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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  The interviewer had asked for a personal statement, and Dov had responded with the Messiah.

  The interviewer tried again: Did faith help the Mercaz students cope with fear during the war? “It seems to me,” the interviewer elaborated, “that the deeper one’s [Jewish] roots are, and the deeper one’s connection with the past—then fear has different dimensions than it does with us [secularists]. . . . And I’m also interested in hearing about something that was hard for me during the war—the whole matter of taking life. How is it for a person of faith?”

  The Mercaz students didn’t seem to understand the question. The kibbutznik was speaking as a human being facing life and death; the Mercazniks could only respond in national terms.

  The second interviewer intervened. “My friends and I—we didn’t hate the enemy. The opposite: We wanted to live with him. And we didn’t rejoice when the enemy was destroyed. The opposite: His [humiliating] fall weighed on us. For example, to see the long convoys of burned vehicles in Sinai, the fleeing refugees . . .”

  “We’re so used to seeing two sides,” a Mercaznik named Naftali sarcastically replied. “A normal nation says, If an army rises up against me, against a whole nation, a nation of Holocaust refugees, a nation that suffered throughout its history— If one Egyptian dares to stand on the border [to attack us], then he’s a despicable murderer. He’s a partner to an historical crime, and for me it’s a commandment to kill him, and all the convoys should be scattered through the Sinai Desert. And those who escape—kill them before they reach the [Suez] Canal.”

  “What about Judaism’s love for the human being?”

  “I have love for human beings,” said Naftali, “but not for someone who comes to kill me.”

  “You want us to be a normal people?” the kibbutznik asked.

  Yochanan, the host, intervened: “Naftali said those things in a sharp way and formulated them in the wrong way. But at a time of [great developments for] the people, the details don’t exist. They exist but in a different way.”

  “It seems to me there’s a gap between us,” an interviewer said. “I don’t accept the whole notion of a chosen people.”

  But there was another, unspoken gap between them. Religious Zionists who proclaimed their belief in chosenness were, in effect, insisting on the right of the Jews to behave as any other nation, while secular Zionists who rejected chosenness were insisting that Jews be held to a higher standard.

  An interviewer tried a different direction. “Can you obey orders against your moral principles? Did you find yourself in that situation?”

  Yoel Bin-Nun, at age twenty-one the youngest participant, spoke up. “In a place where moral principles can contradict each other,” he said slowly, “it’s clear to me that no simple soldier is capable of weighing all the considerations. In that kind of situation I have no choice but to accept the order.”

  “Do you have to be practically blind?” demanded the interviewer.

  “It’s a necessary reality,” replied Yoel.

  But then Yoel conceded ambivalence. Hesitantly, he alluded to the shooting incident after the paratroopers had entered the Old City. “The truth is,” he said, “that if I examine myself retroactively, when I had to carry out all of these ‘beautiful’ acts, I had very little strength to do it. I’m willing to say that to everyone. . . . It was hard for me. . . . I had doubts. . . .”

  “In the middle of the war?” Dov the Mercaznik demanded.

  “Yes, in the middle of the war,” replied Yoel. “And it’s impossible to avoid it.”

  Chapter 9

  THE KIBBUTZNIKS COME HOME

  A RECKONING WITH HISTORY

  ARIK ACHMON MADE the rounds of the wounded, and sought out Avital Geva. Though they knew each other only cursorily from reserve duty, Avital was one of the junior officers whom Arik most appreciated—perhaps envied—for his spontaneity, his joy.

  As Arik approached Avital’s bed, Avital began to weep.

  “Are your wounds so painful?” Arik asked awkwardly.

  Avital didn’t seem to hear the question. Still weeping, he said, “Mother Russia. The Second Homeland. How could this betrayal have happened to us?”

  Crazy Shmutzniks, thought Arik, even now they still feel betrayed by the Soviet Union.

  But Arik had misunderstood Avital’s anguish. Avital wasn’t mourning the betrayal of the Soviet Union, for which he cared nothing. He was, instead, grieving for Hashomer Hatzair’s betrayal of itself. Hashomer Hatzair had prided itself on its ability to understand the inner meaning of history but had missed the most obvious truths, had mistaken enemies for friends, mass murderers for saviors. How would his beloved movement survive the shame?

