Leah left to study in Paris. Udi’s old girlfriend, the elegant Matzpen activist Sylvia Klingberg, began visiting Ramle Prison.
UDI SHARED A six-square-meter cell with thirteen inmates, in a section of the prison whose cells faced an inner courtyard. The cells alternately housed Jewish criminals and Arab security offenders. Each cell had its own bathroom, with a hole in the floor and a cold-water shower. Three times a week prisoners were taken to a communal shower, with hot water. Udi felt grateful to be among the Arab security prisoners, whose code forbade molestation.
Udi was accepted by his Arab cellmates; he was almost one of them. Most were Palestinian citizens of Israel with whom he could speak Hebrew. Several were Marxists, and together they studied political texts. Even the devout Muslims, whom Udi regarded as simpletons, were civil. Udi befriended three young men from the Galilee who had planted a bomb on a beach, wounding a woman; they were, thought Udi, naive. He tried to educate them. “Violence should be directed only against the institutions of the state, not against the people,” he said. “Our task as revolutionaries is to bring Jewish and Arab workers together.” They nodded and smiled, but Udi suspected he wasn’t getting through.
Udi was troubled by some of the talk of his fellow security prisoners, like the Palestinian who assured him that Israel would be destroyed by “our secret weapon, the Arab womb.” “Human beings shouldn’t be reduced to statistics,” Udi admonished.
“Hey, Udi, look at this,” called out a cellmate named Abu Tawfik, pointing to an article in the paper about a fatal car crash. “Three more Jews who are looking up at the flowers.” He smiled.
Udi was perplexed. Abu Tawfik wasn’t one of those primitive religious Muslims, but a Marxist like Udi. How could he be happy about the deaths of people just because they were Jews?
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
THE SIEGE AGAINST ISRAEL DEEPENED. PLO terrorists crossing from Lebanon invaded an Israeli apartment building and killed eleven residents. Another PLO group seized hostages in a high school, and twenty-one teenagers were killed during an IDF rescue operation. The PLO formally adopted the “stages plan,” declaring that any territory evacuated by Israel would be used as a base from which to destroy it.
To the dismay of Israelis, the legitimacy of the PLO only grew. In November 1974 PLO leader Yasser Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, where he denied the right of the “Zionist entity” to exist. Many delegates gave him a standing ovation.
GUSH EMUNIM BECAME a mass movement, impelled by faith in Israel’s redemption and by fear of Israel’s unraveling. Even for many secular Israelis, the group offered a way to fight back against the siege. Israel’s leading satirist, Ephraim Kishon, urged that the young people of Gush Emunim—the “knitted kippot” generation—receive the Israel Prize, the nation’s highest award. Even Yehudit Achmon’s father, Yaakov Hazan, a fierce opponent of Gush Emunim, confessed that he wished Hashomer Hatzair were still able to produce such dedicated youth.
One autumn night several thousand young people, carrying backpacks and sleeping bags, crossed the invisible 1967 border. Their destination was two sites in the West Bank, marked by Gush Emunim for future settlement. One group, led by Hanan Porat, walked along the cliffs of Wadi Kelt in the Judean Desert, heading toward Jericho.
Through the night and into the next day, the protesters evaded army roadblocks and pursuing soldiers. They slipped into a cave and then out the other side. Finally they were surrounded, and the IDF carried Hanan and his friends down the cliff on stretchers.
SEVERAL NIGHTS A WEEK, Yoel Bin-Nun went to the Gush Emunim office for meetings. The office—small, crowded rooms with overflowing ashtrays and mattresses on the floor—was located in an apartment building a block away from what had once been no-man’s-land separating Jordanian and Israeli parts of Jerusalem. The building’s narrow windows had been built as protection against Jordanian snipers, a reminder of the fragility of the old borders the Gush was determined to permanently erase.
After one late-night meeting, Yoel was driving home with Hanan Porat when Hanan admitted to feeling exhausted. Yoel, who didn’t have a license, couldn’t help with the driving. He persuaded Hanan, who recently had driven into a ditch and been briefly hospitalized, to stop at the side of the road. They were just past Bethlehem, near Solomon’s Pools, which had been a reservoir for ancient Jerusalem.
Hanan napped, and Yoel kept watch.
