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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  As he regained focus, Hanan felt a sense of wonder. His survival, doctors agreed, had been miraculous. No one could remember a story quite like it. A shell bouncing off his shoulder? By thrusting him in the air, away from the blast, that initial crash of the shell had saved his life.

  Leaders of the religious Zionist camp came to visit. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the former IDF chief chaplain and now the country’s chief rabbi, told Hanan that he was privileged to be wounded in the service of Israel. Hanan replied, “You, rabbi, were more privileged than even the Macabees. It took them a year to announce the miracle of Hanukkah. But when you blew shofar at the wall, you were announcing the miracle the same day.” Goren laughed appreciatively.

  Asked what he’d thought about in those moments just after his injury, Hanan replied, “I thought, ‘So another one is being added to those who gave their lives for the Jewish people.’ ”

  THE BARD OF SUEZ CITY

  MEIR ARIEL’S UNIT was patrolling along the shore of Suez City when it came upon a bunker. Booted feet protruded from the aperture.

  Meir and a friend crouched and entered. Inside, five Egyptian soldiers were asleep. “Brah!”—Out!—shouted Meir in Arabic. The dazed Egyptians lined up. Meir ordered them to empty their pockets. One produced a tag from an Israeli uniform. Meir and his friend looked at each other: he’d obviously taken it from a soldier’s body, probably in one of the outposts of the Bar-Lev Line. Meir pointed his gun, finger on the trigger. His friend was surprised to see him acting so decisively, so military. Any sudden move from the Egyptian, it seemed, and Meir would have fired.

  IN MID-NOVEMBER ANOTHER CEASE-FIRE was negotiated, this time directly between Egyptian and Israeli officers. It was a hopeful moment: the first face-to-face negotiations between the two adversaries since the 1949 armistice.

  But for Meir and his friends, living in an abandoned youth hostel in Suez City, the cease-fire simply meant a reduction in the level of fighting. Every so often, the Egyptians would remember the Israelis across the way and fire a single mortar, and Meir’s crew would fire a single shell back.

  Life in Suez City settled into routine. There was guard duty and hunting expeditions for sheep and calves to roast at the campfires where the stubble-faced men in woolen caps chain-smoked and argued into the night about the government’s failures and sang the old songs, already nostalgic for a fading Israel.

  Meir taught the men his songs. They sang “Legend of the Lawn,” about teenage love in the midst of the entangled collective: “There’s a pile of hevreh on the grass . . .” Someone suggested a post–Yom Kippur version: “There’s a pile of grass on the hevreh . . .”

  The men loved “our Meir,” this pure soul who never argued or gossiped or raised his voice, who listened to their woes and was always ready with a kind word or, when words seemed inadequate, a sad empathic smile. “Az mah, hevreh? b’sach hakol . . .” (So what, guys? After all, it’s only . . . ), he said after a shelling, not bothering to complete the sentence. One of the men lost his home leave and was inconsolable; Meir held him until he calmed.

  But as the weeks went on, Meir became withdrawn. Let him be, the men said to each other.

  Meir was brooding over Tirza. As soon as he returned home from the war, she intended to leave for America to try her luck as an actress. She was beautiful, she had learned English in Detroit, and while doing some modeling in Tel Aviv, she’d met an American movie producer who offered to be her patron. Meir was devastated. He loved Tirza madly, which was the only way to love Tirza, the only way Meir could love. She said she’d be gone for a year. But who knew what could happen in a year?

  It wasn’t only Tirza. His life moved between army and kibbutz, communal impositions. He showed no anger, only what one friend described as a sad stillness.

  The strap of his gun tore, and Meir didn’t bother replacing it. He gripped the gun by its barrel, carrying it as an afterthought. One day, on patrol with his jeep, Meir suddenly called out, “I need to go back, I forgot something.” The jeep pulled up in front of the hostel, and Meir ran inside and reemerged with his gun.

  A friend from home sent Meir marijuana, along with seeds, and he planted those beside the hostel. When he stepped outside “for a smoke,” even his commander didn’t interfere.

  One of the men confided to Meir that he feared he was going to die in Suez City. Wordlessly Meir produced a joint, the only comfort he could manage.

