Twenty awkward celebrants gathered. Among them was a Matzpen activist who had once been a student in the Mercaz yeshiva. There were, it seemed, almost as many prison guards as guests. The warden came by to offer good wishes. Udi’s parents brought cookies and soft drinks from the kibbutz dining room. Sylvia’s father brought cognac.
They were a handsome couple: Sylvia, with long black hair and a stylish dress; Udi, tall and slender, with close-cropped hair. He’d been allowed to exchange his brown prison uniform for a white shirt and jeans, his first civilian clothes since his arrest. He tried to smile for the camera.
Udi’s father and younger brother, Asaf, held up a prayer shawl over the couple, while the prison rabbi, in black fedora and long gray beard, rushed through the blessings. Udi smiled, bemused or perhaps embarrassed. Then he smashed a glass, in mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem.
There would be no consummation. Udi had appealed to the courts for a furlough, but the judge had turned him down. It was dangerous to release Udi Adiv for even one minute, he’d said.
Udi and Sylvia were given exactly two minutes alone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and hugged her.
ZIONISM AVENUE
OFRA QUIETLY TOOK ROOT. Meanwhile Gush Emunim’s public campaign to settle in Samaria, the northern West Bank, focused on a valley near Nablus known as Sebastia, the name of a Roman-era city and now of a nearby Arab village.
Gush Emunim was drawn to the area because it had been home to the capital of the northern Israelite kingdom, destroyed by Assyria in the eighth century BCE. There, around an abandoned Ottoman-era railway station, Gush activists repeatedly pitched their tents, only to be forcibly evacuated by the army. Each thwarted attempt brought a stronger one. Thousands hiked toward Sebastia. A couple was married there. During one evacuation a bearded protester was photographed carrying a Torah scroll as soldiers led him away. Israelis shuddered at that image: the young man was the soldier who had been photographed during the Yom Kippur War at the Suez Canal, carrying a Torah scroll as he was led into captivity.
So far the Rabin government had managed to block Gush Emunim’s attempt to turn Sebastia into the breakthrough point for settlement in the northern West Bank. Frustration among Gush activists was growing. If we don’t achieve a more tangible victory than a fictitious work camp in Ofra, they said, the movement will lose its momentum, its chance to change history.
AND THEN, UNEXPECTEDLY, Gush Emunim received a gift.
On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly voted, 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, to declare Zionism a form of racism. The resolution, initiated by Arab nations and endorsed by the Soviet and Muslim blocs, was the culminating moment of the growing Arab success, impelled by the oil boycott, to isolate Israel. Sitting in solemn assembly, the UN in effect declared that, of all the world’s national movements, only Zionism—whose factions ranged from Marxist to capitalist, expansionist to conciliatory, clericalist to ultrasecular—was by its very nature evil. The state of the Jews, the Israeli political philosopher J. L. Talmon noted bitterly, had become the Jew of the states.
Addressing the General Assembly, Israel’s UN ambassador, Chaim Herzog, noted that the resolution had been passed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the Nazi pogrom that in effect began the Holocaust. The attempt to destroy the Jews, said Herzog, was always preceded by the attempt to delegitimize them. Then he ripped up a copy of the resolution.
For all Herzog’s resoluteness, the secular Zionism he represented was mortally threatened by the UN resolution. Zionism had promised to cure anti-Semitism by demythologizing the Jews, transforming them into a nation like all other nations. The reason for anti-Semitism, wrote one nineteenth-century Zionist theoretician, was that the Jews, a disembodied people without a land, were “haunting” the nations; anti-Semitism, he concluded, was a fear of ghosts. Give the Jews a state—a flag and postage stamps and marching bands—and they would become concretized, demystified. Normal. Zionism had been the Jews’ last desperate strategy for collective acceptance among the nations. And now that strategy had failed. Zionism had been turned against itself: the very means for freeing the Jews from the ghetto had become the pretext for their renewed ghettoization.
