When the camp ended, several members of the executive complained about the spartan conditions. Why don’t we give the kids a good time instead of subjecting them to boot camp? Why not take them, say, to an amusement park?
Yisrael was outraged. What made the camp special was precisely its ability to impart the Zionist values that the children’s fathers had sacrificed their lives to protect.
“We don’t want to spoil them,” Arik said, backing Yisrael. “They have to be prepared for life.”
“They already know about life,” someone countered. “What’s wrong with giving them some fun?”
These bourgeois lawyers, Yisrael seethed afterward to Arik. What were they trying to do, turn Israel into America?
“I also prefer the way we’ve done things until now,” Arik said. “But times are changing. Maybe it’s not our job to be educators.”
“That’s exactly our job,” countered Yisrael. “They’re ruining everything we built.”
“They’re our comrades, Srulik. Don’t treat them as enemies.”
Yisrael, in the minority, quit.
WEEKENDS, ARIK SKYDIVED. To clear my head, he explained.
Arik had begun to skydive on a dare. One day in 1972, two young South African Jews on motorcycles showed up at his office. They had founded a skydiving club in Johannesburg, they explained, and wanted to do the same in Israel. But the IDF had vetoed the idea: the only parachutists in Israel’s skies, said the IDF, would be in red boots.
Arik made the right calls, and together with his two investors, founded Israel’s first skydiving club. “Of course you’re too old to jump,” one of the partners told him. “Oh, really?” said Arik, who since then had skydived over a hundred times.
One Friday afternoon, Yisrael accompanied Arik to the skydiving club, located near Kibbutz Ein Shemer, to photograph him for a newspaper essay. They went up together in a Piper Cherokee. Yisrael stood at the door and shot as Arik jumped. Arms spread wide, alert to the effect of the slightest move of a limb, a turn of the head, plunging at the speed of 260 kilometers an hour, he began to slowly count, savoring his discipline even as the world seemed to spin out of control. When he reached 35, he tugged open the chute.
Afterward Yisrael gave his friend a gift: a photo album with pictures of Arik conquering the skies.
OFRA, SUMMER 1976
“YOEL, WE NEED YOU,” said Yehudah Etzion. He wanted a spiritual teacher for Ofra, someone who would make explicit the connection between the daily newspaper and the weekly Torah portion. Not an official rabbi—Ofra seemed adamant on that point—but a guide for the community’s religious and moral and political dilemmas.
Ever since the shooting death of Yitzhak Lavi, Yoel had wanted to exile himself from his home. Now Yehudah was offering him the chance.
“We will need a bathtub for the children and a way to install a washing machine,” said Yoel.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Yehudah.
FROM RELATIVES AND FRIENDS, Yisrael Harel faced incredulity. Yes, of course idealism is admirable, they said, but this time you’ve gone too far. “What are you looking for in the wilderness?” Sarah’s father demanded.
Yisrael’s editor at Ma’ariv summoned him. “We can’t have one of our senior people living in an illegal settlement,” the editor said. “It will reflect badly on the paper.”
When Yisrael didn’t respond, the editor continued, “You’re going to have to choose between Ofra and your job.”
Yisrael returned to his cubicle, phoned an editor he knew at a rival daily, and quit.
IN AUGUST 1976, shortly before the beginning of the school year, a dozen families, including the Harels and the Bin-Nuns, moved to Ofra. Each family was given a barracks, divided by a curtain into a parents’ bedroom and a children’s bedroom. The floors were rough concrete. But there were now indoor bathrooms and kitchen sinks.
Yoel and Yisrael’s lives had converged at crucial moments—Bnei Akiva in Haifa of the 1950s, the paratroopers in the orchards of May 1967. But they had never been intimate. They had naturally gravitated to different parts of the settlement movement—Yoel to the messianists of Gush Emunim, Yisrael to the secularists of the Movement for the Complete Land of Israel. Yoel’s knitted kippah covered most of his head; Yisrael’s smaller knitted kippah was a badge of loyalty more than faith.
Now Yoel and Yisrael were neighbors; their children would grow up together. For both men, a shared goal was the only worthy reason for friendship. There was no place for trivial ambitions, for mere conversation. When matters of pride and hurt arose, those were given ideological justification. There would be no easy friendship between them.
On their first Shabbat in Ofra’s prefab synagogue—the first building constructed by the settlers—Yoel and Yisrael were called up to bless the Torah. When each finished reciting his blessing, the congregation responded with the same joyful song, based on the words of Jeremiah, “V’shavu banim l’gvulam”—and the sons shall return to their borders.
AVITAL GEVA CELEBRATES A JUBILEE
IN KIBBUTZ EIN SHEMER they debated the delicate line between a growing restlessness among members and the need to preserve collectivist principles. Should parents be allowed to visit their babies and toddlers outside the allotted forty-five minutes a day? (Yes, provided they don’t disturb the “educational order.”) Should members be allowed to travel abroad if the ticket is a gift from a family member? (Yes, but then you forfeit your turn to a kibbutz-paid trip abroad for the next fifteen-year cycle.) Should the kibbutz pay the government television tax for televisions purchased privately by members? (No, but the kibbutz will buy fifty TVs.)