  MORNING LINEUP IN the courtyard of the hostel. Thirty helmeted men stood at ease in a ragged row, reservist style. The daily inspection: Were the guns oiled? Bullet clips filled?

  Strap hanging from his helmet, bootlaces open, Meir dragged his gun on the ground behind him and joined the line.

  “Meir,” said the commander sympathetically, “I have a suggestion. Why don’t you bring your guitar for inspection?”

  The next morning Meir showed up with gun and guitar. “Are the strings properly tuned?” the commander asked.

  “Everything is in order,” replied Meir.

  AVITAL GEVA ENCOUNTERS YOEL BIN-NUN

  EVEN IN SUEZ CITY, joked Avital’s men, our commander can’t resist doing an art project. Avital’s “art project” consisted of laying strips of camouflage across the facade of the abandoned school where the hundred men of Company D had camped. He extended the cloth to the facades of nearby buildings occupied by other units. Then his men broke down the side walls, allowing soldiers and jeeps and even tanks to pass between the buildings, out of sniper sight.

  With the new cease-fire, tensions eased. For the first time Avital could begin to think about the war. The sin of arrogance: Israel had really thought it was invincible. Golda and Dayan had assured that the new borders would keep Israel safe. But those borders had induced the very smugness that almost destroyed Israel on Yom Kippur. Why hadn’t Israel’s leaders aggressively pursued peace, checked every rumor of Sadat’s readiness for negotiations, instead of dismissing and suspecting—waiting, as Dayan had put it, for a phone call from Arab leaders?

  Peace, Avital now knew, was possible. Egyptians and Israelis had greeted each other, embraced, on the streets of Suez City. Avital had acted then as a responsible officer, protecting his soldiers from danger. But there had been no danger, only exhausted men celebrating their common humanity. How could enemy soldiers turn in an instant into friends? Apparently the Middle East could yield surprises that weren’t only destructive but redemptive. Avital had seen a miracle. A vision of the end of days.

  ONE SHABBAT MORNING, while visiting friends in the hostel, Avital heard a bearded young man with a knitted kippah speaking to a group of soldiers, evidently teaching some kind of class. The young man swayed slightly as he spoke, pulling the edges of his beard. Avital wasn’t sure what he was talking about, something about the Torah reading of the week. But it wasn’t the words that attracted him, but rather the bearded man’s evident empathy. When someone argued a point, he tilted his head, listening with the same intensity, it seemed to Avital, with which he’d spoken. Someone who could take another’s arguments as seriously as he took his own seemed to Avital worth knowing.

  When the class ended, Avital approached Yoel Bin-Nun. “Listen, my hevreh are going crazy with boredom,” Avital said. “Why don’t you come by Company D and teach something about, you know, the Torah?”

  And so the next Shabbat, after completing his morning prayers, Yoel went to the school. Avital greeted him with a hug; Yoel allowed himself to be embraced.

  A dozen men sat on cots. Avital joined them. He felt like a child, ignorant of Judaism and eager to learn.

  The Torah reading, Yoel explained in his deep voice, was about Joseph and his brothers. “Hevreh, look how beautiful this is,” he enthused, and read a few verses from his pocket-size Bible. The descent of the children of Israel into Egypt had begun through an act of hatred: Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers. That triggered a process in which the tribes of Israel were eventually enslaved. The redemption of the Jews would come, Yoel said, whe
n they learned to love each other. And now we are back in the land of Egypt, secular and religious, correcting the sin of our last sojourn here. When we are united, redemption is possible.

  Avital didn’t know if the Jews had been chosen for some special destiny, if the Torah contained clues to understanding Israel’s situation, if there was a God at all. But in Yoel’s presence Avital felt, if not quite faith, then peace.

  Avital’s men confronted Yoel with their questions about God and their resentment toward the rabbinical establishment.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” a kibbutznik said. “If you succeed in convincing me that God exists and that there is a divine hand guiding the world, I’m ready to become religious. But if I succeed in convincing you that it’s all nonsense, then you’ll become secular.”

  “You’re asking me to give up my deepest beliefs,” Yoel replied, smiling. “Let each person observe and interpret in his way, but the Torah belongs to every Jew. Shabbat belongs as much to you as it does to me.”

