Two weeks after the children had first returned to Kfar Etzion in 1967, Rachel showed up alone and declared her intention to remain. Rachel’s parents had been members of one of the fallen kibbutzim in the Etzion Bloc; her father had been a prisoner of war in Jordan during the 1948 war. And so even though she hadn’t been one of the children of Kfar Etzion, she felt she belonged among them. The commune decided that she was suited to run the office, and though she found the work stifling, she agreed without complaint.
Hanan spoke of “ascents and descents” in the redemption process, and that is how Rachel described their courtship. Sometimes they did late-night guard duty together, and Hanan would recite poems written by the poet of the pioneers, the young woman known simply as Rachel. But those were rare and precious moments of being alone together; mostly they found themselves absorbed by the commune. And then Hanan would disappear for days at a time, traveling the country on some important mission. Worse, Hanan was wavering in his commitment to her. Many young women were in love with Hanan, the prince of religious Zionism; was Rachel really the one?
Despairing, Rachel considered leaving the kibbutz. Finally he asked her, matter-of-factly, to marry him. Hanan was a romantic, but also shy; his romance was most easily expressed about the land of Israel.
They married two days after Yom Kippur 1969. Hundreds of celebrants came from all over the country. The modest wedding was held outdoors. Under the canopy one of the rabbis summoned to bless the couple lamented that Hanan himself could have been a great rabbi—implying that he was wasting his time as a mere activist.
The newlyweds spent the coming days visiting relatives and touring in Jerusalem. And then Hanan returned to work. He didn’t have time for a proper honeymoon.
KFAR ETZION’S YESHIVA for soldiers had outgrown its quarters and needed a new home. From an enrollment of some thirty students, the yeshiva was now attracting hundreds. The plan called for building a study hall and dormitory on a hill not far from Kfar Etzion. And around the yeshiva would form a new settlement, attracting those not interested in life on the kibbutz—like Yoel Bin-Nun, who intended to move in as soon as the first houses were ready.
Through the spring of 1970, tractors cleared land for the yeshiva. Prefabs were erected, along with a row of small one-family houses intended for the yeshiva staff and married students. Yoel was hoping the yeshiva would move to its new quarters before the holiday of Shavuot, Pentecost, which celebrates the giving of the Torah to Israel. What more appropriate way to dedicate a place of Torah study than on Shavuot?
But the work was going far too slowly. Impatient, Yoel organized a group of students and friends to complete the infrastructure, installing electricity and plumbing.
They completed the work just after Shavuot. On their first night on the hill, they nailed a mezuzah to the study hall. Then Yoel organized the students into shifts for night patrol. There were rumors of terrorists in the area, and Yoel feared an attack.
The students moved into the dormitory, and Yoel and Esther became the first couple to move into one of the houses, in effect the community’s first permanent residents. There were no paved roads yet, but the settlement had a name: Alon Shvut—return to the oak tree, the lone oak that had been the marker of longing for the children of Kfar Etzion during their years of exile. To be a founding father of a new community in the land of Israel: What more could Yoel Bin-Nun have hoped for?
Toward the end of the week the IDF appeared, and distributed Uzis and bullet clips to the students.
THE KIBBUTZ BECKONS
ARIK COMPLETED HIS degree in economics. Yehudit was working as a psychologist. The decision to take up permanent residency in the city could no longer be deferred.
Arik assured Yehudit that her father would accept her decision to quit the kibbutz and remain with her husband. Yaakov Hazan was the beloved leader of Hashomer Hatzair—the admor, or Hasidic master, they called him only half jokingly, as much a spiritual as a political authority. Comrades consulted him about their personal problems; thousands of kibbutzniks, like Avital Geva’s parents, considered him a friend. He never let himself forget, he said, that he represented the men and women who rose every morning before sunrise to work in the fields and the communal kitchens. While he criticized his rivals in the fiercest ideological terms, accusing them of distorting and subverting and destroying, he never gossiped about them. He was kind, passionate, self-righteous. Once, after an argument with Yehudit, he told her, “I was thinking all night about what you said, and I came to the conclusion that I was right.”
