The only reason Jews were no longer living in Hebron was that in 1929 Arabs had destroyed its defenseless Orthodox Jewish community. Incited by false rumors that the Jews intended to take over the Temple Mount, the mob had massacred sixty-nine Jews, hacking limbs and gouging out eyes. (Several hundred Jews had been saved by their Arab neighbors.) The survivors then fled to Jerusalem. Like the return to Kfar Etzion, there was nothing abstract about a return to Hebron.
The seder was held in the hotel’s dining room. On the walls hung embroidered quotes from the Koran. Novelist Moshe Shamir, who had grown up in Hashomer Hatzair, offered commentary on “Dayenu,” the Passover song expressing gratitude for whatever God in His mercy offered the Jewish people. Shamir attacked the intent of the song: Our fathers, he said, were ready to settle for too little. Last year, he continued, before the war, we accepted the state of Israel without reunified Jerusalem and without Hebron. And so we are forbidden to say dayenu, forbidden to settle for less than total redemption of the land of Israel.
Afterward celebrants danced with the soldiers guarding the hotel. “Next year in Hebron,” they sang.
SHORTLY AFTER PASSOVER, Arik Achmon visited Hebron. He was curious: several of his friends were on reserve duty there, and he wanted an insider’s report about the Jews who had moved into the Park Hotel and then refused to leave. Prime Minister Eshkol had denounced the would-be settlers but then agreed to move the group into an army base in the city, pending a final decision on their fate.
Arik often spent Shabbat driving through the territories, exploring the new Israel he and his friends had helped create. He was concerned, though not acutely, about the future: retaining the territories, with their one million Arabs, seemed to him inconceivable; sooner or later Israel would find the right moment to withdraw. Driving to Hebron, he took an Uzi for precaution. Though an Israeli felt no danger in most of the territories, Hebron, with its religious passions and history of slaughter, was an exception.
“The Jews here are as bad as the Arabs,” a friend told Arik. “For them, the Arabs are invisible. It’s as if they don’t exist.”
The settlers’ leader, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, constantly spoke of the humiliations Jews had endured in this city of their birth—how the Muslims hadn’t even allowed Jews into the Tomb of the Patriarchs, confining them to the seventh outdoor step. In revenge he provocatively danced before Muslim worshippers sitting on prayer rugs in the Tomb of the Patriarchs, just to prove he could. Levinger was telling Hebron’s Arabs: You murdered the most passive and helpless Jews; now you’ve gotten the Jews you deserve.
Despite himself, Arik was fascinated by this unexpected outbreak of defiant pioneering emerging from religious Zionists, of all communities. He had to admire their courage: kerchiefed women strolled babies through the market where soldiers patrolled warily.
But the image of a gaunt-faced Levinger avenging Jewish honor by taunting the conquered Arabs troubled Arik long after his visit to Hebron. Levinger liked to compare himself to the Zionist pioneers who had founded the state, but he was defying a sovereign Jewish government, not British occupiers. Levinger was invoking an alternative—religious—legitimacy to the secular state. A foreign spirit, antithetical to Zionism, was stirring.
THE BOOK OF JOSHUA
YOEL BIN-NUN MARRIED Esther Raab, his girlfriend from their Nahal days on Mount Gilboa. They were both twenty-two years old. The wedding, blessed with the presence of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, was modest, plates of humus and canned corn and schnitzel; the couple didn’t hire a photographer. Yoel’s friends from Mercaz danced ecstatically, unaccompanied by music: according to Jerusalem’s strict Orthodox custom, bands couldn’t play at weddings as a sign of mourning for the destroyed Temple.
Just before Hanukkah 1967, the newlyweds moved to Kfar Etzion. Hanan had wanted Yoel and Esther to join the kibbutz. “Out of the question,” said Yoel. There was no way he was going to subject his freedom to the will of a commune, waste his time on weekly meetings and kitchen duty.
Instead, Yoel and Esther came as staff members of Kfar Etzion’s new hesder yeshiva—which combined military training with religious study for eighteen-year-old IDF recruits. Esther was the house mother, Yoel a teacher. Yoel was a rabbi in all but name: at some time of his own choosing he would take the state rabbinate’s exam on the intracacies of Jewish law and become ordained, a formality.
