Udi was given a notebook and wrote. He described his trip to Syria and readily acknowledged the information he’d provided. Surely, thought Udi, that would prove he hadn’t revealed any secrets.
BANNER HEADLINES ANNOUNCED the unthinkable: a joint Arab Israeli–Jewish Israeli terrorist underground against the Jewish state. Until now, Jews had feared subversion from Arab citizens. No one had imagined this.
“The Syrian spy ring,” as the media was calling it, had caused “major damage” to the country’s security, according to one report. The minister of police declared that the group had in fact been apprehended before it could do real harm, but the public wasn’t calmed.
The shock and revulsion focused on Udi—kibbutznik, paratrooper, liberator of Jerusalem.
The right-wing opposition, headed by Menachem Begin, blamed the Israeli left generally, for doubting Israel’s historic right to the territories won in 1967 and calling them “occupied” instead of “liberated.” Hashomer Hatzair leader Yaakov Hazan countered that for the last fifty years, his movement had stood on the front line of Zionism and the state of Israel.
One defender of Hashomer Hatzair was Yisrael Harel. We can’t discredit a great pioneering movement because of a radical fringe, he argued with friends. Udi Adiv, he added, was nothing more than an esev soteh, an errant weed.
UDI’S PARENTS, Tova and Uri, sat in the police station, spared at least the humiliation of speaking to their son through a barred window.
“What were you thinking?” demanded Uri.
“Daoud misled me,” Udi replied. “I thought I was connecting to the Palestinians, not the Syrians.”
I’ve dragged them into something that will change their lives forever—
But self-recrimination quickly passed. Udi had no reason to regret anything. Uri and Tova, after all, were part of the colonialist system. For all their progressive pretenses, they too were hypocrites.
They parted without an embrace.
ON GAN SHMUEL, the rhythm of daily life continued. But the intactness was gone. Though Udi hadn’t managed to actually commit any terrorist act, Gan Shmuel’s members felt as if he had blown up the foundations of the kibbutz. Udi wasn’t only the son of Tova and Uri, he was everyone’s son. Shortly after Udi’s arrest, one of the veterans died of a heart attack, and his family blamed Udi.
Once known as the kibbutz of the soldier who didn’t betray, Gan Shmuel now became known as the kibbutz of the traitor. Gan Shmuel members were thrown out of stores; bus drivers refused to stop near the kibbutz.
At the weekly meeting, Gan Shmuel’s secretary general, Ran Cohen, suggested that the kibbutz pay for Udi’s lawyer.
Shimon Ilan, brother of the martyred soldier Uri, was outraged. Did Ran Cohen really expect the family of Uri Ilan to help subsidize a traitor?
“I’m as outraged as anyone by what Udi has done,” replied Cohen, an officer in the paratrooper reserves and leader of a small faction that combined New Left politics with Zionism. Cohen detested Matzpen for compromising the patriotism of Israel’s radical left, and he especially detested Udi.
Still, he continued, Udi’s parents, Tova and Uri, were their comrades. “Uri was the first son born on the kibbutz. He is like one of the eucalyptus trees here. How is he supposed to raise money for a lawyer?”
The members voted overwhelmingly to subsidize Udi’s legal defense.
URI AND TOVA made the rounds of trial lawyers and searched for character witnesses. Uri tried to meet with Hazan, but the leader of Hashomer Hatzair, whose door was always open to any comrade, refused to see him.
On Ein Shemer, the kibbutzniks maintained a discreet public silence. The newsletter didn’t so much as mention Udi’s arrest and Gan Shmuel’s trauma—which was shared by the entire Hashomer Hatzair movement. Founded in pre-Holocaust Europe, Hashomer Hatzair had seen itself as a dignified alternative to the thousands of young Jews who were becoming Communists and abandoning their people at its most desperate time. Hashomer Hatzair despised Jewish revolutionaries who fought for all oppressed peoples but their own. How, then, could Hashomer Hatzair have produced an Udi Adiv?
Avital Geva took Udi’s actions as a personal offense. Udi was guilty of what Avital considered the worst possible sin: ingratitude. Ingratitude toward the kibbutz that had raised and cherished him, toward the movement that had taught him his passion for social justice. Avital felt proud of having initiated Udi’s expulsion from the paratroopers. “I had that honor,” he said.