Hazan’s great love was his kibbutz, Mishmar Ha’Emek, “Guardian of the Valley.” Photographs of the kibbutz from its early years in the 1920s showed a row of tents in a valley surrounded by bare hills; from one of those tents young Hazan had run the world movement of Hashomer Hatzair. During the War of Independence Mishmar Ha’Emek had withstood siege and blocked Arab forces advancing toward Haifa. Now it was one of the most prosperous kibbutzim.
Though he spent weekdays in Tel Aviv, where the movement’s headquarters was based, Hazan insisted on returning every weekend to Mishmar Ha’Emek. Yehudit’s two sisters had left Mishmar Ha’Emek and settled on their husbands’ kibbutzim. That left Yehudit to maintain the family connection to the kibbutz. Every Friday she would prepare her parents’ little apartment for their arrival. Before setting out to study in Tel Aviv, she had assured her father she would return when her studies ended.
“If I don’t go back,” she told Arik now, “it will destroy him.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” Arik said.
ARIK WENT TO SEE Hazan in his Tel Aviv apartment and was struck once again by the modest lifestyle of one of Israel’s most powerful men: two rooms, bed, couch, bookcase, a kibbutz apartment in the city. The only indulgence was a profusion of works by kibbutz artists, including a bust of Hazan as a young man.
There was respect—love—between Hazan and Arik. Hazan was proud of his son-in-law and shared with him the government’s security deliberations. And though Arik insisted he didn’t care about proximity to power, he enjoyed his proximity to Hazan.
Impatient with small talk, Arik got to the point. ”Yehudit and I are staying in Tel Aviv,” he said.
For the first time Arik heard contempt in Hazan’s voice. “A person with your background, your values—you betrayed the kibbutz. But we won’t allow Yehudit to betray it too.”
Returning home, Arik said to Yehudit, “If you leave now, he won’t survive it.”
Arik would have to gradually wean Hazan’s daughter away. He offered a compromise: Yehudit would move back to Mishmar Ha’Emek, while Arik continued living and working in Tel Aviv but spent weekends on the kibbutz. Not as a member, he emphasized. And sometime within the next few years, he added, this arrangement would end, and they would build their home in Tel Aviv.
THE SIX-DAY WAR incited dreams. Yoel Bin-Nun and Hanan Porat envisioned an expanded Israel with Jewish towns and villages in the hills of Judea and Samaria. And for Arik Achmon, the vision was a prosperous and efficient Israel centered on Tel Aviv. Not that Arik was drawn to the city. In his preference for simple food, in his routine of rising with the first light of day, in his ethic of service, he remained a kibbutznik.
Arik was proud of the kibbutz movement for setting the borders of Israel and creating a class of selfless servers. But his economic studies had confirmed what he knew from experience: that a centralized economy stifles initiative and rewards laziness. It was absurd. In the Middle East’s military superpower there was a two-year waiting list for a telephone—unless, of course, you had the right connections.
Why was Israel so efficient during war and so incompetent in peacetime? A modern nation was waiting to be born here, freed of the outmoded fantasy of an agrarian collectivist utopia. Yes, Arik readily agreed, the old ideology had been necessary to create a state from nothing. But now utopian nostalgia was preventing Israel from becoming the great nation Arik believed it could be.
CHI
MAVIR WAS A small aviation company of light planes that specialized in crop dusting. Owned by the same kibbutz federation to which Arik’s former kibbutz, Netzer Sereni, belonged, ChimAvir intended to create a division of Piper Cubs for domestic travel. The director-general happened to be a friend of Arik’s from Netzer, and he offered Arik a job. “Come help run the company,” he said. “We’ll create a revolution in domestic aviation.”
Israel’s new expansive borders offered opportunities. ChimAvir could thrive just by transporting soldiers back and forth to the Suez Canal. Still, Arik hesitated: What did he know about airplanes besides jumping out of them? But when he visited the company’s hangar, inhaled the gasoline fumes, and watched the planes taking off, he said yes.
Arik wanted to adapt the management principles he’d learned at university to ChimAvir. But he quickly discovered that the company was run like a kibbutz. Initiative wasn’t rewarded, and incompetence wasn’t penalized. It was almost impossible to fire anyone. No longer a kibbutznik, Arik would never be appointed CEO, no matter how good he was.