The couple was given a single room, without bathroom or sink. They shared an outhouse with the yeshiva’s thirty-five students.
One of the “igloos” was turned into the Mount Etzion Yeshiva. The small kerosene heaters were hardly adequate against that first bitter winter. Yoel and his students leaned on wooden lecterns wearing hooded coats.
Yoel taught Bible. That was unusual: a young man beginning his teaching career in the yeshiva world would not ordinarily choose Bible but Talmud, the truly “serious” subject. But Yoel had a spiritual intuition: the generation reclaiming the land would also be the generation to reclaim the Bible. Only Hebrew-speaking Jews living in the land of Israel could understand, as Jews in exile could not, the impact of topography and seasonal change and agricultural cycles on the Bible’s imagery and narrative and even moral and legal commandments. The Bible, Yoel taught, had been written for a specific people in a specific place—for nomads transformed into farmers. Its agricultural laws, like leaving the land fallow every seven years and reserving the corners of a field for the poor, were intended to turn mere labor into divine service, bind a consecrated people to a holy land. In exile, Jews had been severed from that living connection. But now that they were back, they could rediscover the link between topography and text.
Yoel began with the book of Joshua: the tribes of Israel crossing the Jordan River and entering the land, a blueprint of conquest for the generation of conquest. Students didn’t miss the point that their teacher, a paratrooper and liberator of Jerusalem, carried the same family name as Joshua Bin-Nun.
POCKET-SIZE BIBLE IN HAND, wearing sunglasses and the kibbutzniks’ brimless hat, Yoel led his students through the biblical landscape. They searched for springs, ruins, the topography of biblical accounts that would reveal the sites of ancient battlegrounds. They traced the route where Abraham walked from Hebron to Jerusalem, and the route of the Palmach fighters of 1948 who tried to break the siege on Kfar Etzion—a seamless history as though uninterrupted by twenty centuries of exile.
In the intense light of the Judean Hills, time seemed to bend. In Yoel’s telling, the battles of Joshua merged with the battles of Motta Gur; the walls collapsing in Jericho prefigured the Jordanian soldiers retreating before dawn from the Old City. Don’t read Torah as untouchable scripture, Yoel urged: see yourselves in this story.
THE SINGING PARATROOPER PLANS HIS ESCAPE
THE ALBUM COVER of Jerusalem of Iron showed a smiling Meir Ariel in a camouflage uniform with a red beret in his epaulet—a false detail, since a beret was worn only with a dress uniform. For Meir, though, that was the least of the deception. How had he allowed them to turn him into a symbol of the paratroopers? “The singing paratrooper,” they were calling him on the radio.
Meir tried to undermine the military image in his autobiographical liner notes: “Okay childhood, questionable teenhood, wet his bed until a late age, still sucking, joined the paratroopers as a last desperate attempt to get onto the straight and narrow. . . .” For Meir that was the jacket’s only truthful content.
TIRZA WAS PREGNANT. It had happened during the war: after the battle for Jerusalem, just before the brigade was dispatched to the north, Meir had gotten a few hours’ leave; Tirza, assuming he was about to return to battle, had insisted they make love. “I want to duplicate you, just in case,” she’d said.
They had met, a year before the war, at a kibbutz seminar for aspiring actors.
“Don’t get interested in me,” she had warned. “I’m getting married next month.”
“I pity the guy who will marry you,” he said.
Twenty-four hour
s later, he proposed: “Let’s get married tomorrow. We’ll find some strangers to play our parents and we’ll go to the rabbinate.”
“What happened to ‘I pity the guy who will marry you?’ ” she asked, bemused.
“I have the feeling,” he said, “that with you I can go to places I’d never get to on my own.”
After the seminar, she had tried to forget him and moved back to her fiancé’s kibbutz. But Meir tracked her down. He phoned the kibbutz office and left a message: “Tell her the Mishmarot soccer team called.”
It was late afternoon when she arrived in Mishmarot. She found Meir’s room across from a cactus garden, in a row of rooms for the kibbutz’s discharged soldiers. Meir’s room was so filthy, she thought, you could grow a lawn on his bed. She lay down and fell asleep. Several hours later, Meir awakened her with a kiss. “Want to see a play?” he asked.
