“I say it’s not true,” Udi replied.
“Look, Udi, politics is one thing, the army is another,” said Avital. “Whatever your politics are, you have to keep them out of the army. Otherwise we’ll tear each other apart.”
Udi thought, Who is this Avital Geva? One more idiot hero—
Avital thought, What am I supposed to do with this fanatic? I swear, this guy reminds me of a Stalinist—
“I can arrange for you to stay in the brigade as a truck driver,” Avital offered.
“I’m not interested in driving a truck,” said Udi.
AVITAL WENT TO SEE Haggai Erlichman, commander of Company D and a member of Ein Shemer. “What are you going to do about Udi Adiv?” demanded Avital.
Haggai was hesitant. Avital understood: bad blood had existed for decades between Ein Shemer and Udi’s kibbutz, Gan Shmuel. Only in the last years, with a new generation, had the enmity begun to ease. But what would happen if an Ein Shemer officer expelled a Gan Shmuel member from the paratroopers?
“There’s going to be trouble in the neighborhood,” warned Haggai.
“It’s him or me,” countered Avital.
Back home, Udi received a letter informing him that he was no longer a paratrooper.
TO THE FRINGE
THE TEL AVIV living room was crowded with long-haired young people arguing about how to hasten the imminent revolution. Arab and Jewish workers, someone said, were about to rise up together and destroy the Zionist state, along with reactionary Arab regimes. Revolution was spreading from Paris to Saigon; surely Tel Aviv wasn’t far behind.
Udi Adiv listened, fascinated. With his short hair and sideburns and sandals, he was a conspicuous kibbutznik among the bohemians. The anti-Zionist group Matzpen (Compass) was the most detested political movement in the country. In all of Israel there were barely fifty Matzpen activists. The whole Tel Aviv chapter fit comfortably into this salon. Founded by dissidents from the Israel Communist Party, Matzpen was an uneasy coalition of Maoists and Trotskyites and anarchists, united only by antipathy to Zionism. Though Matzpen considered itself an Arab-Jewish movement, almost all of its members were Jews.
Udi became an activist. He spray-painted antioccupation slogans on the apartment of a right-wing editor, visited Arab Israeli villages in a vain attempt to recruit members. When he tried to sell the Matzpen newspaper on the streets of Tel Aviv, he was spat upon, the papers knocked from his hands.
Fired from jobs, sometimes shunned by their families, Matzpen members prided themselves on being a kind of esoteric elite, the Jews who knew the truth about Zionism. Yet even in their contempt, Udi and his friends proved Zionism’s success. Only Zionist empowerment could have made young Jews feel safe enough, barely twenty-five years after the Holocaust, to despise Jewish power.
IN HER SILK scarf, heels, and beret, Sylvia Klingberg was incongruously elegant among the activists of Matzpen. Udi was drawn to Sylvia not only because of her dark beauty but because she was one of the most politically adept among the “Matzpen girls,” as the group’s young men called them. Sylvia was the only child of doting older parents. Her father was deputy director of Israel’s research institute for chemical and biological warfare; Sylvia called him a war criminal.
On May Day, Udi and Sylvia joined the small Matzpen contingent tagging along on the Communist Party march through the streets of Tel Aviv. The Communists carried red flags as well as blue-and-white Israeli flags; Matzpen members carried only red flags. Party members chased them away: Matzpen’s presence embarrassed even fellow Communists. Matzpen members regrouped and marched in their own mini parade, carrying signs that read “Down with Zionism.” Outraged passersby surrounded them. Udi, punched and kicked, was extricated from the mob by a policeman.
EVENING IN THE Gan Shmuel dining room. Udi and a friend sat at one of the Formica tables and mocked the “bourgeois revolutionaries” of the kibbutz. Even among the hundreds of diners who filled the hall, Udi’s voice resonated. “Cherkas,” he said, referring to the destroyed Arab village near the kibbutz, “that’s Gan Shmuel’s idea of socialist fraternity!”
A kibbutznik named Gabi, who’d been wounded in the thigh in the battle for Jerusalem, limped over to Udi’s table. “Why don’t you learn some history before making big statements?” Gabi said. “You talk about the Palestinians, but not a word about the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries.”