EARLY ON THE MORNING OF February 11, 1973, several hours before the doors opened, the crowds were already gathering outside the Haifa district courtroom. When Udi and five fellow defendants appeared shortly before nine o’clock, they were greeted with shouts, “Death to the traitors!” The defendants, handcuffed to each other, marched into the courtroom, singing, in Hebrew, an old Soviet song: “Off they went / the guys of the Red Army / off they went to work.”
Of the thirty-two alleged members of the ring, six defendants, including Daoud and Udi and Dan Vered, were identified as leaders and tried separately. Udi and Daoud were each charged with espionage, treason, and transferring military secrets to the enemy. The maximum sentence was life in prison.
Head raised in defiance, Udi’s demeanor conveyed the message to his three judges: You have no authority to try me; my very presence in the dock is an indictment against the Jewish state.
Sylvia Klingberg, Udi’s old girlfriend from Matzpen, had been studying in England but flew back for the trial. Sylvia approached the defendants’ bench. “I didn’t spy for Syria,” Udi said urgently. “I was trying to contact Palestinian revolutionaries.” That was what passed for their reunion after a two-year absence.
Udi’s younger brother, Asaf, came to the trial. Asaf had never been drawn to radical politics. But Israeli society had criminalized his family, and Asaf felt solidarity with Udi and his friends.
UDI TOOK THE STAND. His pose of contemptuous calm was gone. Red-faced, agitated, he seemed to finally realize the seriousness of his situation. He put aside the revolutionary rhetoric and tried instead to convince the court that he was no spy or terrorist, that he hadn’t intended to kill his fellow citizens, that all he had intended was to bring peace and justice.
“Did you serve in the Six-Day War?” Udi’s lawyer asked him.
“I was in the paratroopers’ brigade that fought in Jerusalem,” he replied. “The mission of my company was to reach the Rockefeller Museum. At a very early stage of the breakthrough the Jordanians began to shell us. . . . My job afterward in the war was to evacuate the wounded and the dead.”
“Did this influence your worldview?”
“Definitely. . . . People died, and for what? For some holy places? I thought, This war is being fought at my expense. This isn’t what I intended. I hardly even saw the enemy. My impression was that my friends and I need to listen to our inner voices and sacrifice our lives not for this but for some higher goal.”
“The indictment against you includes charges of harming the state’s security,” noted his lawyer.
“All I wanted was to bring a revolution for the peoples who live here, the Jews and the Arabs. I didn’t intend any harm to the security of the state. I wanted to do something positive and good.”
Udi said he regretted going to Damascus. He had hoped to meet like-minded revolutionaries, but now realized he had been duped by Syrian intelligence.
JUDGE: You told [Kawaji] everything you knew about the army?
UDI: He asked what weapons I knew, and I told him.
JUDGE: You gave information on army bases?
UDI: Yes . . . [But] I didn’t think I was revealing anything . . . I didn’t imagine that what I know they don’t know.
The prosecutor handed Udi a copy of the loyalty pledge recited by recruits to the IDF. Did you violate this pledge? he asked.
“I am loyal to my principles,” replied Udi.
THE GHOST OF CHERKAS, the destroyed Arab village near Gan Shmuel, intruded. One of Udi’s
fellow defendants, Mahmoud Masarwa, was a son of Cherkas. His brother, Rashid, had once applied, together with his Jewish wife, for membership in Gan Shmuel; the kibbutz had turned them down.
Mahmoud told the court how in 1948 his father, along with other villagers, was expelled from his land. On the site, he said, a kibbutz factory was built.
ONE MORNING, JUST BEFORE the hearing resumed, a man approached the defendants’ bench. “Do you know what people say at the end of every argument about you?” he said quietly to Udi. “They say: ‘Adiv simply wanted to kill me.’ The indictment claims that you wanted to blow up factories and attack military camps. Any one of us could have been killed in those places.”
“No one would have been killed,” replied Udi, defensive.
Another man joined in: “If you, Vered and Adiv, had devoted even a small part of your time to studying Jewish history, just an eighth of the time you devoted to Marxism, maybe you would have been less skeptical of the right of this state to exist.”