  “Listening to you,” Avital said to Yoel afterward, “I feel half religious.”

  LATE AT NIGHT, Yoel and Avital sat on the upper floor of the abandoned school where Company D was camped and, wearing coats against the bitter wind that seeped into the unheated building, argued about the future of Israel. It didn’t matter that Yoel was a corporal and Avital a captain, or for that matter, that Yoel was a scholar and Avital didn’t know the most basic prayers. Somehow it didn’t even matter that Yoel was a settler for whom annexing the territories was part of the redemption process, while Avital was a kibbutznik for whom withdrawing from the territories was the hope for peace.

  They agreed about this: Israel’s survival required moral renewal. “What I love about you, Yoel,” said Avital, “is that you don’t speak about rolling heads like the others here. ‘Golda has to go, Dayan has to go, Gorodish has to go.’ You’re speaking about moral transformation.”

  “We need the moral vision of the kibbutz,” Yoel said.

  ”Yoel, habibi, you should be prime minister.”

  YISRAEL HAREL UNDER FIRE

  DANNY MATT ASKED Arik Achmon to prepare a report of the brigade’s actions in the Yom Kippur War, as Israelis were calling it, just as Arik had done in the summer of 1967 about the battle for Jerusalem.

  The assignment meant interviewing dozens of officers and soldiers. Arik asked Yisrael Harel to be his assistant. Not that Arik expected much help from him. He’s not a real fighter, he doesn’t understand war— Still, Arik liked Yisrael, his partner in helping bereaved families, and he’d enjoy the company.

  Yisrael was thrilled. On home leave, he bought, for interviews, the latest model of tape recorder with his own money. Yisrael referred to himself as Arik’s partner. When Yisrael wasn’t around, Arik referred to him as “the tape carrier.”

  Danny moved headquarters from the “Holocaust cellar” to an abandoned Egyptian army base in the agricultural belt. Arik, who knew how important it was for Yisrael to be among the powerful, invited him to sleep in the officers’ quarters, though Yisrael only held the rank of sergeant.

  “Get him out of here,” demanded a friend of Arik’s, repeating a common sentiment among the officers. “He doesn’t belong among us.”

  Arik refused. “He’s the chief education officer, he’s working with me, and he will have the status of an officer,” he said.

  ARIK AND YISRAEL traveled to the brigade’s outposts along the patchwork front, interviewing reservists.

  In Suez City Arik went to see a friend in the youth hostel. There he found Meir Ariel lying on a mattress on the floor, strumming his guitar. Arik expected Meir’s usual effusive greeting. But Meir seemed withdrawn.

  “What’s with Meir?” Arik asked Meir’s commander.

  “He just misses home, like everyone,” the commander replied. “He’ll be okay.”

  Arik knew that Meir wasn’t like everyone. And he wasn’t at all sure that Meir would be okay.

  ARIK AND YISRAEL sat on a rooftop in Suez City, drinking coffee with officers who had secured the Yard on the night of the crossing. They could clearly see Egyptian positions barely a hundred meters away. But the front had quieted, and no one felt the need to sit behind sandbags.

  After the interview, Arik and Yisrael walked down the stairwell, back toward their jeep. Just as Yisrael was passing a window, a mortar shell, and then two more, exploded in the courtyard. The window shattered. Yisrael cried out. Arik, a few meters behind him, rushed down the stairs.

  Yisrael leaned against the wall. Arik checked his head and torso: clean.

  A medic ran up the stairs. He pulled down Yisrael’s pants: a few metal and glass fragments in his thighs. You don’t die from this, thought Arik.

  There was a flow of blood. Flesh wounds, reassured the medic.

  Yisrael was quiet, and Arik appreciated his restraint. “Yihyeh b’seder, Yisrael”—It will be okay—Arik reassured him, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  Arik and the medic carried Yisrael to the jeep and rode with him to a field hospital. “In a few weeks you’ll forget it,” the doctor told Yisrael.

  When Arik returned to officers’ quarters, he announced to his friends, laughing, “Hevreh, you won’t believe it, but Yisrael Harel has just earned his Purple Heart.”