Only Gush Emunim had a ready explanation for why this was happening. It was an old Jewish answer, and it first appeared in the Bible: “Lo it is a nation that shall dwell alone and not be reckoned among the nations.” Not that Hanan and Yoel and their friends welcomed Israel’s isolation. But it hardly fazed them. Goyim were acting like goyim; now Jews needed to act like Jews, embrace their unavoidable uniqueness and fulfill their redemptive destiny, the world be damned. Increased settlement in all parts of the land is the only answer to the UN resolution, Gush Emunim declared. And many Israelis now agreed.
Gush Emunim announced plans for yet another gathering in Sebastia, this time on Hanukkah, at the end of November. It quoted the book of the Macabees: “We have neither taken other men’s land, nor possessed that which belongs to others, but the inheritance of our fathers.”
TEN DAYS AFTER THE UN VOTE, on the night of November 20, terrorists crossed from Syria into the Golan Heights and entered a yeshiva in the settlement of Ramat Magshimim. The terrorists were drawn to a light in a dorm room. They broke in and opened fire, killing three students. Two of them were from the Mount Etzion yeshiva—students of Yoel Bin-Nun—who happened to be visiting friends.
Yoel was a teacher of soldiers; burying students was part of the job. But these boys had been gunned down, helpless. No way for Jewish soldiers to die in the land of Israel.
The people of Israel, thought Yoel, needed an infusion of strength. And Hanukkah was an auspicious time. The upcoming protest in Sebastia would be the eighth attempt to settle in Samaria since Hawara, and that too was auspicious: Hanukkah commemorates the small vial of oil that defied natural law and burned in the Temple for eight nights. Eight was a number for miracles.
THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 30, the second day of Hanukkah, was bright and cold. Despite forecasts of heavy rain, several thousand people met at rendezvous points near the old West Bank border. They were Orthodox families with young children, Bnei Akiva girls in long skirts, and Bnei Akiva boys with white ritual fringes hanging down their jeans. They carried sleeping bags and knapsacks, filled with a change of clothes and sandwiches and menorahs to light the hills of Samaria.
They set out in cars and vans and buses. The slow procession came to an army roadblock. Protesters left their vehicles. Led by guides, they began walking east toward Sebastia, a day’s distance by foot.
In the sun and wind marchers sang Hanukkah songs celebrating the courage of the few against the many. The UN, the media, the left, their own government, everyone was against them—but what did that matter? They were the children of the Macabees.
Walking at the head of the line was Naomi Shemer, composer of “Jerusalem of Gold.”
Shortly after nightfall, the first trekkers reached a valley near the Palestinian village of Ramin. Four kilometers and one final hill separated them from the valley of Sebastia. Guides decided not to risk the slippery slopes in the darkness. Marchers unrolled sleeping bags beneath a cloudy sky and prepared to spend the night. They laid menorahs on rocks and lit candles in the strong wind, trying to protect the flames with their bodies. “We kindle these lights,” they sang, “to recall the redemptive acts, miracles and wonders which You performed for our forefathers, in those days, at this time.”
Then came the rain. Thundering, flashing. Hikers huddled beneath spread sleeping bags, but the rain penetrated. Nothing to do but wait out the night.
The government rejected a request from Gush leaders to open the roadblocks and allow them to bring food to the valley. They sent a taunting telegram to the cabinet: “Were your hearts moved more by the [Egyptian] Third Army than by your own citizens?”—referring to the previous government’s acquiescence to American pressure to allow supplies to reach trapped Egyptian soldiers.
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br /> In the uncertain dawn, drenched protesters began arriving in Sebastia. The valley had turned to mud. Each new group was greeted by singing and dancing. The unstoppable force of those who felt as if they had personally waited through two thousand years of exile for this moment.
The rain continued, and most protesters soon left by buses provided by the army. But several hundred remained. And though Sebastia was declared a closed military zone, hundreds more continued to come.
The abandoned railway station was transformed into a kitchen, dispensing soup and sandwiches. Activists driving on the old train tracks smuggled in tents, and a camp rose around the small lake the rains had formed in the center of the valley. Zionism Avenue, read a makeshift sign, a response to the UN.
