy than the velvet cloth covering the Torah ark behind me. On the wall hung a banner that read, “May the Temple be rebuilt, speedily in our time”—prayer turned into demand.

  Voice strong, tone defiant, the rabbi warned the world not to interfere with God’s plan and try to wrench the liberated lands from Israel’s control. Not even the democratically elected government of Israel, he continued, had the right to withdraw from the territories—a warning aimed at the Labor-led national unity government, which declared its willingness to exchange territory for peace.

  Hanan Porat approached the lectern. Broad-shouldered and powerfully handsome, with a wave of brown hair, he projected far beyond his short stature. Of the dozen paratroopers in Mercaz—who were holy, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah liked to say, only half joking, because they descended from heaven like the Torah at Sinai—the rabbi especially loved Hanan, heir of Kfar Etzion. Hanan embodied the Mercaz synthesis of yeshiva student and sabra, spirit and matter. And now Hanan carried the additional aura of the Six-Day War’s most heroic battle, Ammunition Hill, where paratroopers had fought face-to-face with Jordanian soldiers in the trenches. Hanan happened not to have actually fought in the trenches and had seen little fighting during the war, all of which Hanan acknowledged. Still, for young religious Zionists, Hanan was a hero.

  In his permanently hoarse voice, Hanan read a poetic account of a journey he’d recently taken to Kfar Etzion, this time in the company of friends. A middle-aged man, one of the few survivors of the massacre, ran atop the bunker where the last of Kfar Etzion’s defenders had died and began pounding with a pickax. “It was as if he were trying to signal to someone down below. And a faint echo from the void seemed to respond: ‘I am still alive, where are you, my friend? Respond, give me a sign!’ ”

  The president of Israel stood and kissed Hanan on the forehead.

  HANAN MAILED OUT a questionnaire to the children of Kfar Etzion: Are you prepared to return? And if so, what kind of settlement should we create? A kibbutz or a noncommunal village? A community only for the Orthodox, or open to everyone?

  A dozen friends affirmed their readiness to “go up” and settle. “I don’t care what will be established there,” one wrote. “Even if it will be a yeshiva, you can assign me the job of janitor.”

  But when they gathered together for a planning session, tensions emerged.

  “What if the government doesn’t agree to our return?” a friend asked Hanan.

  “We go up anyway,” Hanan replied. “Let’s see them removing us!”

  “We’re returning home in memory of our parents,” his friend countered. “If we go up without authority, we will desecrate their memory.”

  The deeper tension within the group was about whether the return to Kfar Etzion was a personal act of restoration or, as Hanan insisted, a national act with messianic implications. The resurrected Kfar Etzion, he told his friends, would be the first of many settlements in Judea and Samaria. They were blessed to be the avant-garde. And in restoring the wholeness of the Holy Land, the world would be healed, redeemed.

  Listening to Hanan, one of his friends thought: He can only see the return in abstract terms because he’s not an orphan like us.

  They argued about whether the new Kfar Etzion should be a kibbutz like its predecessor. Hanan wasn’t sure: a kibbutz, with its limited size and screening committee for applicants, would absorb at best a few hundred people, when the goal should be to attract thousands. A kibbutz, he said sarcastically, isn’t a mitzvah from the Torah.

  His friends, though, insisted on a kibbutz, and Hanan relented. It was, after all, poetic for the first West Bank settlement to be a kibbutz, a link between the movement that had helped found the state of Israel with the movement that was about to complete it.

  “I NEED YOUR HELP,” Hanan said to Yoel over breakfast of white cheese and olives in the Mercaz dining room.

  “When we return,” he continued, “I want us to have a yeshiva. Kfar Etzion can’t just be a place of physical renewal. There has to be a light emanating from it to the people of Israel.”

  “I’m with you, Hanan,” said Yoel. “What do you need from me?”

  “I want you to come and teach.”

  Yoel mentioned Hanan’s offer to his fiancée. Esther Raab’s father had been among those taken prisoner by the Jordanians in 1948 from a kibbutz near Kfar Etzion. “Returning to the Etzion Bloc,” said Esther, “is the dream of my life.”

  A CONVERSATION AMONG SOLDIERS

  A HALF DOZEN students from the Mercaz yeshiva sat around a reel-to-reel tape recorder, speaking about their experiences in the war. They were being interviewed by two editors of the kibbutz literary magazine, Shdemot (Fields). The magazine, whose editors included the young novelist Amos Oz, was dispatching teams of interviewers to kibbutzim around the country, to record the anguish and ambivalence of young kibbutzniks who had just fought their first war. The intention was to turn the interviews into a book.

  Though kibbutzniks were barely 4 percent of the population, nearly two hundred of them had been killed in the war, a quarter of Israel’s fatalities. Raised on reticence, young kibbutzniks suddenly felt a need to talk—about losing friends and about killing for the first time; about the shifting face of the enemy, from crowds chanting “Death to Israel” to lines of Arab refugees; about their identification with Jewish vulnerability before the war and their unease with Jewish power afterward. The victory they had helped bring had turned Israel into an occupier—true, history’s most improbable occupier, having gone to battle not to conquer but survive. No one had intended this. But now kibbutzniks, the children of utopia, were suddenly occupiers.

  The only nonkibbutzniks being interviewed for the project were students from Mercaz. Mercaz’s infatuation with kibbutzniks was finally reciprocated. Through their shared experience of war, kibbutzniks had discovered in young religious Zionists a fellow elite, ethical and sacrificial. Kibbutzniks recalled how religious soldiers had danced in the orchards before the war, raising morale, and how they had opposed the looting in Jerusalem after the battle. Now the editors of Shdemot were reaching out to them. Surely the Mercaz students were as appalled as the kibbutzniks by the postwar coarsening of Israeli society—the gloating and the glorification of power. Surely the kibbutzniks and the Mercazniks would find comfort in a common alienation.

  They met in the Jerusalem apartment of Yochanan Fried, a Mercaz st
udent who had fought in the unit that conquered Bethlehem. An Arab watchman had given him the key to Rachel’s Tomb. Our Mother Rachel, Jews lovingly called the biblical matriarch, who in the imagery of the prophet Jeremiah wept for the people of Israel as they were led into exile. Yochanan had borrowed a jeep, driven straight to the home of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah and presented him with the key—which the rabbi refused to accept, insisting that it be returned to the IDF.

  The young people filled Yochanan’s small living room. Two walls were covered with books—religious works with titles printed in gold letters, along with the prose and poetry of secular Israel. Rabbi Kook the father, in long gray beard and fur hat, gazed from a photograph, at once tender and austere.

  There was no unease between the Mercazniks and the kibbutzniks, no sense of “us” and “them.” Regardless of what they wore or didn’t wear on their heads now, they had all worn the same helmets a few weeks earlier.

  “Before we speak about the moral questions,” one of the kibbutznik interviewers began, “it’s important that each of us expresses his personal feelings.”

  “I feel like we’re moving toward something big,” said Dov, a former kibbutznik who had become Orthodox and was now studying at Mercaz. “I don’t depend on reason anymore. I have a feeling that I’m being pushed, I’m already moving . . . together with the whole people of Israel I’m moving toward something . . . I don’t know. . . . But I believe it is something good.”