They ran to catch the open-backed truck crowded with Mishmarot members going to a play in nearby Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. Tirza felt all eyes on her, and the looks weren’t welcoming. Only later did she discover that Meir had a serious girlfriend, a daughter of Mishmarot, and that Tirza had just announced herself as the spoiler.
They slept together for the first time that night. The next morning Meir went off to a month of reserve duty. “If you come back in one piece,” said Tirza, “we’ll marry.” Two weeks after he returned, they married. Barely six weeks after their first meeting, four of those weeks spent apart.
“THEY HATE ME HERE,” said Tirza.
“No one hates you,” said Meir.
“I know what they all say behind my back: ‘How can he fall in love with that hysterical girl?’”
Tirza was beautiful and funny and impulsive to the point of offense. She had too much ambition, too much craving for the wider world, to be content as a kibbutznik. Was this it? she wondered, living among too-intimate strangers, washing diapers in the day-care center? What am I doing in this kibbutz botz, this mud?
Tirza dared to argue about kibbutz ideology with Meir’s father, Sasha, the feared family patriarch. Sasha, a small, austere man with winged hair, carried in his gaunt face the years of hunger he had endured in Siberia, to which he’d been exiled by the Communists for Zionist activity. Once a group of kibbutz children was playing soccer near Sasha’s room and kicked a ball by mistake through his open door. Sasha emerged, holding the ball and a knife; smiling, he stabbed the ball.
Tirza loved the way Meir respected his parents. He addressed his father with a soft-spoken reverence, so un-Israeli, and didn’t respond to Sasha’s rebukes. (“When are you going to stop wasting your time writing songs for the radio and go to university?”)
And Meir loved Tirza. Around Tirza he felt fully alive. In choosing her as his bride, he conceded the impossibility of a normal life.
WE HAVE TO GET AWAY, he told her. Just for a while, to a place where they never heard of the singing paratrooper, where I can clear my head and return to myself. Israel was too small; it would have to be abroad. Extracting Tirza from Mishmarot, even briefly, was also a good idea. A separation of forces, he called it.
Taking a trip abroad was no routine matter for a kibbutznik without an income and dependent on the collective for approval. But Meir had a plan. The kibbutz movement was looking for emissaries to American Jewish communities; the two-year stint involved teaching Zionism and socialism to Jewish teenagers.
Meir enrolled in a year-long preparatory course at his movement’s educational center. There he studied conversational English and Jewish history and Judaism, including the basic blessings that he didn’t know. Why, he wondered, had his kibbutz education denied him the tools to at least understand the Judaism he wasn’t observing?
Meir was assigned to the Detroit branch of the Labor Zionist youth movement, Habonim (the Builders). “When we’re there,” he told Tirza, “I’m going to study filmmaking. I’m finished with music.”
The Ariels’ first child, a daughter, Shiraz, was born nine months after the war. Three months later, in June 1968, the Ariel family set off for America.
Chapter 11
ATTRITION
ON THE JORDAN RIVER
THE HAPPY ENDING of Jewish history barely lasted the summer of 1967. Arab attacks resumed on all fronts. The Egyptian army shelled Israeli troops along the Suez Canal. The PLO sent terrorists across the Jordan River and placed bombs in Israeli markets. Abroad, Israeli planes were hijacked. Arik Achmon was wrong, after all. The Six-Day War hadn’t convinced the Arab world that Israel’s existence was permanent.
Reserve duty resumed, even more intensively than before the war. The new borders required greater effort to protect. The IDF built camps and bunkers along the Suez Canal, on the Golan Heights, in the Jordan Valley. Still, for the first time the coastal plain, where most Israelis lived, was no longer directly threatened. The paratroopers’ war in the streets of Jerusalem seemed to mark the end of the unbearable intimacy between the home front and the battlefront. A surprise attack could no longer sever the state in minutes; the IDF’s doctrine of preemption, of taking the war into enemy territory, was replaced by a defensive strategy. In protecting Israel, the IDF finally had a reasonable margin for error.
