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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Meir—“Meirkeh”—was beloved in Mishmarot. He played accordion for the weekly folk dancing, confided his love poems to the Mishmarot newsletter. When there was a death in the kibbutz family, he wrote a rhymed eulogy for the funeral. Meir revered the old-timers who, though barely in their fifties, looked so much older, worn by austerity and labor. What amazing people they were, moving across continents, always just one step ahead of death, creating a new state and culture and way of life. Where did these Jews get the stamina to emerge as victors from the twentieth century?

  Yet Mishmarot was different from its two bigger and more successful neighbors, Gan Shmuel, home of Udi Adiv, and Ein Shemer, home of Avital Geva. And not only because Mishmarot had always been anti-Marxist and social democratic. Here young women wore makeup and young men jeans. On Gan Shmuel, foreign volunteers with long hair were taken for haircuts the day they arrived; on Mishmarot, Meir had let his hair grow and no one seemed to mind.

  Mishmarot was a small kibbutz, with barely one hundred members, off a back road near the regional cemetery. Little houses with verandas angled along sloping dirt paths. Mishmarot of course had its cotton fields and chicken coops, but its main source of income was the plywood factory, which had scandalized the neighboring kibbutzim by bringing in a capitalist partner.

  “You call this a kibbutz?” mocked Meir’s wife, Tirza, who’d grown up in a kibbutz on the Syrian border. “Everyone does what they want. You want to be on a committee? Fine. You don’t want to be on a committee? Also fine. This isn’t a kibbutz, it’s anarchy.” Mishmarot’s anarchic spirit was especially evident in the summer of 1967. During the war, the children had been evacuated from their communal house to underground shelters. But now that the war was over, mothers simply kept their children home. The children’s home, central to kibbutz life, was shut down, without so much as debate at the weekly meeting.

  Mishmarot reserved its communal passion for song. Several of Meir’s friends had written songs that made it to the radio; one, about a soldier returning home after battle and unable to readjust to normal life, was a hit that summer. On holidays and at weddings, the kibbutz’s musical group, part choral group, part pop band, sang satirical songs written by Meir and his collaborator, Shalom Hanoch. Shalom was currently concluding his army service in the IDF’s entertainment troupe, and when he finished he intended to become a rock singer.

  As a child, lying forlorn at night in the communal children’s house, wetting his bed and sucking his fingers, Meir would listen to the singing of the grown-ups. Only then, soothed by the hopeful songs of the pioneers, would he fall into restless sleep.

  Later, as teenagers, Meir and his friends would sit on the grass with guitars and sing the songs of Elvis and the Beatles that had reached their remote corner, despite the best intentions of the socialist government to censor the 1960s. (The government had once prevented a Beatles concert in Israel, so as not to corrupt the youth.) Meir and his friend Shalom described that time in a wistful song called “Legend of the Lawn,” an ode to teenage romance on the kibbutz, boy and girl awkwardly reaching out toward each other through a tangle of bodies: “There’s a pile of hevreh on the grass / Those kinds of things—I like / girls-boys together, it’s nice that / there’s courage sometimes to mix . . . / Beneath my head lies a thigh / and on my stomach a burst of curls . . . / I can’t tell whose hand is crawling over me / and turning my body into a piano.”

  Shalom had written the melancholy music as a parody of an old Zionist song. But the music was so lovely, and Meir’s lyrics so evocative, that Mishmarot’s young people adopted it as an anthem.

  A RECORD PRODUCER appeared at Meir’s door with a contract for an album, to be titled Jerusalem of Iron.

  “I just wrote that as a parody,” Meir protested feebly, and signed.

  In a newspaper interview, he explained why. “After urgent consultations with my wife, I decided first of all to exploit the opportunity given to me; second, to prove to whomever I need to prove to that I can write better songs [than ‘Jerusalem of Iron’]. My own songs. I don’t think that ‘Jerusalem of Iron’ is a good song. It simply belongs to those days. I hate pathos.”

  AVITAL GEVA BOYCOTTS THE WALL

  AFTER A MONTH in the hospital, Avital returned to Kibbutz Ein Shemer. He gave Ada strict instructions: No welcome-home party.

