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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Six dunams, one dunam a day. The hardest part was to keep from collapsing in laughter. When the team finished a morning of plowing, Avital built a fire at the edge of the field and they drank Turkish coffee. Together.

  CAPITALIST PIONEER

  ARIK ACHMON CAME upon a circle of reservists in faded green uniforms. The brigade had been drafted for a parachute drop over the sand dunes south of Tel Aviv. Avital Geva was standing in the middle of the circle, and everyone was laughing. Arik moved in closer and heard that he was talking about Arik’s daughter, Tsafra.

  “You should have seen her,” Avital was saying, “hitched to a plow like a mule.”

  Arik joined the laughter. But he didn’t really find the story funny, and he suspected that Avital was getting back at him for telling the guys about how Avital had wept in the hospital about the Soviet Union.

  EVEN AS AVITAL GEVA was trying to revive the communal spirit of the kibbutz among its young, Arik Achmon was searching for a way to break the hold of socialism and turn an almost successful company into a model of rational capitalism.

  There is only one way, he concluded, that his domestic airline, Kanaf, would thrive as a private company in a statist economy: subvert the system by joining it.

  He had a plan. Israel’s national airline, El Al, had founded a subsidiary for domestic travel, called Arkia, and Arik proposed to his partners that they offer it 50 percent of Kanaf. By creating a partnership with a government company, they would ensure access to government officials; by maintaining partial private status, they would keep their management professional, freed of party hacks.

  Arik and his partners met with the finance minister, Pinchas Sapir, a big bald man who ran the centralized economy out of a small black notebook.

  “State your case,” said Sapir.

  “We want Arkia to buy half our company,” Arik said. “You have to allow private companies to exist.”

  Arik was offering a new model for an Israeli company. Besides, Arkia was failing; perhaps this arrangement would help revive it. Nor was Kanaf’s case harmed by the presence at the meeting of Sapir’s son-in-law, one of Kanaf’s shareholders.

  On Sapir’s instructions, Arkia bought 50 percent of Kanaf. Now Arik had the access he needed: Kanaf-Arkia went into business with the army, ferrying soldiers between Tel Aviv and the Suez Canal.

  “I CAN’T KEEP THIS UP ANYMORE,” Arik said to Yehudit, “running back and forth between two homes. We’ll visit the kibbutz every Shabbat. But our home is Tel Aviv.”

  When Yehudit finally told Hazan, he said nothing. Afterward he confided to an associate, “This is the blackest day of my life.”

  ARIK MOVED HIS family—there was now nine-month-old Yael, his first child with Yehudit—into an apartment in North Tel Aviv. When Yehudit saw the apartment, she wept. “From now on, these four walls are going to be our whole life,” she said. She was exchanging the solidarity of the kibbutz for apartment buildings built on sand dunes. And how was she to raise her daughter alone, without the children’s house?

  The kibbutz awarded Yehudit a parting grant of 6,000 lira for her years of work, just enough to buy the Achmons’ first washing machine.

  FAREWELL TO KIBBUTZ GAN SHMUEL

  LATE AT NIGHT on May Day, Udi Adiv entered Gan Shmuel’s dining room and hung a banner with the Matzpen slogan “Down with Occupation.” By morning the banner was gone.

  At the next weekly kibbutz meeting Udi was denounced as a saboteur. “If the kibbutz won’t accept ideological diversity,” he countered, “I’ll have to leave.”

  UDI TOOK A SABBATICAL from the kibbutz and moved to Tel Aviv. He worked as a caretaker for a handicapped man and devoted his free time to Matzpen.

  One Thursday night, the Matzpenniks were sitting at an outside table at Café Casit, arguing and flirting. An activist tried to sell copies of the Matzpen newspaper to passersby. An angry crowd gathered. “Traitors!” “Our soldiers are fighting at the canal, and you’re stabbing them in the back!” Someone pushed Udi, and he pushed back.

  Hatzkel Ish-Casit, who rarely threw anyone out of his cafe, told the Matzpenniks to leave.

  UDI’S YEAR IN TEL AVIV ENDED, but he didn’t return to Gan Shmuel. Instead he enrolled in the University of Haifa, where a new program was preparing kibbutzniks, whose high school education didn’t bother with matriculation exams, for university. One more sign of the changing kibbutz: increasingly young people were being allowed to choose professions, instead of being sent to study “useful” subjects like agriculture and education. Udi intended to study political science and economics, useful subjects for the revolution.