Hanan abruptly awoke and, as if resuming a conversation, said, “So let’s say it’s 1948, and the Arabs have accepted the [UN] partition plan. The Etzion Bloc is under Arab rule. Do you stay or not stay?”
“Hanan,” Yoel replied slowly, “I didn’t go through two thousand years of exile just to raise my children in exile in the Holy Land, when there is a Jewish state half an hour away.”
“What, are you crazy?” said Hanan. “No matter what, we don’t move from Kfar Etzion. Why is there even a question?”
PRIME MINISTER RABIN accused Gush Emunim of trying to topple his government, threatening Israeli democracy. Yoel wrote an op-ed appealing to Labor leaders to remember their roots. He invoked not the Torah but secular Zionism: there is nothing more sacred in the Zionist ethos, he wrote, than settling the land of Israel.
A kibbutznik with gray stubble and a woolen cap showed up at Yoel’s door with a warning. His name was Yehoshua Cohen. As a young man, he had been an assassin for the anti-British underground the Stern Group (known to the British as the Stern Gang); later he became bodyguard and confidant to Ben-Gurion on the desert kibbutz Sde Boker, where both men had lived. A sympathizer of the settlers, Cohen had helped found the field school at Kfar Etzion.
“Yoel,” Cohen said grimly, “your camp is going too far. You’re trying to bring down Mapai, and it can’t be done. The left will do anything to stay in power. They’ll stage a coup here. They’ll take over the radio and the TV.”
“What are you talking about?” said Yoel.
“You don’t know them like I do.”
“You know the left of the old generation, Yehoshua. But I serve with their sons. Maybe some of the older people would want to do that. But the hevreh from the paratroopers? No way.”
THE NEARLY-NINETY-YEAR-OLD WOMAN sitting beside Hanan in the front seat of the car keenly watched the landscape of terraced hills passing outside her window. Rachel Yanaít Ben-Zvi had an eye for the potential of empty space. One of the legendary figures of Labor Zionism, she had as a young woman founded a female workers’ collective to train pioneers for agricultural labor rather than traditional women’s roles and, as she later wrote, to “satisfy their passion for a partnership with mother earth.”
For Hanan, the support of Ben-Zvi, who also happened to be the widow of Israel’s second president, was a gift. Op-eds in the Israeli press were deriding the Gush as a distortion of Zionism, which had intended to replace the messianic fantasies of exile with the responsibilities of the real world. Opponents noted the contradiction at the heart of the Gush, a strange hybrid of Zionist activism and messianic passivity: Since redemption was imminent, why worry about problems like the demographic threat to the Jewish state of annexing two million Palestinians? Some on the left went so far as to condemn Hanan and his friends as anti-Zionist.
Yet here was Rachel Yanaít Ben-Zvi, confirming the Gush’s claim to pioneering legitimacy.
They drove through the West Bank. Few Israeli soldiers were visible, their presence unnecessary in the pastoral calm. Just beyond the Arab village of Ein Yabroud, near Ramallah, rose Mount Ba’al Hatzor. Bulldozers were clearing the top of the hill. Hanan explained that this was the highest spot in southern Samaria, and that the army was building a radar station.
“Why don’t you establish a work camp there?” suggested Ben-Zvi. Hanan grasped the historic reference: in the pre-state era, the pioneers had built roads and cleared land as prelude to creating towns and kibbutzim. Maybe Gush Emunim activists should help build this army base, continued Ben-Zvi. And then forget to leave.
Han
an brought the idea to the Gush Emunim executive. We’ll ask the contractor building the base to hire our people, he said.
Nonsense, countered Rabbi Moshe Levinger, head of Hebron’s settlers. As soon as the work is done, your construction workers will be sent packing.
But Yehudah Etzion, Yoel’s devoted student and a member of the executive, was enthusiastic. He offered to organize a work group.
Yoel backed Yehudah: here was a way of bypassing the Rabin government’s opposition, infiltrating rather than storming the territories. “We need to walk a thin line,” said Yoel. “Create facts on the ground, and if possible without going head-to-head with the government.”
Yehudah brought together ten friends willing to work on the base. Hanan convinced the contractor to hire them and secured a work permit from the defense ministry, granted on condition that the group not stay overnight in the West Bank and create a de facto settlement.