Udi smiled.
“You know, Udi,” Gabi continued, “we don’t have firing squads in the state of Israel. But the way you’re heading, you’re going to end up before the equivalent of a firing squad.”
ANOTHER NEIGHBOR EAVESDROPPING on Udi’s table was Shimon Ilan, whose brother, Uri, was the martyr of Gan Shmuel. In 1955 the nineteen-year-old Uri Ilan had been sent with his unit on a mission into Syria, to replace a battery at an IDF listening post. The group of five soldiers was captured and imprisoned in Damascus. Isolated from his friends, fearing he wouldn’t keep silent under torture, Ilan tore a strip from his mattress, tied it to his cell window, and hanged himself. When his body was returned to Israel, a note was discovered in his clothes, punctured holes forming the words “I didn’t betray.” Uri’s family and that of Udi Adiv were neighbors and close friends. Before Uri went off on his final mission, he’d come to say good-bye to Udi’s parents.
Udi was nine when Uri Ilan’s body was returned to the kibbutz for burial. Moshe Dayan eulogized his “determined will,” poets extolled his sacrifice. Gan Shmuel became known as “the kibbutz that didn’t betray.” And Uri Ilan became a powerful symbol for Gan Shmuel’s young people.
But not for Udi Adiv. In his parents’ home, he’d heard criticism of Uri as a fantasist who committed suicide out of fear, not strength. “Moshe Dayan knows very well how to send boys to their deaths,” said Udi’s mother, Tova. She dismissed the paeans to Uri’s courage as “patriotic schmaltz.”
Listening now to Udi’s mockery of Zionism in the kibbutz dining room, Uri Ilan’s brother, Shimon, wondered how far Udi was ready to go. Would he confine his anti-Zionism to Matzpen protests? Or was he planning more drastic action?
Shimon contacted the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. Keep an eye on him, Shimon was told. And let us know what he’s up to.
MR. TAMBOURINE MAN
“MEIR, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Are you crazy?”
“I’m not moving dis car,” Meir said in accented English, “until everybody be quiet.”
Meir had been driving on the highway in his secondhand Chevy station wagon, teenagers piled on each other’s laps. And then he’d simply stopped in the middle of the lane. Honking cars speeded by, drivers shouting. But Meir refused to move until his passengers quieted. “Anything, Meir, just drive!” Calmly, as though starting the car from a driveway, Meir stepped on the gas.
The teenagers of the Detroit branch of Habonim, the socialist Zionist youth movement, entertained each other with stories about their beloved and wacky Israeli emissary. Like the time he was sitting in his car in a supermarket parking lot and an untended shopping cart began rolling toward him and Meir honked at it. Or how he infuriated the parents of his teenagers by driving them to picket lines in solidarity with migrant grape pickers at local businesses owned by members of the Jewish community.
In the windowless basement that was headquarters for Detroit Habonim, with torn couches and spray-painted graffiti denouncing the war in Vietnam and supporting Israel, Meir taught his young people Zionist history and Israeli music. He spoke about Israel as the place where Jews dared take responsibility for their fate, and the kibbutz as a society where idealists dared turn the vision of equality into messy reality. Meir was so successful that parents complained to the Habonim leadership that the new emissary was enticing their children with the dream of living on a kibbutz—which was, after all, the goal of Habonim.
Tirza stayed at home with the children—there was now a baby boy as well as a girl—and watched America on television. TV had been introduced in Israel just a
s the Ariels were leaving for America. Having your own TV, said Tirza, felt like having a private helicopter.
America bewildered, dazzled. How was it possible, wondered Meir, to drive for days and still be in the same country? Tirza couldn’t grasp why no one seemed to understand her English. “Because,” said Meir, “you’re speaking in German,” the other language Tirza almost knew.
IT WAS THE late 1960s, and Detroit was burning and rocking. Racial riots had destroyed large parts of the city’s downtown. But at Motown headquarters you could walk in off the street and listen to a recording session of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Just a few years earlier, the Supremes had been playing local bar mitzvahs. Meir’s teenagers took him to hear the great rock bands and blues singers passing through. Meir was drawn to protest folk singers like Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary—though Pete Seeger’s sing-along earnestness, he said, reminded him of a revivalist meeting.