  FAR FROM HOME

  A TRAUMATIZED ISRAEL resumed the motions of normal life. Universities opened two months late; a third of the students were still mobilized. With the scarcity of gasoline, drivers had to leave their cars idle for one day a week. Businesses were failing, kibbutzim had lost large parts of their harvests.

  The men of the 55th had been called up in early autumn; it was now early winter. Sporadic shooting continued on both fronts. No one could say when this reserve stint, already the longest in the country’s history, would end.

  A truck mounted with a bank of phones circulated among the IDF positions, and the men lined up to call their families. Leaves were given grudgingly, usually for forty-eight hours. Problems accumulated on the home front, and reservists were demanding longer leaves.

  Zviki Nur, commander of the 28th Battalion, decided to appoint an ombudsman to advise him on the most pressing cases. He looked for someone whose judgment would be trusted by his fellow reservists. He chose Yoel Bin-Nun.

  Yoel took the assignment as a religious duty. All other armies, he said, march on their stomachs, but the IDF marches on its home leaves. Few armies fought in conditions of such intimacy between the home front and the actual front as did the IDF. Leaves raised motivation, reminding soldiers they were fighting to protect their families.

  Past midnight, following Zviki’s nightly briefings of the battalion’s commanders, Yoel began what he called his office hours. He weighed need against need—a business going bankrupt, a pregnant wife confined to bed. When he felt overwhelmed, he asked for God’s guidance. Avital saw it as a sign of Yoel’s modesty that he made a point of returning afterward to his unit, rather than sleeping in the officers’ quarters.

  One afternoon, during a staff meeting, Yoel excused himself to pray. As Yoel headed toward the door, Avital called out, “You don’t have to leave.” Yoel found a corner to recite the afternoon service. Avital watched him slowly swaying: Avital wanted to offer himself the way Yoel was now, confessing his smallness before the enormity of existence. Unable to pray, Avital felt happy in proximity to Yoel’s prayer.

  YOEL WAS SENT for a three-day trip to the home front, to assess the most pressing cases. He flew to Israel in a Hercules transport plane, which hovered low to evade Egyptian radar.

  Yoel informed the disappointed driver assigned to him that they would be spending no more than a few hours with their own families. “What did you think,” said Yoel, “that we would live it up?” Yoel didn’t even visit Hanan in the hospital; that would be stealing time from the men who depended on him.

  Yoel’s wife, Esther, in her ninth month with their third child, was furious. “You’re taking care of everyone else’s needs
but your own,” she said when he came home for a brief visit. “Your children haven’t seen you in months, and I need you. Why don’t you put yourself on your list?”

  “I can’t exploit my position for my own benefit,” Yoel replied.

  What’s the point of arguing? thought Esther. He’ll always do exactly as he thinks, regardless of the consequences.

  ARIK ACHMON RETURNED home on leave to a desperate Yehudit. He had never known her so angry, so hurt. Since Yom Kippur, she had been alone with Arik’s nine-year-old son, Ori. “He cries when he wakes up and doesn’t stop crying until he gets to school,” Yehudit said. “Then he waits for school to be over and starts crying again.”

  Most of all she was furious at Arik. Other reservists had pleaded special circumstances and been discharged. “Arik, just tell them what’s happening here and I’m sure they’ll understand. You’re trying to build a second family, not easy under the best circumstances.”

  “Danny needs me at his side,” Arik replied.

  “What about me? What about your son? You’re not eighteen anymore, Arik. It’s time to stop defending the homeland and take care of your family.”

  Yehudit should know—this is the price people like us pay for having the right values and education.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, noncommittal.

  “Arik, I can’t go on.”

  “I know I can depend on you, Yehudit. I know you’ll be strong.”

  Damn it, he’s right—

  MEIR ARIEL SINGS THE BLUES

  ON GUARD DUTY around late-night campfires, the reservists in Suez City dissected the war. Who was responsible for the depleted stockpiles of weapons they had found on Yom Kippur? For the intelligence failure to read the most blatant signs of impending invasion? For the doctrine of Israel’s invulnerability and the contempt for the fighting capability of the other side? For the strategic stupidity of the Bar-Lev Line? Someone had to answer for this.