  Instead friends filled their apartment at all hours. They had recently moved from one room to a room and a half, with a private bathroom. The new apartment was on the edge of the orchards, beside two cypress trees with great branches, planted to protect the oranges from the wind. As teenagers, Avital and Ada would meet there secretly, trying to evade the watchful collective. Since Avital’s injury, his relationship with Ada, always close, had become almost telepathic. It was, one friend noted, as if they had become a single being.

  IN FLOPPY CONICAL CAPS and wide straw hats and work boots and sandals, with sleeping bags and knapsacks weighted with canned meat and corn and with East German cameras around their necks, the kibbutzniks of Ein Shemer piled into open-backed trucks to discover the restored homeland. After a day of hiking in the Golan Heights, in Hebron and Bethlehem, they would retire to youth hostels or monasteries, twenty to a room, and awaken at dawn for another day of hiking. During one trip they drove to the site, near Ammunition Hill, where Amnon Harodi had been blown apart.

  Avital refused to join them. “I don’t want to tour battlegrounds,” he told Ada. And he especially did not want to go to the Western Wall. “Not interested,” he said curtly. He was in no mood for rejoicing or gratitude. I’d give up the whole pile of stones to get Amnon back—

  Ada returned from the West Bank disgusted. “You should see our people,” she said, “gloating like conquerors and bargaining over trinkets.”

  IN EIN SHEMER there were no more arguments about the Soviet Union. The break with “that bitch,” as Amnon Harodi had called it, suddenly seemed self-evident. The Ein Shemer newsletter even denounced the leaders of the Soviet Union as “red Czars”—a description that not long ago would likely have been condemned by kibbutzniks as fascist.

  Avital wasn’t mollified. The ideological shift had happened too abruptly, without introspection. Avital was struggling to understand how a community of decent, even noble human beings had been so blinded to evil and threat. They had behaved no differently from the religious fanatics they loved to despise. Worse, comrades: we turned a mass murderer and anti-Semite into a saint! They had walled themselves off from the rest of the nation, reading only the movement’s newspaper and dismissing all criticism of their ideology as lies. Unless they tried to understand how they had gotten to that point, they could make a similar mistake again.

  STEADIED BY A cane, Avital shuffled along the paths of his beloved kibbutz, beneath the canopy of ficus trees, through the children’s area where he’d grown up, through the orchards now being irrigated in preparation for the autumn harvest. Then he wandered into Ein Shemer’s greenhouses, which grew roses. Avital hated roses—too pretty, too tame—but the greenhouses intoxicated him. Everything rising, new life breaking through. In the moist density, he felt his own vitality stirring again.

  THE SILENCE BETWEEN FATHER AND SON

  URI AND TOVA Adiv were worried about their son, Udi. But they didn’t know how to show their concern. As a boy Udi hadn’t been hugged or kissed by Tova, who considered such gestures a form of spoiling. Udi’s father, Uri, a big silent man, found speech almost painful; whatever he had to say he conveyed in practical ways. He had served as kibbutz secretary general and was sometimes dispatched by the movement to help organize a struggling kibbutz. He had little left for his children. Young Udi would fall asleep at night on the windowsill in the children’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father returning from the fields.

  Uri had been attracted to Tova in part by her rhetorical eloquence. Tova, a famous beauty in her youth, had been ashamed of her good looks, which made her feel frivolous. Tova was respected and feared in the kibbutz for the
same reason: her indiscriminate sense of outrage. At kibbutz meetings, she denounced with equal vehemence the kibbutz school’s insensitivity in dealing with nonconformist children and the Labor government for aligning with the West. Tova remained loyal to Stalin long after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s attack against Stalin’s “cult of personality.” True, she said, Stalin had his faults, but he inspired human beings to fight for justice, just like Moses. Though Uri had doubts about the Soviet Union—his cousin had been imprisoned by Stalin for spreading Yiddish culture—he kept those to himself, not daring to argue with Tova.

  The stories Tova told to Udi as a child were about the struggle against oppression, like the three brothers in czarist Russia who led a peasant revolt, just like the Macabees. Udi learned from a young age that the deepest emotions should be trusted to ideology, that the way to win Tova’s affection was by proving his ideological fervor. He adopted Tova’s rhetorical skills, and could recite from memory whole passages of The Communist Manifesto.