  Udi informed Gan Shmuel’s secretariat that he was quitting the kibbutz. No one tried to talk him into staying.

  WELCOME HOME, MEIR ARIEL

  MEIR AND TIRZA stood at the entrance to their house in Kibbutz Mishmarot, beside a wood crate containing their new American acquisitions, including a stereo and a collection of rock albums. It was late summer 1970. After two years in America, the Ariels were back. Meir looked around at the little red-roofed houses and dirt paths and clusters of cacti and lit a cigarette. Home.

  The kibbutz provided the Ariels with a two-room house, double the size of their last abode. In the old house there was a hand shower with cold water, and no kitchen. Now they had a kitchenette and hot water. The two children shared a bedroom, while Meir and Tirza slept on a folding cot in the salon.

  They’re different, the kibbutzniks said. It wasn’t just Tirza’s tight jeans and denim shirt and the disposable diapers, a luxury in Israel. They’ve stepped out, they don’t quite belong to us anymore. Beatniks, some called them.

  Yet Mishmarot was different too. Volunteers from America and Europe, who worked the fields in exchange for room and board and Hebrew lessons, had brought something of the 1960s into the kibbutz. There were weekend dance parties to rock music, affairs between kibbutzniks and volunteers, rumors of drugs.

  The sensible kibbutzniks of Mishmarot realized they couldn’t simply dispatch Meir back to the fields and Tirza back to the nursery. And so the Ariels were given the job of supervising the foreign volunteers. Perhaps that would satisfy the couple’s restlessness.

  “TIRZA, I HAVE something to tell you.”

  Meir tried to sound matter-of-fact.

  “In America, in the summer camp—I slept with one of the girls.”

  Tirza fell on the bed, weeping.

  “I love you more than anyone,” he said. “Don’t leave me. I can’t live without you.”

  “While I was cooking a whole day for the campers, that’s what you were doing?”

  “A man can love more than one woman at a time,” he insisted. “I can’t confine my love to only one woman.”

  Meir had a practical suggestion. “Why don’t you find someone? There’s an American volunteer who’s making eyes at you. Do you want me to speak to him?”

  “I want to die,” said Tirza.

  A few days later, she approached the American.

  “Whatever is permitted to you,” Tirza told Meir afterward, “will be permitted to me.”

  ISRAEL HAD FORGOTTEN the “singing paratrooper,” just as Meir had hoped.

  Yet anonymity too was oppressive. In his absence had emerged an exuberant Hebrew rock music that joined the Beatles with the Russian and Hasidic folk melodies of the pioneers, rock in minor key. Its creators had been influenced by the rebellious music filtering in from the West; and yet most of them emerged from the army entertainment troupes, which sang patriotic songs to raise soldiers’ morale. The result of those conflicting influences were antiwar songs more wistful than angry, at once mocking and rooted, an opposition from deep within the national self.

  Hebrew rock’s great composer was Meir’s childhood friend and musical collaborator from Mishmarot, Shalom Hanoch. Shalom, bone-thin and hawk-faced, had left the kibbutz at age sixteen to study in acting school and never returned. His songs were instant classics, taking the three-minute rock song to its melodic and poeti
c limits. One Shalom song, “Avshalom,” with its plaintive refrain wondering why peace couldn’t come now, became an anthem.

  Meir had written some lyrics in Detroit and sent them to Shalom, who put them to music and recorded them. And Meir had sold some songs to other leading singers. Yet he remained unknown to the public.

  He tried to suppress his envy of Shalom. But Shalom’s success was a constant rebuke.

  Why wasn’t Meir out there, instead of being stuck on the kibbutz?

  EVERY AFTERNOON, RETURNING from the cotton fields, Meir snipped a few leaves from a marijuana plant that reached the red-shingled roof of his house. Speaking tenderly to the leaves, he dried them in a frying pan on the kitchenette burner and rolled them into a joint.

  Meir’s father, retired as principal and now the kibbutz gardener, was perplexed. “What kind of plant is that, Meirkeh?” he asked.

  “Japanese tomato,” Meir replied.