The group set out from Gush Emunim headquarters in a Land Rover that had once belonged to the Jordanian army. Yehudah, curly red hair protruding from a floppy kibbutz hat, rode atop the jeep, one foot propped on the spare tire attached to the hood. One of the young men was a doctor who took leave from work to join the construction crew.
Working against a fierce wind, they drove poles into the hard earth, constructing a four-kilometer fence on Mount Ba’al Hatzor. Evenings they returned to Jerusalem. Yehudah slept in the Gush office.
As the weeks passed without change, group members concluded that no settlement was going to come from their efforts. One by one, they dropped out.
Demoralized, Yehudah consulted with his teacher. “Yoel, we can’t continue like this. Either we become a settlement or we will dismantle.”
Yoel recruited several volunteers to help Yehudah. One morning they took a taxi from the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem to downtown Ramallah. From there they took a taxi to Mount Ba’al Hatzor. Yoel told the Palestinian driver to take them near El Yabroud, the village closest to the radar base, whose existence was a military secret. “Ah, to the radar,” replied the driver in Hebrew.
That night Yoel returned to a disapproving Esther. “The land of Israel cannot be settled by trickery,” she said.
THE ASCENT OF MEIR ARIEL
TIRZA ARIEL RETURNED home from America. She hadn’t succeeded there as an actress. But, working as a makeup artist, she had managed to save some money. And she opened a private bank account.
“Everyone here has grandparents in the city, except for us,” she told Meir, justifying her refusal to turn over her earnings to the kibbutz. “So only our children shouldn’t have bicycles?”
Meir objected feebly. “We have everything we need,” he said. Tirza was adamant. Some on the kibbutz suspected her of sinning against the collective, but this was Mishmarot, and no one made it an issue.
The Ariels resumed life as if nothing had changed. Tirza got a job marketing for Mishmarot’s factory, which made frames for sunglasses. Soon she was pregnant with the Ariels’ third child.
But for Meir nothing felt normal. He was sleeping with the wife of a neighbor, with teenage girls half his age. Though he didn’t ask—that was the agreement between them—he assumed that Tirza was likewise having affairs. The house was a wreck—dirty clothes on the floor, dishes in the sink, broken toys in the yard.
“We have to stop this charade,” he said to Tirza. “Whatever you want—separation, divorce. It’s not your fault. It’s my problem.”
“Don’t ever talk to me about divorce again,” said Tirza.
ON PASSOVER EVE, Meir and Tirza and the children celebrated the seder with Tirza’s parents in the dining room of Kfar Szold, their kibbutz in the north.
Meir sat glum, unable to join in the singing. What was the point of this ritual of pretend devotion? Every year, like dutiful children, the secular kibbutzniks recited passages from the Haggadah, extolling the God of Israel for ancient miracles. If there was a God, we shouldn’t be making a mockery of the seder by eating nonkosher food. And if there wasn’t a God, then why bother with the seder at all?
Meir stepped outside, into the Galilee silence. The singing in the dining room receded.
Meir gazed upward. The stars seemed fierce. Alive. He continued staring into the illumined void, as though he were expanding, merging into vastness.
And then he knew: Nothing was random. Of course there was a God. He had asked a question and the universe had responded. How could he have ever doubted the obvious?
THE BIRTH OF OFRA
ON APRIL 20, 1975, after a day of work on the fence, Yehudah and a dozen friends broke their daily routine. Instead of returning to Jerusalem they drove to Ein Yabroud, below Mount Ba’al Hatzor. They turned across the road into a valley without trees. Between the boulders, sage was in purple bloom.
They came to a row of abandoned barracks, partly stone-faced, without doors or glass in the windows. In 1967 the Jordanian army had begun building this base, but the Six-Day War had intervened. Yehudah’s group intended to spend the night here and simply stay on.
A dozen supporters arrived from Jerusalem, with sleeping bags and gas burners and canned food. One young man missed his ride and hitched, part of the way on a donkey cart. Yehudah and his friends swept the concrete floors and laid plastic sheets over gaping windows and blankets across doorways. “If only the war had happened a little later,” joked one young woman, “we would have gotten better housing.”