He had thought he’d escaped the kibbutz, but here he was, being pulled back in. Weekdays he worked with the kibbutzniks of ChimAvir, weekends he spent with Yehudit on Mishmar Ha’Emek. He even agreed to occasionally work in its cowshed, in exchange for room and board. It was familiar, comforting, and smothering.
Arik tried to convince Hazan that the kibbutz needed to grow. Like the children’s house: maybe it made sense to raise children collectively during a period of austerity. But why raise children away from their parents now?
“Did you or Yehudit suffer in the children’s house?” demanded Hazan.
“No,” Arik conceded, “but those were different times.”
Hazan laughed dismissively. “There is no kibbutz without the children’s house,” he said. And there could be no Israel, of course, without the kibbutz.
THE HEAD OF ChimAvir was replaced, and the new director-general wasn’t interested in domestic travel. “Our purpose is to provide service to farmers,” he said.
“So keep doing that,” Arik said, and quit.
Though he didn’t know it then, a far better job was waiting. A group of entrepreneurs was forming a private domestic airline, and Arik was offered the position of CEO, along with 7 percent of the company’s stock. “We’ll take on the government and open Israel’s skies,” an investor said. For Arik, it was like receiving a battle order.
The company, Kanaf, had four light planes; its leading competitor had seven. Kanaf was headquartered in a Tel Aviv apartment. Every available space, including the porch, was turned into an office. Files were stored in the bathroom. No one wore ties, and everyone called each other by their first names and felt free to criticize Arik’s decisions. Arik’s salary was scarcely higher than those of the company’s technicians.
Arik planned to set up a line between Tel Aviv and the Suez Canal, create a flight school, and teach skydiving. But every initiative required government approval. When Arik wanted to buy a plane, he needed the finance ministry’s permission first to buy foreign currency. And to get that permission he had to explain to a skeptical bureaucrat how another plane for Kanaf would benefit the state of Israel.
Arik let slip to a ministry official that one of his partners happened to be the finance minister’s son-in-law. (He’d been given 5 percent ownership of the company for precisely that connection.) Arik got permission to purchase dollars.
But even Kanaf’s connections weren’t enough when it came up against its competitor, Ya’af, one of whose owners was a close friend of transportation minister Shimon Peres. Arik was bidding against Ya’af for a franchise to test navigational aids for flight paths. Though Kanaf offered a more attractive bid, Ya’af won.
Arik appealed to the Supreme Court. Arik’s partners were astonished. No one could recall a private company challenging the government’s decision on a bid. Arik’s lawyer phoned Peres and said, You’re going to lose. Peres, more perplexed than indignant, responded, But it’s a government decision!
The hearing was scheduled for just after Passover.
On Passover Eve, Arik put on a white shirt and khakis and attended the seder in the dining room of Mishmar Ha’Emek. There weren’t enough chairs to go around for the hundreds of participants, so Arik and Yehudit, along with the other young people, sat on benches on one side of the long table while Yehudit’s parents and the other veterans sat on chairs across from them. As the kibbutzniks sang songs about the season’s final rain and the coming harvest, Arik’s mind was on the impending court case, his challenge to socialist Israel.
Kanaf won. Buoyed, Arik decided to launch a skydiving school. But he needed the approval of the IDF. The army replied: The only parachuting in the skies of Israel will be under our supervision.
This wasn’t working. Kanaf could, at great cost, win isolated battles, but government control would continue to thwart initiative. There had to be a better approach, some way to manipulate the system against itself.
Chapter 12
THE INVENTION OF YISRAEL HAREL
ARIK ACHMON MEETS AN ADMIRER
SEVERAL HUNDRED OFFICERS from the 55th Brigade were gathered in a Tel Aviv movie theater for a day of briefings about “the situation,” as Israelis called their permanent security crisis.
Though only a sergeant, Yisrael Harel, a newspaper editor in civilian life, sat among the officers. As the brigade’s “culture officer,” in charge of educational activities, he was invited to officers’ meetings, but didn’t quite belong among them. With his knitted kippah, Yisrael felt all the more an outsider. Religious Zionists were now thoroughly integrated into the brigade, but the officers’ corps remained overwhelmingly secular, still heavily kibbutznik. Yisrael wished he could represent the religious Zionist community as an equal among the fighters and heroes of the 55th.
