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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  “What do you want, kinderlach?” Eshkol asked, using the Yiddish endearment for children.

  “To go up,” said Hanan.

  “Nu, kinderlach, if you want to go up, then go.”

  “Listen,” Hanan pressed, “in ten days it will be Rosh Hashanah,” the Jewish new year. “We very much want to pray in the place where our parents prayed.”

  “Nu, kinderlach,” said the prime minister, “if you want to pray, then pray.”

  ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1967—two days after receiving Eshkol’s blessing—a caravan equipped for an instant settlement proceeded slowly through Jerusalem. Two rented buses, cars, vans, and open-backed trucks were led by a 1948-era bus that had once traveled the route between Jerusalem and Kfar Etzion. Hanan and his friends left nothing to subtlety: the sides of the bus were covered with gray-painted wood sheets to simulate the armor that had covered buses then, and bore the words, “We Once Traveled Like This.”

  The procession stopped at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl, and several dozen people walked toward the mass grave of Kfar Etzion. They were young men in kippot, some in reservist uniforms, young women in long skirts and sandals, the few surviving fathers of Kfar Etzion in fedoras and peddler’s caps, the widows in kerchiefs.

  They approached a grassy slope beside a stone wall with marble plaques, each engraved with the name of one of the fallen. The crowd recited the mourners’ prayer together: “May He Who brings peace above bring peace to us and all of Israel.”

  Next stop: Rachel’s Tomb, a small, white-domed building at the entrance to Bethlehem. The group pressed around the stone sarcophagus. One of the Kfar Etzion “children” chanted the portion from Jeremiah that imagines Mother Rachel weeping for the exiled children of Israel: “So says God: Keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work shall be rewarded, says God, and they shall return again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope for your future, says God, and your children shall return to their borders.”

  Hanan Porat felt a shiver. Metaphor and reality converged: those verses had been written for him and his friends, for this moment.

  They came to the site of Kfar Etzion. It was a bright, windy day. The stony hills, parched from the long summer, awaited the first rains. Hanan declared: “Today we have removed the disgrace of the term ‘administered territories’ and restored the appropriate term, ‘redeemed territories.’” Psalms of thanksgiving were offered. An Israeli flag was raised on a flagpole left behind by the Jordanian army.

  And then, to work. A survivor of Kfar Etzion, its former carpenter, built a table; another survivor watered a carob and a fig tree that had survived the Jordanian uprooting of the kibbutz’s trees. The young people unloaded a generator and spring cots and boxes of canned food, drew up schedules for kitchen duty and for guard duty. An army truck brought water.

  The settlers, all single, divided into male and female barracks. The barracks were rounded aluminum structures resembling long igloos, built by the British and inherited by the Jordanian army. In the male barracks they hung a photograph of Rabbi Kook.

  Toward evening the well-wishers departed, leaving a dozen members of the original group of children evacuated from Kfar Etzion alone on the mountain: the first West Bank settlement, a kibbutz of orphans.

  PARTING OF THE WAYS

  SOLDIERS’ TALK, A collection of interviews with kibbutznik veterans of the war, was self-published by the editors of the magazine Shdemot. Lacking funds, they’d posted notices in kibbutz dining rooms soliciting advance purchases, and on that basis printed an initial press run of 12,000 copies. To the shock of the young editors, the book sold nearly a hundred thousand copies, a massive best seller in a country of less than three million people.

  The tone of Soldiers’ Talk was more of anguish than protest. The soldiers interviewed didn’t minimize the threat Israel had faced; there were no voices among them like Udi Adiv’s. Instead, there were hesitant expressions of discovering a sense of responsibility to the Jewish people and its history, a love for Jerusalem that surprised them. One kibbutznik who fought in Sinai confessed to feeling envy when he heard that the paratroopers were fighting in Jerusalem. Another told of being on a bus with his unit in Sinai when they heard that the Old City was in Israeli hands. Everyone began to sing “Jerusalem of Gold.”

  There were expressions of horror. A kibbutznik who fought in East Jerusalem and who said he never wanted to see the city again recounted his first experience of killing a man. Here was a tone of self-doubt that the nation had rarely heard before from its soldiers. And anger—at the Arabs for trying to destroy the Jews, and at their fellow Israelis for exulting in victory, at having to fight for survival and having to conquer. One soldier recalled seeing young children—the age of his son—with their hands raised in surrender. Another recalled entering an Arab village as residents dutifully applauded. He felt, he said, sullied.