  Udi longed to ease human suffering. Once, on a bus during a class trip in third grade, Udi stood and offered his seat to an exhausted-looking Arab laborer. Later, in high school, having noticed a bus driver speaking rudely to an Arab passenger, Udi wrote a protest letter to the bus cooperative.

  AFTER DINNER IN the kibbutz dining room, Udi went to his parents’ apartment, one room with a wooden partition marking off the bedroom from the salon. As in other Gan Shmuel apartments, there were no mezuzahs on the doorposts, nothing to mark this a Jewish home. On the salon wall hung Pablo Picasso’s Don Quixote.

  Udi wanted his parents to understand the changes he was going through as a result of the war. But after a lifetime of silence between them, the best Udi could manage was mockery. “They told us that the state was in danger of destruction,” Udi said. “That we’re about to be thrown into the sea. It was all a lie—war hysteria encouraged by the fascist generals so that they could conquer Rabbi Goren’s holy stones.”

  “What are you talking about?” his father shouted with sudden vehemence.

  “You talk about the solidarity of workers,” Udi pressed. “But when an Arab wanted to join Gan Shmuel, the kibbutz rejected him. And when the army offered the kibbutz the fields of Cherkas, what did the good socialists of Gan Shmuel do? You took a vote! How typical of Hashomer Hatzair to confiscate land democratically.”

  “I’m not saying everything is perfect here,” said Uri, “but you’re going too far.”

  “Listen to him,” Tova pleaded with her husband, “he’s speaking from his experience in the war.” Uri glared at her; unaccustomed to his firmness, she demurred.

  “There are no bigger hypocrites than Hashomer Hatzair,” Udi taunted. “You wanted to have it all ways: to be anticolonialists and to collaborate with the British. And now the Americans are our big friends. Zionism couldn’t succeed without colonialist support. And Hashomer Hatzair made it all progressive!”

  Uri wanted to ask his son, Who are you turning into colonialists? The impoverished dreamers who created the most egalitarian society in history? Who faced destruction everywhere we turned? We offered our Arab neighbors a hand in friendship. And when we were attacked, we fought well and won. You want me to apologize for surviving? If they had won the war, not a Jew would have been left alive in this land. But all you know is that we took land from Cherkas. Maybe we were wrong. Things happen that one later regrets. But you—you have it all figured out. You want to turn Zionism itself into a crime—

  But Uri, unused to argument, couldn’t find those words. Instead, he pounded the table with his big fist and shouted words that formed no coherent argument. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did: father and son weren’t trying to convince but silence each other.

  Only when neighbors complained did the shouting subside.

  A MODEST WEDDING

  MOTTA AND ARIK drove to the Suez Canal, to plan a brigade maneuver: a simulation of an Egyptian crossing of the canal. Before the war, they had routinely spent weekends driving along the country’s narrow borders, and were never more than a few hours from home. But the drive to the canal took ten hours.

  They passed lines of charred Egyptian tanks. Atop one tank, Israeli tourists posed for a picture.

  Arik had a delicate issue he needed to raise with Motta. Since the war, Motta had initiated an aggressive campaign to commemorate the battle for Jerusalem. He all but ordered reluctant reservists to grant interviews to a journalist writing a book about the war; when Yoske Balagan balked, Motta threatened him with a call-up notice. Motta even organized a filmed re-creation of scenes from the battle, complete with exploding smoke grenades.

  “Motta, listen,” said Arik, “the guys are unhappy with all the glorification. It’s not our style.”

  “Don’t be such hypocrites,” Motta retorted. “There were other battles in this war that were greater military achievements than ours. Raful [commander of the standing army’s paratrooper brigade, which operated in Sinai] fought a battle that was more impressive. But in thirty years, no one will remember Raful’s battle, and everyone will remember the battle for Jerusalem. And then, when you tell it to your grandchildren, you’ll thank me.”