Most of all there was Dylan. Mr. Dylan, Meir called him with reverence.
Dylan seemed to catch every mood, break every boundary. And how he kept reinventing himself: from folk singer to rocker to country musician. It was worth struggling with English just for “Visions of Johanna.”
Listening to Dylan, Meir knew he had to write songs, ballads that told a story.
Though Meir’s voice was thin, Dylan’s was worse, and he’d become the voice of the generation. Go ahead, Dylan seemed to urge, your vulnerability is your strength.
MAGINOT LINE AT THE SUEZ CANAL
MOISHELEH STEMPEL-PELES, Motta’s deputy commander and Arik’s partner in tending to the brigade’s widows, was killed in a firefight with terrorists in the Jordan Valley. Just before he died, as the helicopter evacuated him, he smiled and waved to his men.
Tough, coarse, empathic, Moisheleh had taught Arik how to help the widows in practical ways. Arik maintained regular contact with the families he and Moisheleh had adopted—and those families now included Moisheleh’s wife, Daliah, and her two young sons. They had planned to reach many more war widows. But without his partner, Arik felt overwhelmed by study, work, family, reserve duty. Arik thought of the long list of widows waiting to be contacted, and guilt, an alien emotion, gave him no peace.
THE RUBBER DINGHIES crossing the Kishon River near Haifa Bay swayed in the fierce wind and rain. As the boats reached the opposite shore, men in helmets and drenched green coats rushed out and established the beachhead.
The 55th Brigade was conducting a three-day exercise, simulating a crossing of the Suez Canal. If Egyptian forces invaded the Israeli-held Sinai Desert, the paratroopers would cross the canal and take the battle into Egypt. That scenario was obviously far-fetched. How would the Egyptian army, whose soldiers had fled in the Six-Day War and left behind trails of boots in the desert, manage to cross the canal, let alone create a foothold on the Israeli side? Still, Israel needed to be prepared for any eventuality, however improbable.
In the evening, Motta summoned Arik and the officers from the scouts unit that had fought on the Kidron bridge in Jerusalem. The men laid their Uzis on the ground and sat around a table in the long tent that served as dining room. Rain hit hard against the undulating roof; a single lightbulb, illumined by a generator, flickered.
We are here, Motta explained, to discuss the scouts’ ill-fated mission during the battle for Jerusalem, when you missed the turnoff to the Mount of Olives and ended up, disastrously, under the Old City walls. According to the scouts’ version, repeated by the books beginning to appear about the war, the tank crews had been to blame for missing the turn. And then the scouts had tried to clean up the mistake, fighting against overwhelming odds.
Arik, who had participated in the rescue of the scouts and had later investigated the incident, knew the truth. There had been no battle against overwhelming odds. And the scouts had missed the turn, just like the tank crews before them.
Motta asked the men to recount that night’s events. After each had dutifully confirmed the unit’s official version, Motta said, “You know and I know that what you’ve said isn’t accurate. Hevreh, you made one mistake after another. I’m not blaming anyone. You fought bravely. I want you all to look me in the eye and tell me whether what I’ve said is true or not.”
“True,” said Kapusta, the unit commander, a squat man with a thick mustache whose body carried four battle wounds.
Motta asked each man in turn: “True?” “True,” each confirmed.
“Arik, give me the protocols,” said Motta.
Arik handed over the notes he’d been taking. Motta put the papers in his pocket.
“I have no interest in destroying your myth,” he said. “What was discussed here stays here. But we needed to establish the truth for ourselves.”
THE 55TH BRIGADE was called up for reserve duty along the Suez Canal. It was June 1969, and a war of attrition had been going on along the canal for nearly a year. Hundreds of Israelis and Egyptians had been killed or wounded. Combatants burrowed in bunkers beneath sand embankments along the roughly two-hundred-meters-wide waterway. With the onset of summer, temperatures during the day went over a hundred degrees. Sandstorms choked the bunkers, but stepping outside meant risking sniper attack. Tanks and artillery exchanged fire, while commandos crossed and attacked each other’s fortifications.