  ONE GROUP OF interviewees was missing from Soldiers’ Talk: the students of Mercaz. No mention of the five-hour discussion in Yochanan Fried’s living room.

  The omission was deliberate. When the editors of Shdemot read the Mercaz transcript, they had been horrified. Where was the soul-searching, the doubt? The Mercaz students, said one editor, seemed even willing to sacrifice the sacredness of human life, Judaism’s main contribution to humanity.

  Among Mercaz students too there was bewilderment and contempt. What was happening to the kibbutzniks, they asked, to our commanders? Were they losing their nerve? Yochanan Fried was stunned to read one kibbutznik admit he’d felt happy when his bullet missed its mark: that was a soldier protecting Israel? Instead of holy kibbutzniks, there was now talk in Mercaz of the children of the pioneers shaming the fathers. “Crybabies,” said a Mercaz student.

  Yoel Bin-Nun was conflicted. He shared his friends’ incredulity at the lack of vision and self-confidence expressed in Soldiers’ Talk. Yet he also shared its moral struggles. He had, after all, been the only one among the Mercaz students at the discussion who had conceded ambivalence. Most of all he regretted the lost opportunity to bring what he called Israel’s two spiritual elites—the kibbutzniks and the Mercaz students—closer together.

  BREZHNEV BOULEVARD

  EVERY FEW MONTHS Avital Geva returned to a Jerusalem clinic for another operation to remove shrapnel from his shoulder and legs.

  The elderly doctor, Yitzhak Kook, who had volunteered during the war and operated on dozens of soldiers, happened to be the nephew of the late chief rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Not that that meant anything to Avital: the religious world was a blur to him. But Avital was drawn to the doctor, who quoted the Bible and the Talmud in discussions about medicine and politics and who offered Avital a glimpse into a world of religious wisdom he wished he understood.

  Dr. Kook took a special liking to the ebullient young man who spoke with such warmth about his kibbutz and with such bitterness about its ideological blindness. With the affection of a Kookian for kibbutzniks, the doctor wanted to know what Avital and his friends were thinking about collective life, whether they were as restless as the newspapers claimed.

  Finally the doctor told Avital that there was nothing more he could do for him. Some fragments would remain. Not so bad, Avital concluded; only on cold days did he feel the metal pressing.

  AVITAL RETURNED TO the orchards. But he wasn’t quite the same Avital. The kibbutznik who’d delighted in the changes of the seasons, the appearance of the autumn squill and the late winter anemones, now felt an unfamiliar disaffection. Sleep eluded him. He’d been blown out of his life and couldn’t find his way back in.

  Ada suggested he study art. He’d enjoyed drawing sketches for the kibbutz newsletter, banners with holiday themes for the kibbutz dining room. And so twice a week, he went off to art school in Jaffa. There he discovered conceptual art. The notion of art as a carrier of ideas rather than mere aesthetics appealed to his kibbutznik soul.

  One morning in the orchards, while eating breakfast with his friends Ra
fi and Manu, Avital said, “Hevreh, the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution is approaching. We have to give it the honor it deserves.”

  Avital revealed a plan: to turn the orchards into a paean to Soviet bombast by hanging street signs along the dirt paths, each sign bearing the name of a Soviet hero.

  “Roads should have names,” agreed Rafi.

  Avital drove to the plywood factory in nearby Kibbutz Mishmarot and bought thirty sheets of wood. In the orchard’s packing shed, he painted on them the names of Soviet leaders. Rafi and Manu helped him hammer the signs to the cypress trees that circled the orchard.

  The next Shabbat, when kibbutzniks strolled in the citrus groves, they saw big signs proclaiming: Karl Marx Avenue, Brezhnev Boulevard, Red Square.

  Avital’s father, Kuba, cautioned him: “Don’t push too far.” He meant: don’t provoke the collective like I did.

  Most of the kibbutzniks, though, seemed to delight in Avital’s new style of political discourse. Humor instead of rhetoric to make a political point! One man, whose pilot son was a POW in Syria, silently pressed Avital’s hand. The kibbutz movement’s newspaper sent a photographer.