  SOME RESERVISTS WERE grumbling about the battle’s failures. How was it possible, they asked, that we went to war with such little intelligence? And what recklessness for Motta to blindly charge into the Old City in his search for glory: a single sniper could have taken out the whole senior command! And what about the fight for Ammunition Hill, Jerusalem’s bloodiest battle: Why send paratroopers into the trenches, when the position could simply have been circumvented?

  Nonsense, said Arik: Ammunition Hill overlooked the road to Mount Scopus, where an Israeli unit was under siege, and the whole length of no-man’s-land. As for Motta charging into the Old City, yes, that was reckless, but Motta was in the grip of history and had no choice.

  By rational standards, argued Arik, preparing an urban assault in less than twelve hours and without adequate intelligence was impossible. “But we knew that it had to be done, and so we did it. We didn’t make calculations about expected losses and argue whether the mission would be ‘worth it.’ All that mattered was achieving the objective. That’s what it means to be a paratrooper.”

  JUST BEFORE THE holiday of Sukkoth, Arik and Yehudit married. They deferred the question of kibbutz versus city: until they finished their studies, they would live in Tel Aviv, close to the university.

  The little wedding party—parents and a few friends—gathered in an office in Tel Aviv’s official rabbinate. Yehudit wore a simple suit sewn by a friend, Arik an open-necked white shirt and khaki pants. No one thought to bring a camera.

  The appearance in the Tel Aviv rabbinate of Yehudit’s father, Yaakov Hazan, head of Zionism’s most anticlerical movement, caused a stir. Officials peeked into the room to get a glimpse of the great heretic, dapper in a beret, who good-naturedly greeted the bearded men.

  “Do what you have to do, and nothing more,” Arik ordered the officiating rabbi, as though he were one of his soldiers. “No speeches, no circling the groom.”

  The rabbi rushed through the ceremony. Arik stepped on the glass, gave Yehudit a chaste kiss. The newlyweds went to lunch at Tel Aviv’s most exclusive restaurant, with white tablecloths and a French menu. At a nearby table, Moshe Dayan was having lunch with his mistress. Then Arik went to be with his two children in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, and Yehudit went to be with her two children in Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Emek.

  Chapter 10

  THE CHILDREN RETURN TO THEIR BORDERS

  COMFORTING MOTHER RACHEL

  WRY AND SLOW-SPEAKING, mixing Yiddish with Hebrew, Prime Minister Eshkol, age seventy-two, eyed with bemused affection the fast-talking young man in the knitted kippah sloping on the side of his head, so absorbed in his vision that he showed little of the respect one would expect of a twenty-four-year-old meeting the leader of his country. Hanan Porat—shirt hanging from pants, uncombed hair permanently windblown—eye
d Eshkol in return with impatience. Hanan had come on an historic mission, on behalf of the children of Kfar Etzion, and here was Eshkol, bantering.

  In fact Hanan’s contempt for Eshkol was widely shared among Israelis, who even in the aftermath of the Six-Day War couldn’t forgive him for hesitating to attack during the agonizing weeks of the “waiting period.” Eshkol should have been a hero: he had, after all, led Israel from its worst crisis to its greatest victory, launching a preemptive attack only once he had exhausted every diplomatic option, ensuring a united cabinet and American sympathy.

  Now Hanan was challenging Eshkol to confront the consequences of victory. Though the cabinet had secretly voted to offer a withdrawal from the Sinai and the Golan Heights in exchange for peace, it was divided over the future of the West Bank. The government had annexed only East Jerusalem, pointedly leaving the status of the West Bank open for negotiation.

  But negotiations seemed more remote than ever. The Arab League had just issued its three noes: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. Eshkol shared the fear of his cabinet’s doves of ruling a million Palestinians, the threat to the demographic intactness of a Jewish state. But even the doves agreed that there could be no return to the fragile prewar borders; the only debate was how much of the West Bank should eventually be returned.

  Hanan’s group of orphans seemed to be offering Eshkol a sensible compromise. The site of Kfar Etzion was near Jerusalem, not deep in the West Bank; even if Israel were to eventually annex Kfar Etzion, it wouldn’t substantially change the borders. A modest return: a few children to the literal homes of their parents, not the return of the Jewish people to its ancestral home.