  AVITAL’S HOSPITAL ROOM filled with family and friends. “Hevreh? Not to worry,” he reassured well-wishers. “It looks worse than it is.”

  The bandages over his face were removed, but mortar fragments remained in his shoulders and legs.

  Avital transformed his ward into a kind of kibbutz where no one was a stranger. He introduced his visitors to his fellow patients and joked with the nurses and doctors. Relieved friends told each other that nothing had changed: Avital remained Avital. The Ein Shemer newsletter downplayed his wounds: “Luckily for all of us, Avital was only lightly wounded. He is receiving excellent care. The nurses constantly hover around him, and were it not for a little pain, he might even be enjoying himself.”

  But as Avital had revealed in a rare moment to Arik, he was quietly grieving. One of his closest friends from Ein Shemer, Amnon Harodi, had been killed in the battle for Jerusalem, his body blown in half by a mortar shell. Avital kept recalling the image of Amnon saying good-bye to his pregnant wife as he went off to war. With his goatee and ironic expression, Amnon had been a farmer intellectual, suspecting every dogma. It was Amnon who, in Ein Shemer’s May Day symposium just before the war, had dared to publicly say what so many of the young people were thinking: that working-class solidarity and loyalty to the Soviet Union and even the red flag were illusions, an embarrassment.

  And now the Soviets, having armed the Arabs and encouraged them to war, had helped kill Amnon. How could we have been so stupid—

  THE SUMMER OF ARIK ACHMON

  FOR ARIK, IT was a time of vindication. At a postmortem gathering of IDF intelligence officers, Arik was treated with special respect, recognition of his effectiveness during the war despite the handicap of poor intelligence. On a visit to Netzer Sereni, he ran into his paratrooper buddy Aryeh Weiner, who had mocked him for not being a war veteran. “Weiner,” said Arik, dryly, “I’ve now heard bullets over my head.” There were benefits, he discovered, to being part of an epic. Seeking a waiver for exams, he put on a dress uniform, red beret tucked under his epaulet, and drove in a confiscated Jordanian jeep to the campus of Tel Aviv University; when he happened to mention that he’d been among the liberators of Jerusalem, his request was readily granted.

  Arik knew that Yehudit wasn’t interested in his war stories, so he kept those to himself. Yehudit hadn’t even known to what unit he belonged: when she heard on the radio that “Arik,” the chief intelligence officer of Motta Gur’s brigade, had raised the flag over the Temple Mount, she hadn’t realized it was her Arik. Yehudit resented the paratroopers for competing for Arik’s time. All the other reservists had been demobilized; why was Arik still in uniform? So what if he had an obligation to Motta, what about his obligation to her?

  ARIK AND MOISHELEH Stempel-Peles, Motta’s deputy commander, stood outside the little whitewashed house in Rishpon, a farming community near the sea. Naomi Mizrahi opened the door. When she saw the two men in uniform, she wept.

  Naomi’s husband, Yirmi, had headed the machine gun unit of Company A, which Arik had commanded before becoming the brigade’s intelligence officer. Arik had felt close to the good-natured Yemenite, one of the first Sephardim to break into the paratroopers’ club of kibbutzniks. Yirmi had been hit with shrapnel in his hand in the first hours of the battle for Jerusalem, but
he’d refused to be evacuated and led his men across no-man’s-land. He was killed by a sniper shortly afterward.

  Naomi had been left with two young children and a patch of field. What was Arik supposed to say? What comfort could he offer that wouldn’t sound perfunctory?

  Moisheleh unbuckled his belt and sighed as his ample stomach expanded. “How are the children coping?” he asked Naomi. “What about your financial situation? Is there a will?”

  Naomi stopped crying and started talking. Moisheleh retrieved a notebook and wrote. His tone remained matter-of-fact, businesslike. As if to say: This happened to you, but it could just as well be my wife sitting in your place. No awkward words of consolation, no false pieties, only offers of practical assistance. Arik watched with admiration. Here was a form of condolence he could manage.

  “This isn’t a one-time visit, it’s a connection,” Moisheleh said as they left. “You’ll be hearing from us.”

  A SHATTERING IN GAN SHMUEL

  IN THE HUMID JULY NIGHT, Udi Adiv paced the paved paths of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, lined with little red-roofed houses shaded by cypresses and fig trees. Sprinklers rotated across the lawns, bright green even in summer. On a hill in the distance were the rooms of the children and the teenagers, a self-contained youth collective with its own dining room, responsible for its own rules. Paradise, thought Udi with contempt.