  WINTER IN KFAR ETZION

  THE FIRST RAINS of late autumn turned the dirt paths of Kfar Etzion into rivulets. The young people walked with clumps of mud on their work boots. The furious winds seemed intent on uprooting them from the exposed mountain. Every few days the generator broke down, leaving the community without electricity. Then, in the premature winter, the water pipe froze. Sometimes, when there were terrorism alerts, the army imposed a curfew on the winding road to Jerusalem.

  But every day also seemed to bring another small sign of permanence. Sympathetic cabinet ministers dispatched a tractor, a new generator, turkey chicks, a greenhouse for growing carnations. Crates of fruit were sent by a kibbutz, Ha-Lamed Hey (the Thirty-Five), named in memory of a Palmach unit ambushed in 1948 on its way to a failed rescue mission for Kfar Etzion. A Tel Aviv dentist about to retire offered to sell his office equipment and donate the proceeds to Kfar Etzion. Hanan received dozens of letters with urgent requests to join the kibbutz, like one from a university student prepared to drop out if Kfar Etzion would accept him. A newlywed couple asked to spend their honeymoon there.

  Letters of gratitude came from around the country. The rector of Tel Aviv University wrote a short note: “The pioneers of Kfar Etzion are showing the way.” High school students sent a poem of praise on a picture postcard, a photograph of paratroopers dancing at the Western Wall.

  A TAXI APPEARED on the mountain, and out hobbled a young American woman with a torn sandal, carrying a suitcase. Sandy Sussman, age twenty-one, former head of the Bnei Akiva branch of Los Angeles, had just moved to Israel. A friend had told her that Kfar Etzion was the place to be, and so here she was. Looking around, she was struck by the hard beauty of the surrounding hills and by the barrenness of the kibbutz itself, little more than a row of what looked like long igloos.

  Hanan was skeptical. What did an American know about hardship? “It’s not Bnei Akiva summer camp,” he said to Sandy.

  Finally he relented. “Welcome, my child,” he said to the young woman, four years his junior.

  Sandy accepted life on the mountain without complaint, determined to prove herself. There was no sink in the communal dining room, so they washed dishes under an outdoor faucet; communal bathrooms were a hole in the ground. Sandy loved the informality: boys and girls wandered in their pajamas, and she felt free to wear curlers to the dining room. The girls did guard duty along with the boys, learning how to shoot and dismantle an Uzi. When a boy wanted to get to know a girl, he would arrange for her to be his guarding partner. Which is how Sandy got to know Avinoam Amichai—Abu, as his friends called him.

  Sandy and Avinoam became Kfar Etzion’s first couple. Round-faced, generous, the comedian of the hevreh, Avinoam had left university studies to become a carpenter on the kibbutz. A reservist in the 55th Brigade, he had met Hanan at the Western Wall the morning of its liberation. “We’re going home,” he’d said then.

  Late one night, the watchmen roused the sleeping kibbutz: It’s snowing! When one young woman refused to get out of bed, they carried her cot outside and overturned her into the snow. Sandy, coming from Los Angeles, had never seen falling snow. It seemed as if the world were dissolving into its pure essence. Fog covered the hills. The silence was broken only by the delighted cries of young people throwing snowballs and pushing each other into the drifts.

  Hanan watched his friends and thought, We are redeeming this place with our laughter. Just as the Psalmist had written, “Those who sow with tears will reap with joy.”

  HANAN WAS CONSTANTLY on the road, meeting officials and recruiting volunteers. He often returned to the kibbutz past midnight, dependent on infrequent buses and hitches. He performed his kibbutz responsibilities along with everyone else; the only privilege he allowed himself was to be chronically late for guard duty and kitchen shift.

  Hanan was more than just the coordinator of Kfar Etzion; he was its abba, father of the orphans. In the absence of a rabbi he functioned as the community’s spiritual leader, teaching Torah and inserting wherever possible the messianic vision of Rabbi Kook. We are not merely redeeming our parents’ home, he reminded his friends, but preparing the way for redemption.