  Meir was on reserve duty when the kibbutz manager knocked on the Ariels’ door. “I know what that plant is, Tirza,” she said. “If you don’t uproot it in twenty-four hours, I’m calling the police.”

  “It’s Meir’s, not mine,” said Tirza. “Can’t you wait until he comes back from reserve duty?”

  When Meir returned home, the Japanese tomato plant was gone.

  THE MISHMAROT DINING room, 8:00 a.m. Kibbutzniks in dark blue work clothes wandered in from the fields and chicken coops. They took any available seat and drank Turkish coffee and cut up vegetables on plastic plates with hard-boiled eggs and olives, tossing shells and pits into a metal bowl in the center of the table.

  Into this morning celebration of diligence and frugality entered Tirza, sleepless with dilated pupils. Her neighbor, a young woman nicknamed Jo Jo, said, “This time you went too far, Tirza. Music until three a.m. I was up the whole night.”

  Tirza giggled. “We took LSD.”

  “Tirza, it can’t go on like this. I have to get up to work. What’s going to be here?”

  Tirza didn’t seem to hear. “I felt like I’m walking on the ceiling,” she said.

  “And what about the children in all of this?”

  “They woke up and went back to sleep.”

  Mireleh, an old girlfriend of Meir’s who had lost him to Tirza, joined in. “Don’t tell Sasha,” she pleaded, referring to Meir’s father. “Whatever you do, don’t tell Sasha.”

  MEIR ASKED THE KIBBUTZ for another leave. He needed to test himself in Tel Aviv, where the new Hebrew music was being created. He wanted to write songs—not as a “hobby,” as some on the kibbutz suggested, but full-time.

  Tirza was supportive: maybe this was her way out of Mishmarot. “Grow up and see if you can earn a living,” she said to Meir. “Bring me one month’s salary—that’s all, just earn enough to support the family for one month—and we’ll come and join you.”

  At the end of 1971 Meir moved to Tel Aviv. Tirza found him a one-room shack on a rooftop, built as a storage room, with an adjacent outhouse. She installed a cot, a small fridge, a radio, and a desk. Meir brought his guitar and accordion. He had a view of the sea. “Who needs anything more?” he told a visitor from Mishmarot.

  Through a friend from the paratroopers, Meir got a part-time job as driver and schlepper for a film company. Meir had long considered becoming a filmmaker or an actor—he and Tirza had met in a theater workshop—but no one seemed to notice his potential.

  Shalom, meanwhile, had left Tel Aviv for London. He was working with a leading British producer on an English-language album, writing songs with the help of a dictionary. Israel had been too confining. Shalom insisted on his right to define himself simply as a human being, to restrict his love to individuals, not collectives.

  Meir was introduced to the Tel Aviv music scene as Shalom’s friend. Producers considered Meir interesting and amusing but hopelessly noncommercial. His songs went on too long, and told stories rather than expressing accessible emotions. One well-known singer tried to be helpful. You’ve got talent, Meir, he said, but you need to write songs that can be played on the radio.

  MEIR WANDERED THE STREETS of Tel Aviv. Thirty years earlier, it had been known as the White City. With its Bauhaus buildings and boulevards of sandy walkways shaded by eucalyptus trees, Tel Aviv had been the center of the Hebrew renaissance. But the White City had turned prematurely gray, as if overcome with the sorrows of the refugees from all the shattered diasporas who had since crowded into it. Languid in the long summer, once-chic buildings with rounded balconies peeled in the sun. Cheap hotels faced the sea; the central bus station, an outdoor strip of smoking buses, drew beggars and peddlers selling cigarette lighters and sewing needles.

  Yet Tel Aviv was infinitely malleable. Here was the center of Israel’s emerging film industry, of music and theater. For Arik Achmon it was the launching place for Israel’s market economy; for Udi Adiv, headquarters of the coming revolution. Here Avital Geva was exhibiting with his friends, disrupting the propriety of the Israeli art world. And here Meir Ariel might somehow become Meir Ariel.

  Meanwhile, though, he was broke. A friend visiting from Mishmarot worried that he was going hungry. Meir’s life had come to resemble a song he’d written in Detroit, about wandering the streets with torn shoelaces and no responsibilities, trying to write a good line to whisper in a woman’s ear.