“Yes,” added a third man, “if you would have shown any interest in Jewish history, you would have realized that this state is the last stop in the journey of suffering of the Jewish people.”
UDI AND DAOUD were found guilty on all counts.
In his statement to the court before sentencing, Udi said, “I feel I’m going to prison for many years. I didn’t think that I would pay such a high price for my acts. I have no choice but to accept it.” Then he added, “There was some amateurishness here. Any great historical change happens through the masses”—not through ideological elites. That was Udi’s way of explaining that the creation of a terrorist group had been a mistake.
Udi and Daoud were each sentenced to seventeen years. Dan Vered, who expressed regret and called himself a fool, was sentenced to ten years.
Udi tried to think clearly: in seventeen years he would be—forty-four years old. He was beginning his sentence as a young man, an athlete, a ladies’ man. He felt like someone who had just been informed of a fatal illness.
ISRAEL, SUMMER OF ’73
THE BORDERS WERE QUIET. The war of attrition along the Suez Canal had ended. King Hussein had expelled the PLO from Jordan, and terrorists no longer crossed the Jordan River. The euphoria of the summer of ’67 was long gone, but what lingered was a self-confidence—a cockiness—in the country’s ability to defend itself against any threat. Palestinian terrorism had gone international, with airplane hijackings and a shooting spree by Japanese terrorists in Israel’s Lod Airport. But the IDF was well prepared to cope. Israeli commandos had performed stunning feats, regaining control of a hijacked plane at Lod Airport and airlifting an intact Soviet radar station from Egyptian territory.
As existential fears eased, suppressed social tensions emerged. The most acute was the status of Israel’s Sephardim, Jews from Muslim countries who formed over half the country’s population. Many still lived in substandard housing projects built by an impoverished Israel in the 1950s. Sephardim were vastly underrepresented in the Labor-dominated political system, and their culture was largely excluded from mainstream Israel. The history of Sephardic communities was scarcely taught in schools, Sephardi music virtually absent from the airwaves.
A group of angry young men calling themselves the Black Panthers—a takeoff on the radical American group—initiated a mass protest movement. Ashkenazi Israel, they noted, has turned us into second-class Israelis. Where are the Sephardi government ministers? Why are new immigrants being given decent apartments while we are still living in shabby projects? Why isn’t Maimonides, the great medieval Sephardi philosopher, taught in schools? Why are the prisons filled with young Sephardim? We didn’t return to Zion to be turned into urban waste but to be Jews in the land of Israel.
The Ashkenazi Labor establishment reacted with defensiveness and contempt. Golda Meir—who took over as prime minister following Levi Eshkol’s death in 1969—dismissed the Panthers as “not nice.” Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek told a group of Panther demonstrators outside the municipality to get off the grass.
FOR ALL THE FISSURES, the ingathering of the exiles back to the land of Israel was intensifying. Tens of thousands of Jews from the Soviet Union, the most sealed nation in the world, were being given exit visas. Young men in ill-fitting gray suits, old men with gold teeth and peddlers’ caps, and old bent women in kerchiefs disembarked at Lod Airport with bound boxes for suitcases and squinted into the Israeli sun. It was, Israelis said, a miracle. Until the Six-Day War, Soviet Jews, subjected by the Kremlin to a policy of enforced assimilation, appeared lost to the Jewish people. But inspired by Israel’s victory, Soviet Jews were now demanding the right to return to their ancestral homeland. “We will wait months and years, all our lives if necessary,” wrote eighteen Jewish families from remote Soviet Georgia, “but we will never renounce our hopes and our dreams.”
The borders of the Jewish national home were still unresolved. Most Israelis were convinced that a return to the pre–Six-Day War borders would only tempt the Arab world to once again try to destroy the Jewish state. Even in the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair the argument was where, not whether, to settle.