Meanwhile, in a coordinated move, Hanan Porat was meeting with Defense Minister Peres in Tel Aviv to convince him to allow Yehudah’s work detail to remain in the abandoned camp. “Look, Shimon,” said Hanan, “you can’t deny the spirit behind our repeated attempts to settle in Samaria. You have to allow this spirit some outlet, some positive expression. Otherwise there will be a very hard confrontation. Allowing the creation of a work camp could bring a certain calm. And what are we talking about? Some people working at an army base and then sleeping over.”
Hanan of course wasn’t threatening. All he was saying was that unless Peres conceded, matters could get out of hand.
Peres said, “If you say that you want a work camp and it isn’t recognized as a settlement, I’m ready to issue instructions not to remove you. But we won’t subsidize this, and we aren’t committing ourselves to anything aside from basic security.”
Peres must have understood the subterfuge, that what began as a daily work detail was now about to become permanent. Was Peres allowing himself to be duped because he supported settling the site? Or was he acting cynically, to embarrass his political rival, Rabin? Cynicism would not have been out of character for Shimon Peres. Unlike Rabin and Dayan and other leading Labor politicians of his generation, Peres was not a war hero but a bureaucrat. Though responsible for some of Israel’s greatest military achievements—arming the IDF in 1948 and negotiating Israel’s nuclear reactor with the French in the early 1960s—he hadn’t served in the army. Rabin despised him as a schemer.
Hanan agreed to Peres’s conditions. Without government deliberation, without word reaching the media, the first settlement in Samaria had just been established.
“THE BA’AL HATZOR Work Camp,” read the sign. Twenty-five kilometers north of Jerusalem, eight kilometers northeast of Ramallah. Two dozen young people, three of them women, settled in. Hanan temporarily joined them, to supervise the transformation of an abandoned military camp into a settlement, just as he had done in Kfar Etzion.
Hanan objected to calling the embryonic settlement Ba’al Hatzor, after a Canaanite deity. Instead he suggested Ofra, after an ancient Israelite town in the area cited in the book of Joshua.
Supporters appeared with spring beds and chemical toilets and a small generator that kept breaking down. Teenagers from Bnei Akiva painted the barracks and plastered holes where pipes had been ripped out by pillagers. A truck arrived with cement blocks. A farmer on his tractor appeared every afternoon to help clear fields. When settlers offered to reimburse him for gasoline, he replied, “Hevreh, don�
��t embarrass me.”
Ofra’s first family, a couple and a baby, arrived toward the end of the first week, close to midnight. They were given their own barracks. Two dozen young people crowded into the room, lit by kerosene lamp. Accompanied by a guitar, young men danced in a circle, their shadows on the newly painted walls.
Supporters came from around the country to celebrate the first Shabbat in Ofra.
Barely an hour before the beginning of Shabbat, Yoel told Esther, “I can’t keep away.” Esther and Yoel had long ago resolved never to spend Shabbat apart, and aside from Yoel’s reserve duty, they’d maintained their vow. Reluctantly, Esther agreed to join him.
The Bin-Nuns packed up their three children and got a ride with a student of Yoel’s. They reached Ofra with sundown.
The young people, mostly singles, crowded around long tables for the Friday-night meal, kibbutz-style. The singing went on for hours. Despite herself, Esther was charmed: here was the authentic face of Zionism, a youth movement atmosphere of purity, truth. These young people weren’t singing for the television cameras, but to celebrate being together in the land of Israel. This is how it must have been, she thought, when her parents settled the Etzion Bloc in the 1940s, singing against the darkness.
“If the government agrees to turn this into a settlement,” she told Yoel, “I could see living here.”
A WEDDING IN RAMLE PRISON
“LET’S GET MARRIED,” said Sylvia Klingberg, sitting across the metal grille from Udi Adiv.
“Married?” said Udi, trying to hide his surprise.
“It makes sense,” insisted Sylvia. “It will be easier for me to get permission to visit. And for you to ask for a pardon.”
“If you’re ready to do it,” said Udi, “then okay.”
AS HE APPROACHED Ramle Prison, Dr. Marcus Klingberg, Sylvia’s father, was horrified to encounter a crowd of journalists, including a TV news crew filming guests arriving for the wedding. Klingberg was the deputy director of Israel’s top-secret biological weapons facility; what would his colleagues think when they saw him on the news? They might even suspect him of being a traitor like his new son-in-law.
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