  His love life, at least, was thriving. He seemed to care most about baring a woman’s soul, treating conversation as potential revelation. He went on into the night about the deadening effect of the kibbutz on creativity and of the army on the emotional life of Israeli men, and about the Bible’s message about power in setting prophets against kings. Meir’s lovers had never met an Israeli man, let alone a kibbutznik, quite like him. He was, they said, introspective, emotional. Almost feminine.

  THE SABBATICAL ENDED. Meir returned to the kibbutz, to the cotton fields. He had failed to meet Tirza’s challenge: he hadn’t earned a single month’s salary.

  THE MOUNTAIN AND THE COAST

  IN THE MOUNT ETZION military yeshiva, Yoel Bin-Nun was creating an educational revolution.

  Teaching Bible, Yoel dared to bring into the study hall the findings of historians and researchers about the cultures of the ancient Near East. He compared the Ten Commandments to the Code of Hammurabi—to prove the moral superiority of Judaism over paganism, of course, but also linking ancient Israel with its neighbors, and insisting that faith must be tested by history. He cited biblical criticism to refute its claims, but in the process exposed his students to heresies like the multiple authorships of the Bible.

  Yoel got away with it because his goal was not to provoke orthodox sensibilities but to restore the Bible as a living force. For Yoel Bible stories were not mere moralistic parables but a precise roadmap for his generation’s experience, for a nation struggling to overcome its longings for normalcy and become a holy people in a holy land. Precisely the opposite vision to Arik Achmon’s.

  Yoel appeared taller than he was, perhaps because he was sturdy and broad-shouldered, perhaps because he projected great ideas. Often he appeared lost in thought, nibbling at the edges of his beard. He would look out to the distance with a slightly quizzical look, as if trying to focus on an image he could intuit but not yet see.

  On a hike along the mountain ridge of Samaria, overlooking the sprawl of greater Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean, Yoel told his students about the tribes of the mountain and the tribes of the coast. Those who had settled on the mountain ridges, he noted, were the most faithfully monotheistic. For that reason, the Tabernacle, containing the Divine Presence, was brought to the mountain ridge. The final resting place of the Divine Presence, the Temple, had been built in Jerusalem, the Judean Hills.

  But the tribes who settled on the coast, continued Yoel, were traders and idol-worshipping backsliders. “The tension exists in Israel today,” he said. “Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: enough said? In the classic planning of most cities in the world, streets are straight, and at ninety-degree angles. The
y are intended to lead people to the commercial center. That is Tel Aviv. Where is the commercial center of Jerusalem? Jaffa Road—a long street that leads to the Old City, right? In ancient times, it was a long street leading to the Temple.

  “The coast, the valley, creates a civilization that is entirely material. The person places himself at the center, seats himself on the throne, and calls himself a god. That is the fate of all materialist civilizations that don’t have God in their midst.”

  AMONG YOEL’S MOST devoted students was an intense redheaded young man named Yehudah Etzion. Listening to Yoel speak about the mountains and the coast, Yehudah was galvanized. That is our real purpose in being in Kfar Etzion, Yehudah realized; resettling the mountains will spiritually renew the coast. Yehudah came to identify so deeply with the vision of the mountain that he changed his family name from Mintz to Etzion. His regret was that he’d been born too late to fight, like Yoel, in the Six-Day War. History had passed Yehudah by once, but he was determined not to let that happen again.

  Yehudah, friends said, was a pure soul. Often he hiked alone through Arab villages, drinking coffee with the old men.

  But there was a ruthless side to Yehudah. One Friday night, before entering the dining room, the yeshiva students danced in a circle. A young Arab man working in the kitchen came out and, laughing, joined them. No one seemed to mind his presence—except Yehudah, who pushed him away. Yehudah didn’t see a human being but a gentile intrusion in the circle of purity.

  Though only four years separated the two, Yoel was clearly the teacher, Yehudah the disciple. Yoel—scholar, soldier, visionary, iconoclast—was, for Yehudah, the ideal Jew. Once a week Yehudah came to Yoel’s room for private study. Yoel sat with a newborn son on his lap and taught the writings of Rabbi Kook. In Yehudah, with his anarchic spirit and his craving for self-sacrifice, Yoel thought he had found a partner for the work of redemption.