Though it had acted resolutely against previous attempts to settle Sebastia, this time the government hesitated. Jewish leaders from around the world were gathering in Jerusalem for a solidarity conference in response to the Zionism = racism resolution, and the government didn’t want to mar the event with an ugly confrontation. By the third day of the protest, government officials were telling the press that the evacuation would be deferred until the following week. “The hand of God,” said Yoel Bin-Nun.
In the freshly painted basement of the railway station, Gush leaders sat around a table, arguing strategy. The low-roofed, windowless room, barely two by four meters and dimly lit by a generator, was heavy with the dust of a half century of neglect. Under no circumstances do we voluntarily leave, said Rabbi Levinger. To Yoel, Levinger’s words sounded like a threat of blood.
Fearing civil war, Yoel circulated among the soldiers, wishing them a joyful Hanukkah. He approached General Yona Efrat, commander of the central front, who had assured Rabbi Zvi Yehudah during the Hawara evacuation that the IDF didn’t shoot Jews. “You’re making a big mistake,” Efrat told Yoel. “Instead of fighting the government over Samaria, you should be settling those areas like the Jordan Valley where there is consensus.”
THE RAINS STOPPED. All through the week protesters came and went. Some hiked through fields of Palestinian farmers, trampling crops that got in their way.
Young people toured the nearby ruins of ancient Samaria, remnants of the eighth-century BCE palace of the kings of Israel and a kilometer-long avenue of pillars from Herodian times. Here is your past and your future, Sebastia seemed to say; the time has come to turn these ruins back into thriving communities.
Sympathetic kibbutzniks brought an oak sapling to plant in the makeshift settlement. “If heaven forbid they evacuate you,” one said, “take the oak with you so that it won’t be left here alone.”
Several thousand demonstrators spent Shabbat in Sebastia. General Efrat brought his family. He blessed the wine, and soldiers and squatters shared a meal. Yoel calmed; there would be no fratricide here.
YISRAEL HAREL WAS in bed with a sprained back.
He tried to be helpful by phoning his friend, the IDF chief of staff, Motta Gur. “You know us, Motta,” he said. “You know we’re serious and responsible. But we can’t control everyone in the field. Tell Rabin not to involve the army in an evacuation. Don’t let it become violent.”
In fact Motta had already told an outraged Rabin that the IDF shouldn’t be employed for political ends like evacuating protesters. Nor did Motta conceal his sympathy for the would-be settlers. “My soldiers,” he called them. He meant Yisrael, Hanan, and Yoel.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 7. A helicopter landed in Sebastia, and out stepped Defense Minister Peres.
Young people danced in welcome, convinced he’d come to announce the government’s capitulation. But Peres didn’t come with an offer. Instead, he told the Gush leaders in the basement that if the squatters didn’t leave Sebastia within twenty-four hours, they would be forcibly removed.
Levinger tore his shirt in mourning. What a showman, thought Yoel with disgust. Levinger ran out of the room. Hundreds of protesters gathered around him. “Hurban!”—Destruction!—he shouted. “Tear your clothes! This is a day of mourning!”
Hanan followed Levinger outside. Among the angry young men in kippot and hooded coats, Hanan spotted a middle-aged, bareheaded man holding an unlit pipe—the poet Haim Gouri, who was writing a series of reports on Sebastia for the Labor Party daily, Davar.
Gouri was both moved and frightened by Sebastia. The schism between left and right, he said, was being fought in his soul. He had been a founder of the Movement for the Complete Land of Israel and loved the purity and self-sacrifice of these young religious people. But he feared their contempt for government authority, their willingness to tempt civil war. He believed that the land of Israel belonged in its small entirety to the people of Israel, that the Jewish claim to Judea and Samaria—the root of Jewish being, won in a defensive war—was as powerful as any people’s claim to any land. But he was tormented by the Palestinian villagers watching the would-be settlers move toward Sebastia, felt the immovable force of their competing claim.
“Why don’t you come inside and see what you can do?” Hanan said to him.