But the Labor government resisted right-wing pressure to open the territories to unlimited Jewish settlement. Instead, Labor confined its modest settlement building to areas with sparse Arab populations, like the Jordan Valley and the Sinai Desert. To the frustration of Yisrael Harel and Hanan Porat and Yoel Bin-Nun, government policy was to prevent Jewish settlement in most of the West Bank, in the hope of an eventual land-for-peace agreement with Jordan. No more than a few thousand Jews had been settled in all of the territories, including Sinai and the Golan Heights. Right-wingers bitterly accused the government of turning Judea and Samaria, the Jewish heartland, into Judenrein—“emptied of Jews,” a Nazi term—territory.
Still, for most Israelis, ambiguity over the territories was hardly an acute problem. Israelis traveled without fear in the West Bank, and Palestinians traveled freely in Israel. Palestinian workers filled the country’s construction sites and restaurant kitchens. It seemed, in the summer of 1973, that the status quo could go on forever.
PART THREE
ATONEMENT
(1973–1982)
Chapter 15
BRAVE-HEARTED MEN
AN ORDINARY DAY
ON THE EVE of Yom Kippur 1973, Arik and Yehudit Achmon drove to Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Emek to spend the holiday with Yehudit’s parents. On Yom Kippur, Arik complained, Tel Aviv turned into a ghost town. Yom Kippur was the one day a year that edgy, garrulous Israel withdrew into silence. There were no radio or TV broadcasts, no flights in and out of the small international airport, virtually no cars on the roads.
Israel’s annual renunciation of the tumult of modernity left Arik unmoved. He connected deeply with historical holidays like Passover and Hanukkah, which marked the nation’s liberation and which spoke directly to his own experience—and of course Independence Day, his favorite holiday, perhaps because of its simplicity, its celebration of existence itself. The holiday was immediately preceded by Memorial Day, and Arik would go from one military cemetery to the next, standing beside the graves of friends. Then, as evening set in and Memorial Day became Independence Day, Arik and Yehudit went to Mishmar Ha’Emek for the torch-lighting ceremony, followed by folk dancing in the dining room. Afterward they would join a small group of friends from the kibbutz and slip away to someone’s modest house to sing the old songs and drink cognac, and Arik would boast about how well he held his liquor and then throw up. In the triumph of Independence Day over Memorial Day was the story of the Jewish people in the twentieth century and, for Arik, the greatness of Zionism. Death yields to life. No self-pity.
But of what relevance to Arik was a holiday asking forgiveness from a God in whom he didn’t believe?
Yom Kippur confronted secular Zionism with the limits of its ability to desacralize Judaism and transform its holidays into celebrations of nation and nature. On Yom Kippur, there was no way to
avoid how Jews had always understood their holidays: as moments of intimacy between God and His people. On Yom Kippur, the secular Zionist effort of re-creating the Jews as a nation like all other nations came undone.
IN THE EVENING, Hazan summoned Arik for a talk. Hazan had forgiven his son-in-law for taking Yehudit out of the kibbutz. In the end, family mattered more than ideology.
“What I’m telling you now is a secret,” Hazan said grimly. “The prime minister just phoned. The situation is moving toward an explosion with the Arabs, and it’s going to be very bad.”
The call from the brigade came to Hazan’s number. Whenever Arik slept even a night away from home, he made sure to call brigade headquarters and leave a number where he could be reached, just in case. Stay near the phone, Arik was instructed; an emergency call-up could be imminent.
Arik had recently been promoted to one of the brigade’s two deputy commanders. And Motta Gur, now military attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, had been replaced as commander of the brigade by Danny Matt, a veteran of the 1948 battle for the Etzion Bloc.
Two p.m., Yom Kippur day. Arik felt the ground shake: dozens of planes taking off from an air force base near the kibbutz. “That’s it,” he said to Yehudit; “it’s begun.” Shortly afterward, Hazan’s phone rang: Arik was to report to the paratroopers’ assembly point, a base near Tel Aviv.
Arik and Yehudit agreed she should remain on the kibbutz. Arik’s daughter from his first marriage, Tsafra, and Yehudit’s children from her first marriage, Gidi and Amira, were all in high school on Mishmar Ha’Emek. There was one complication: Arik’s son, Ori, age nine, had come to stay with Arik and Yehudit, because Ori’s mother, Rina, was in America with her husband. Now Arik was leaving Ori alone with Yehudit. How would the boy manage without his parents during war? “I have complete trust in your ability to cope,” Arik told Yehudit.
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