  “How can you be so sure?” a friend challenged him one night as the two patrolled the barbed wire perimeter. In the near total blackness, the stars seemed closer than the next hill. “Rabbi Akiva believed that Bar Kochba was the Messiah,” his friend pressed, referring to the leader of the fatal Jewish revolt against Rome. “But instead of redemption, Bar Kochba brought the destruction of a thousand Jewish communities and the beginning of exile. If a great sage like Rabbi Akiva could be wrong, then so can you.”

  “But we see it happening!” said Hanan.

  “Rabbi Akiva also said, ‘We see it happening.’ And look what happened.”

  LATE ONE NIGHT Hanan sat alone in the area of the dining room designated as the synagogue. He opened a religious book but couldn’t concentrate. He was so tired. Wrangling one more benefit for Kfar Etzion from government bureaucrats, mediating between the conflicting personalities and ideologies at home. He longed for the purity of the Mercaz study hall. Before the war had turned his life upside down, he had thought of remaining there for another ten years.

  He paced the room and came to the small Torah ark, protected by a velvet curtain stitched with a drawing of fire emerging from the altar of the Temple.

  There was so much to do. The return to Kfar Etzion was only the beginning. The next stage was to settle the area around Kfar Etzion, the old Etzion Bloc, where three other kibbutzim had existed before they too were destroyed in 1948. One day, Hanan was certain, these hills would be filled with Jewish homes and schools and workshops. And then the same would happen on hills throughout Judea and Samaria. There was no time for melancholy, self-doubt.

  Hanan had always done what was necessary. And he was ready now to lay himself on the altar of Jewish rebirth, even if that meant suppressing his own needs.

  He recalled a line by Hannah Szenes, the young poet who had joined Enzo Sereni’s group of parachutists behind Nazi lines, and been captured and executed. The line was inscribed on the memorial to Israel’s paratroopers at the Tel Nof air force base: “A voice summons and you begin to walk.” She had sacrificed poetic ambitions, family, life in the land of Israel, life itself. I will not disappoint the children of Kfar Etzion who depend on me, the public that looks toward this mountain as a beacon—

  He rested his head against the curtain and wept.

  SANDY AND AVINOAM MARRIED. Hundreds of people—rabbis, politicians, strangers—came to celebrate the first wedding in Kfar Etzion in two decades. Sandy wore a wedding gown given to her by a member of the original kibbutz. Celebrants danced to taped Jewish music on the new grass outside the dining room, singing over and over the prophetic words whose fulfillment they were: “The rejoicing
of bride and groom will be heard in the cities of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem.”

  The couple’s friends sang a song they’d written for the occasion. But unlike the usual practice, this song was in praise not of the couple but of the community. “History is returning,” they sang. “Life again is thriving in Etzion. . . . We’ll take revenge upon our enemies / by building and planting and rejoicing.”

  The wedding was reported on the radio, an event of national importance.

  RESTORING THE ROOT

  THE PARK HOTEL IN HEBRON, a two-story building with bathrooms in the halls and holes for toilets, was fully booked for the holiday. It was April 12, 1968, the eve of Passover. Dozens of young couples with small children appeared, claiming to be Swiss tourists but speaking Hebrew. They said they had come only for the holiday, but one family arrived with a truck carrying a refrigerator and a washing machine.

  The “Swiss tourists” had in fact come to settle in Hebron, city of Abraham and Sarah. Their intention was to celebrate Passover together and then, when the holiday ended, simply refuse to leave, declaring the renewal of Hebron’s Jewish community, with or without government approval. A young man in a beret and carrying a cat approached the hotel and called out in French-accented Hebrew, “Is this where those crazy people came to set up a Jewish settlement in Hebron? I’m with you!”

  Hebron was the most tense place in the territories. Just a few days earlier, an Israeli policeman had been killed patrolling the city’s market. The Israeli public had almost universally supported the return to Kfar Etzion; but Israelis were deeply divided over settling inside Hebron.

  For the Jews in the Park Hotel, though, the argument was self-evident. Hebron was the burial place of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. What other nation had preserved the tombs of its ancient founders, could point to its precise point of origin? Here David had established his kingdom before moving to Jerusalem; here, Ruth the Moabite, the prototype convert to Judaism and great-grandmother of King David, was said to be buried. The ruins of medieval synagogues proved an unbroken Jewish attachment. If Jews didn’t belong in Hebron, what right did they have to Tel Aviv, barely sixty years old, an infant by the measure of the Middle East?