The IDF divided the canal into two sectors. Motta’s deputy, who was to command the reservists in the southern sector, was abroad, so Motta asked Arik to take his place. “You’re volunteering, right?” said Motta. “Right,” said Arik.
An officer took Arik on a tour of the front. The bunkers reminded him of the Maginot Line, the French defense that had collapsed with the Nazi invasion. Where was the daring, the ingenuity of the IDF?
They came to an outpost known as the Pier. Wearing aviator sunglasses, hands on hips and legs spread on the sand, Arik surveyed the area and frowned. A five-meter-high sand embankment faced the canal; a trench surrounded the entrance to the underground bunker. Several hundred meters away, within easy reach of the enemy, three Israeli tanks were parked. Sitting ducks, thought Arik.
“Why are the tanks so close to enemy positions?” he asked.
“They see our tanks and they’re scared away.”
“So keep the tanks there during the day. But bring them back at night. And place paratroopers at the entrance to the outpost in case Egyptian commandos cross.”
“They won’t dare approach,” the officer said.
One night Arik was patrolling on a half-track. He heard shots coming from the direction of the Pier. By the time he got there, the Egyptians were gone. They’d left behind three dead Israelis and a burning tank.
RIDING A JEEP through artillery bombardments, Arik spent his days among the outposts. Nights, he led his men in shooting at Egyptian positions across the water. “Why should they sleep well when we don’t?” he said.
The enemy positions were so close that the paratroopers could fire within range without crossing the canal. Arik would target an Egyptian bunker, move his men to the edge of the water, and direct machine gun and mortar fire against the position. Arik calculated that it took the Egyptians inside the bunkers five minutes to emerge and return fire; in that time, his soldiers could easily sprint to another position, out of enemy range.
One night, as Arik’s men opened fire, Egyptian soldiers immediately shot back. The Israelis were pinned down on the sand without cover. A soldier lying beside Arik raised his head and fell backward, a bullet in his forehead. “Run!” Arik shouted. He lifted the body onto a stretcher and ran with it, boots struggling against the sand.
Another night Arik received an intelligence report that Egyptian commandos would be crossing at the point where the canal meets the Great Bitter Lake. Around 9:00 p.m., Arik and a half dozen men entered the marshes along the bank, hiding in the papyrus reeds. The paratroopers took turns napping, four men alert, three asleep. Arik didn’t sleep. Despite a cool wind, his shirt was damp with sweat.
A full moon rose. Voices from an
Egyptian position just across merged with the slowly moving water.
No commandos appeared. Preparing to decamp as the first light broke, Arik looked up at the sky and suddenly remembered: Apollo 11 was approaching the moon. In the coming hours, a human being would take his first steps on its surface. The whole world was watching the future on television, and here he was, lying in the mud of the Middle East.
FORTY-FIVE DAYS AFTER arriving at the canal, Arik returned to Tel Aviv. He had refused to take leave. The fighting along the canal—a war without a name—had penetrated his being: he had arrived at the canal overweight, and left ten kilos lighter. He was edgier than he’d ever felt. How could the army that astonished the world only two years earlier be acting so stupidly now?
Arik went to see Motta. “The bunkers are a rat trap,” he said. “We’re thinking tactically, not strategically.” Motta promised to raise the issue, but he was about to assume command of the northern front, and Arik sensed that his mind was elsewhere.
From the time when he’d served as runner in the trenches of Givat Brenner during the War of Independence, Arik had taken for granted the entwinement of the battlefront and the home front. But the victory of the Six-Day War had separated the two. Now, walking the oblivious streets of Tel Aviv, watching the young men with sideburns and flowered shirts and the young women in miniskirts laughing in cafés, he felt estranged. How can they be sitting here like this while we’re going through hell?
REJOICING IN THE HILLS OF JUDEA
HANAN PORAT FELT a mystical relationship with Mother Rachel, whom the prophet Jeremiah had imagined weeping for the exiles of Israel. In leading the return to Kfar Etzion, he felt that he had comforted Mother Rachel.
And so when Hanan announced his forthcoming marriage to Rachel Hovav, one of the young women of Kfar Etzion, his friends jokingly told each other, Of course he would marry a woman named Rachel.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 20