  Udi had returned home a hero. Old-timers pressed his hand, slapped him on the back. “Glad you made it back safely,” one said, offering a kibbutznik’s version of effusiveness. The teenagers of Gan Shmuel regarded him with awe: not only a star of the kibbutz basketball team but a liberator of Jerusalem.

  He looked the part: tall, broad-shouldered, square jaw, deep-set eyes. But the edges of his mouth were often downturned, so that even when he laughed he seemed to be grimacing.

  In the dining room, Udi exhorted friends to confront the truth about “Zionist imperialism.” He’d seen too much in the war, they told each other; one friend was convinced that Udi was suffering from shell shock. How, they wondered, had he so mistaken Israel’s fears for arrogance? His body broke out in rashes, and no medication could ease the unbearable itching.

  Yet several young people did gather around Udi. After work in the cotton fields, dragging pipes across the field while standing ankle-deep in brackish water, they smoked hashish and listened to Udi denounce Hashomer Hatzair and the fiction of “progressive Zionism.” The Jews, he said, weren’t a nation but a religion and so had no right to their own state. The occupation didn’t begin in 1967 but in 1948, with the creation of Israel.

  Suddenly the legitimacy of Zionism was being debated in Gan Shmuel, where everyone read the newspaper of Hashomer Hatzair and young men kept their hair hardly longer than army regulation. There were no more diligent workers than the kibbutzniks of Gan Shmuel. Members often waived their Shabbat rest to work a few hours in the fields or the canning factory. Comrades told the story of how, during the British Mandate, when soldiers searched the kibbutz for illegal weapons, a kibbutznik was asked to identify himself. Responding in precise English, he said, “I am a gentleman of potatoes.”

  But another, more restless Gan Shmuel was emerging from the war. The collapse of faith in the Soviet Union that had occurred on nearby Ein Shemer had happened here too. The few remaining true believers were taunted by their comrades as traitors—“You and your Soviet Union”—as if they hadn’t been, until several weeks earlier, pro-Soviet too. In this breakdown of old certainties, everything was suddenly open to question.

  Especially the fate of Cherkas. Near the cotton fields of Gan Shmuel were the ruins of an Arab village called Cherkas. As a child Udi and his friends had gone there to pick mulberries; Udi had feared being stranded among the abandoned stone houses without roofs, as though its ghosts would possess him. Cherkas had been destroyed in 1948 by the Israeli army, concerned that the village could become a hostile base overlooking the road to Nazareth. Cherkas’s residents were resettled in Israeli Arab villages a few kilometers away. The army offered the fields bordering the road to Gan Shmuel; the kibbutzniks voted to accept the offer. They had just emerged from a war of survival; if the army said there was a threat to keeping that land in Arab hands, they weren’t about to argue. And if Cherkas’s residents were moved just up the road, well, worse things happened in war.

  No one in Gan Shmuel talked about Cherkas. But now Udi found that silence unbearable. How had their parents simply watched Cherkas vanish without protest? For Udi, a direct line connected the destruction of Cherkas with the destruction of the Arab shantytown at the Western Wall.

  FAME DISCOVERS MEIR ARIEL

  IN MIDAFTERNOON, AFTER a day’s work in the cotton fields of Kibbutz Mishmarot, Meir Ariel returned to his little apartment with its icebox, its thin-legged couch that opened into a bed, and its olive tree trunk that balanced a small table, and turned on the radio. The songs alternated between the Six-Day War and San Francisco’s Summer of Love. And then suddenly there was Meir, singing through the static from the amphitheater on Mount Scopus: “Jerusalem of iron, of lead and of blackness . . .”

  “They’re making me out to be this big hero,” Meir complained to his wife, Tirza.

  “Why should you care how you become famous?” countered Tirza.

  Yes, of course he wanted to be famous. But not like this, not with a takeoff of someone else’s song. And since when did he represent the paratroopers? He had always been an ambivalent soldier, a civilian in uniform. Borrowed ethos, borrowed melody: a fraud.