The 28th Battalion was assigned a month’s reserve duty in the Jordan Valley, the desert strip separating the West Bank and Jordan, Israel’s new eastern border, stretching from the southern edge of the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. The battalion set up headquarters in the former Jordanian police station in Jericho, a quiet town of palm trees and winter villas; just outside the town was a refugee camp of mud houses, dating from the 1948 war.
It was late winter. By day the reservists sat in huts abandoned by the Jordanian army, drinking coffee and arguing about the future of the newly won territories. In the freezing nights, they lay in ambush for terrorists wading across the Jordan River. It rained heavily, and the Jordan, in dry times a thin stream barely two meters wide, rushed with vigor. The limestone hills turned green.
Whatever divisions had once existed between the kibbutznik veterans of the paratroopers and the religious newcomers from Nahal disappeared. Now they were all veterans of the battle for Jerusalem. When religious soldiers needed a tenth man to complete a prayer quorum, Yoske Balagan volunteered. “At the Wall I discovered I’m a Jew,” he said.
One Shabbat, Yoel Bin-Nun’s officer announced a drill, a simulated terrorist attack from across the river. The officer called Yoel aside and said, “You don’t have to participate.” He intended to spare Yoel the choice between obeying orders and violating Shabbat. But Yoel was indignant. “No way,” he said. “An exercise is also potentially a matter of life and death”—and so superseded Shabbat observance.
Even as Yoel rejected religious privilege, he insisted on religious strictures in the army’s shared space. When soldiers caught a rabbit—a nonkosher animal—and cooked it in a pot in the field kitchen, Yoel complained to his commander. “Let them do whatever they want,” said Yoel, “but not with army property.” The IDF belongs to all of us, Yoel was saying; don’t exclude me from the collective kitchen.
With his knowing gaze and reassuring smile, Yoel was, for his fellow soldiers, the beautiful face of Judaism. He spoke in a deep soft voice, imparting Torah wisdom on the issues of the day. Yoel wasn’t trying to “convert” secularists but seeking a common language with them. In Yoel’s vocabulary, there were no “religious” or “secular” Jews, only those who observed more and those who observed less. Every soldier was in some sense religious: Was there any greater mitzvah than protecting the people of Israel in its land?
A secular young man with whom Yoel shared a hut posted a pinup of a naked woman over his bed. Yoel averted his eyes but said nothing. The pinup disappeared.
UDI ADIV’S FELLOW RESERVISTS in Company D wanted to like the basketball player from Gan Shmuel who knew how to make Turkish coffee with just the right balance between bitter and sweet. But they couldn’t bear Udi’s politics. He thinks everything is our fault, they complained
, that the Arabs only want to throw flowers at us.
“What are we doing here?” Udi said over a game of backgammon to a young man from Kibbutz Ein Shemer. “This is occupied territory.”
“I agree,” said his friend. “But we have to protect the country.”
“You’re no socialist,” taunted Udi. “A real socialist, when he sees injustice—he doesn’t just talk, he acts.”
“If you mean protesting, by all means. But if you’re talking about taking the law into your hands, then that’s anarchy.”
Manning a roadblock, Udi allowed Arabs to pass through without a security check. One night, while waiting with his unit in an ambush for terrorists crossing the river, Udi fell asleep. (No terrorists appeared.) He did it on purpose, the others accused.
Udi insisted it had been a mistake; he’d just drifted into sleep. But word in the unit was that Udi Adiv had committed a paratrooper’s most unforgivable sin, turning his back on his friends.
AVITAL GEVA LIMPED into the Jericho police station. He wasn’t supposed to be here; he was still on medical leave. But he couldn’t keep away from the guys. He promised Ada he would be gone for a day, but he stayed a week.
The men of Company D told Avital about Udi’s behavior during the ambush. “He’s mocking us,” one said, “I heard him snoring.”
“Sleeping during an ambush?” said Avital, almost shouting. “Risking the lives of his friends?”
Avital pulled rank and summoned Udi to the police station. They met in the hallway.
“Look, Udi,” Avital began hesitantly. “The guys say you’re sabotaging things here. That you deliberately went to sleep on an ambush. What do you say?”
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