Gouri followed Hanan into the station. No one thought it odd that Israel’s most intense political struggle was about to be mediated by a poet. Gouri suggested that a small group of squatters relocate onto a nearby army base, while the government then debated the next step—similar to the compromise that Rabin had suggested at Hawara. Peres didn’t reject the proposal. The Gush leaders said they would consider it.
As Hanan and his friends debated in the basement, their followers gathered around bonfires against a bitter wind, awaiting a decision.
What was the point, insisted Levinger, of accepting a compromise that we rejected at Hawara and which Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had so adamantly opposed? “We must resist with full force,” he said.
“Reb Moishe,” said Hanan, affectionately addressing Levinger, “if we don’t accept the compromise, the government will use all its force against us. God forbid, God forbid, there can be a disaster here. And we won’t achieve anything.”
“Don’t push the government into a corner,” pleaded Yoel. “We can’t risk another Altalena”—the Irgun munitions ship that Ben-Gurion ordered sunk off the coast of Tel Aviv in 1948, as close to civil war as the Zionist movement ever got. “If our struggle is defeated, there will be no chance of resurrecting it.”
As for the compromise, added Hanan, “we will turn it into a victory in the perception of the public. And once we’re settled in the area, we’ll know how to expand our presence.”
A majority of the executive voted to accept the compromise.
The next morning a four-man delegation drove to Peres’s office in Tel Aviv. One of the Gush leaders came barefoot.
Peres suggested moving thirty settlers to the army base. “Make it thirty families,” said Hanan. Peres agreed; why nitpick? He has no idea, thought Hanan, what a difference there is between thirty Orthodox individuals and thirty Orthodox families.
Peres left the office, phoned Rabin, and finalized the deal. When he returned, he cautioned the delegation that this was an interim agreement, that the cabinet would reevaluate its status in three months and decide the settlers’ fate. Then an aide brought brandy and shot glasses.
Until that moment, the Rabin government had managed to resist the pressures of Gush Emunim. But something in the government’s resolve had been broken. The UN had conspired with Gush Emunim to defeat the Zionism of normalization. Symbolically if not intentionally, the Labor government was yielding to Hanan’s Zionism of destiny.
Back in the car Hanan told his friends, “We have to present this as a great victory, to raise morale. We have to declare before the world that the government has permitted a Jewish settlement in Samaria.” In fact, the government had agreed only to allow thirty families to move to an army base near Sebastia. But that was not how the compromise would be announced.
Unknown to Hanan, an emissary of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had meanwhile appeared in Sebastia, with a message from the rabbi: No compromise. Yoel, who h
adn’t joined the delegation to Peres, was horrified. Would Rabbi Zvi Yehudah sabotage the agreement, just as he had at Hawara? And at what price?
Back in Sebastia, Hanan rejected the ultimatum. “It’s too late,” he said. Even Levinger agreed, warning against humiliating “the Kingdom,” as Kookians referred to the government of Israel. The nine-day confrontation was over.
Levinger announced through a megaphone: the government of Israel has agreed to establish a settlement in Samaria.
Holding each other’s shoulders, the young men danced. Yoel stood to the side and watched. He didn’t like crowds. And he mistrusted ecstasy. He felt relief—they had avoided another Altalena. But no joy. This outcome could have been achieved at Hawara, without the confrontations of the last year and a half. And all because of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. How could the man who once spoke prophecy be so wrong now?
Hanan was raised above the crowds. “Am Yisrael chai!”—The people of Israel live!—the young men sang. Hanan closed his eyes, smiled. Jacket open against the wind, arms spread wide, embracing the land.
THE LAW OF EXILE
A MONTH AFTER the terrorist attack on the Golan Heights, the Mount Etzion yeshiva held a memorial for its two fallen students. Several hundred mourners filled the dining room, the largest space in the yeshiva. Rabbi Yehudah Amital eulogized one of the young men: “His long day began with prayers at dawn and continued [with Torah study] into the late hours of the night.”
Afterward, the young men returned to the study hall. One student, Yitzhak Lavi, approached Yoel and suggested a drill. If terrorists could strike in a yeshiva in the Golan, then why not here? Only recently there had been an army alert.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 35