  Journalists appeared in Mishmarot. Meir dutifully played along, giving reporters quotable one-liners. I had to write an alternative to Naomi Shemer’s anthem, he explained in one interview, because “the metals got switched,” from gold to iron. But the profiles about the sensitive paratrooper-farmer only deepened his unease. He tried to compensate with irony, telling a journalist that he experienced more fear onstage on Mount Scopus than he had during the entire war. But that only reinforced the endearing image of the shy, stoic paratrooper.

  He had intended his song as a protest against sentimentality, myth; yet the song itself had become absorbed into the national mythos, one more reason for Israelis to celebrate themselves: Look how conflicted, how humane, our fighters are. A song meant to be shared with friends had somehow been let loose, and now the whole country was peering into his soul.

  Shuli Natan, the female soldier with the quivering voice who had popularized “Jerusalem of Gold,” went on pilgrimage to Mishmarot, accompanied by a reporter. Her conversation with Meir was recorded in the newspaper Ha’aretz:

  MEIR: The words that gave me the push to sing were the words of Naomi Shemer.

  SHULI: I don’t think you can compare the words [of the two songs]. Naomi’s song is a prayer of longing, a hymn. Your words are an exact description of the historic change that happened.

  MEIR: Naomi Shemer’s song is more than a passing phenomenon. The words I wrote are just a response to events.

  Ha’aretz summed up the encounter with this headline: “Shuli Offered a Prayer—The Paratrooper Ariel Fulfilled It.”

  Naomi Shemer wasn’t charmed. She wrote Meir, threatening to sue for plagiarism. The curse of “Jerusalem of Iron”: now he’d made an enemy of Israel’s greatest songwriter. “Why is she so upset?” Meir told Tirza. “I never intended this to get out.” But then he reconsidered: “She’s right. I hitched a ride on her song.”

  Shemer agreed to meet Meir. As the date of their meeting approached, Meir became increasingly anxious. Naomi Shemer was, at age thirty-seven, the most beloved composer of Hebrew song. She had written the sound track of the state in its exuberant youth—songs about a soldier returning home from war and a soldier who doesn’t return, about cowboys in the desert and a couple in sandals on a little bridge in Tel Aviv; songs that were sung on school outings and army hikes and in kibbutz dining rooms and even in synagogues, where her melodies were attached to prayers. No song went more deep than “Jerusalem of Gold,” which h
ad been instantly adopted by Israelis, even before the war, as a second anthem. And Meir had violated that song.

  Tirza accompanied Meir to the Tel Aviv restaurant where they met with Shemer. “I didn’t intend to hurt you in any way,” Meir said to her. “I’m not chasing headlines. I want to make this right, but I don’t have much to offer. I work in the cotton fields of Kibbutz Mishmarot.”

  Shemer, herself a former kibbutznik, was gracious. She acknowledged being moved by “Jerusalem of Iron,” praised its language. She paid for the meal.

  They settled on splitting the royalties from any future income related to “Jerusalem of Iron.” Meir would have given her all the royalties if she’d asked: as a kibbutznik, he wouldn’t see the money anyway.

  MISHMAROT REJOICED IN Meir’s success. Meir had forever linked the little kibbutz with Israel’s greatest moment. The mimeographed newsletter reported on his media triumphs. “We wish Meir success in writing songs in times of peace and tranquillity for our people and our land,” the newsletter wrote. Even Meir’s father, Sasha, the dour principal of the local school, was proud, though of course he didn’t admit it.

  At age twenty-five Meir remained a beautiful boy, with high cheekbones and long black curls. Only his almond-shaped eyes, which sometimes seemed to shift between green and blue and with a faraway look that was likewise imprecise, hinted at the torment in his soul.

  Meir wanted to be a normal kibbutznik, unburdened by brooding thoughts about death and meaning. But normalcy eluded him. As a boy, he would sleepwalk out of the children’s house, an unconscious protest against separation from his parents, until he was finally allowed to sleep in their apartment. Now he wandered in daydreams. His friends laughed about how he’d run over irrigation pipes while driving a tractor, caught up in a line to a new song or simply in the sound of the wind through the eucalyptus trees.

  His struggle for stability left him tender and tolerant, not toward his own weaknesses but toward those of others. Meir, they said on Mishmarot, never got angry; when someone behaved poorly Meir smiled sadly, as if to say, Nu, hevreh, what do you expect, that’s how we are, we human beings.