All his life Yisrael Harel had wanted to be part of the elite of sacrifice. He regarded himself and the Jewish state as extensions of each other; he even carried its name, “Yisrael,” Israel.
Now Yisrael had a plan that could increase his scope of service among the paratroopers.
As culture officer charged with promoting the brigade’s values, Yisrael knew of the work that Arik and Moisheleh Stempel-Peles had begun with the widows. That work, he believed, needed to be revived in an organized framework. And the man who would help Yisrael do that, he concluded, was Arik. Yisrael, diligent journalist, had researched Arik’s past, learned that he had once been considered a promising young leader in the kibbutz movement, had raised the Israeli flag over the Dome of the Rock, was one of the brigade’s most respected officers—everything Yisrael Harel, a non-combat soldier, had wished he could be.
When the briefings ended, Yisrael approached Arik, accompanied by the brigade’s chief physician, Jackie King.
“Do you have a moment?” asked Yisrael.
Arik looked without curiosity at the young man in the kippah and the thick-framed glasses. The tarbutnik, the culture guy. Not one of us—
Jackie, though, was one of them. The religious doctor had performed heroically under fire in Jerusalem. And Jackie had done for medicine what Arik was trying to do for aviation: defying the socialist establishment, he had opened one of the country’s first private clinics.
The three men took seats in the back of the emptying theater. Yisrael explained that he and Jackie had been visiting widows from the brigade, just as Arik and Moisheleh had done. But many families weren’t being helped.
“We understand spirit,” Yisrael said, “and you understand organization. Why not join forces?”
Yisrael was offering Arik the chance to renew his commitment to their fallen friends, to Moisheleh.
”I’m with you,” Arik said.
REFUGEE BOY, NATIVE SON
YISRAEL HAREL WAS born Yisrael Hasenfratz, in the worst place and time for a Jew: Central Europe, fall 1939. Two years later, the Hasenfratzes, together with tens of thousands of other Romanian Jews, were deported by the f
ascist Iron Guard to an area of the Ukraine called Transnistria, beyond the Dniester River. Lacking the Final Solution’s thoroughness, the Romanians placed some Jews in camps, shot others, and allowed still others to die of hunger and cold. Yisrael’s father, a lumber merchant, was dispatched to a forced labor brigade; Yisrael’s mother bribed a Ukrainian peasant family and found shelter for herself and her two small sons. Yisrael’s younger brother died of hunger, but Yisrael and his parents survived.
After the war, they boarded a refugee ship running the British blockade of the land of Israel. Seven-year-old Yisrael would leave the hold, with its iron bunks from floor to ceiling laid so close together that survivors said it reminded them of the camps, and wander up to the deck, just to watch the kibbutznik sailors and listen to their songs.
Then two British speedboats appeared. Loudspeakers demanded the surrender of the crew. In the brief battle, refugees threw iron bars at the British soldiers boarding the ship. When the British took control of the ship, Yisrael stood with the grown-ups and sang “Hatikvah,” the Zionist anthem of hope.
The Hasenfratzes were sent to a detention camp on Cyprus for illegal immigrants, and eventually landed in Haifa, where they remained, collapsing into the first embrace of home.
Growing up in Haifa in the early 1950s, in a two-room apartment that his family shared with another family of survivors, Yisrael dreamed of becoming a kibbutznik—the ultimate Israeli. As an Orthodox boy and a member of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, he would join one of the handful of religious kibbutzim. Yisrael would be like the plowman in the photograph hanging in the Bnei Akiva clubhouse: shirtless and in khaki shorts but wearing a cap, honoring Jewish tradition.
Until then, Yisrael did all he could to uproot the traces of exile from his being. When his parents spoke to him in Yiddish or German, he answered in Hebrew. His father, Yaakov, a gentle man who walked about singing cantorial snippets, was nearly deaf, the result of a beating in Transnistria; and deafness wasn’t just a physical but a cultural condition. Every morning, Yaakov, who worked as a lumber inspector, set off for his office on the Haifa docks in jacket and tie—in a country where even the prime minister wore an open-necked shirt. Yisrael wore khaki shorts and sandals until the winter rains.
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