EIN SHEMER WAS preparing for its jubilee celebration. Avital joined the planning committee. The projects were predictable—a pageant, a sports day, a symposium on the future of the kibbutz. “Why don’t we do something different?” Avital suggested.
“What do you have in mind?” someone asked warily.
“Building a greenhouse and growing tomatoes,” he said.
The members were confused. “You’ve always been in the orchards,” one noted. “What do you know about growing tomatoes?”
“Nothing! But I’ll learn. This will be my gift to Ein Shemer for the jubilee. Every family will be given a plot, as big as they want, to grow tomatoes. It will bring the kibbutz together. What better way to celebrate the jubilee than by strengthening our togetherness?”
Avital approached Avishai Grossman, Ein Shemer’s secretary general. There was a discarded chicken coop near the rubber factory, in the center of the kibbutz; why not let Avital turn it into a greenhouse?
Though Avishai wasn’t much older than Avital, the kibbutz official regarded him as one would a mischievous child, with affection and exasperation. Avishai had never understood what Avital was trying to say with all his artistic provocations. What had been the point of painting the trees purple and dumping garbage on the high school lawn?
Still, Avishai could see nothing wrong with the project Avital was now proposing. Besides, it was just for a year, right? Not even Avital could turn this into a scandal.
EVENINGS, AVITAL’S FRIENDS helped him transform the chicken coop into a greenhouse. They removed the cages, spread plastic walls, and replaced the asbestos roof with plastic just before the first rains came. But how to make the dead earth, gray from two decades of neglect and compacted chicken droppings, come alive again? Avital took a sample of soil to a laboratory and was told: Impossible, you won’t be able to grow anything in this.
Avital began intensively watering the ground. Then he ordered fresh soil—hamra, rich and red—and lay it over the ground. “Look at this delicious earth!” Avital said. “Ya Allah, you can eat it!”
Dozens of families signed up. “Each according to appetite,” Avital said, encouraging families to claim as much space as they wanted within the one-dunam greenhouse. Kibbutzniks came straight from work, exchanging insights on their budding plants as rain and wind shook the plastic walls. For Avital, the
tomatoes were just a pretext for a happening, a useful work of conceptual art—a reminder to his friends of the joy of communal life.
YISRAEL HAREL’S VINDICATION
SHORTLY AFTER THE HARELS moved to the wilderness, Arik and Yehudit Achmon drove to see them. “I can’t help being interested in what’s happening there,” Arik told Yehudit. “You can’t keep away,” she said, though she too was curious to glimpse this unexpected turn in the saga of pioneering Zionism.
Smiling broadly, Yisrael introduced Arik to his neighbors as “my commander and friend.” Then, still smiling, he brought his guests into his thirty meters of home. Yehudit thought of her father, living in a tent in Mishmar Ha’Emek.
In Arik’s grading system, Yisrael had just moved up the scale from a mere tarbutnik, culture officer, to magshim, a pioneer who fulfills his highest ideals.
“Srulik?” said Arik, his intonation a slight questioning, as if seeing Yisrael for the first time. “Kol hakavod”—well done.
Yisrael had waited his whole life for this moment of vindication.
Deeply moved, he said, “You, Arik, are one of the people I most respect. I know how to recognize people of quality.”
For the first time in their relationship, Arik regarded Yisrael as an equal. In one sense, more than an equal: even if Arik had agreed with the settlers ideologically, he wouldn’t bring his family here. In that respect, Srulik has surpassed me.
Chapter 19
A NEW ISRAEL
REVOLT OF THE JEWS
AVITAL GEVA HAD a deep foreboding about this day. It was May 17, 1977, Israel’s ninth national election day, and the Labor Party, which had never lost an election, was fighting its toughest contest. Corruption charges against leading party figures were accumulating; under suspicion, the housing minister, Avraham Ofer, committed suicide. Then, weeks before the election, Prime Minister Rabin abruptly resigned, following the revelation that his wife, Leah, maintained an illegal dollar account—all of $20,000—in the United States. Shimon Peres, the unloved technocrat, was hastily nominated to replace him. Meanwhile a new reformist party, the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC), was cutting into Labor’s middle-class Ashkenazi base, strengthening the right-wing Likud. Even Arik Achmon, son of Labor Zionism, was planning to vote for the DMC.
On Kibbutz Ein Shemer, the old-timers reassured each other: Of course we’ve made mistakes, maybe we even deserve to lose some of our power; but the country won’t commit suicide, the people of Israel know there is no Zionism without Labor at its head.
Avital spent the day with his young people, handing out Labor leaflets at polling stations. When the stations closed, he went to watch the election results with them at the high school dormitory, in the bomb shelter that also functioned as the TV room.
On the screen was Israel TV’s news anchor Haim Yavin, who wore a tie in a country where even the prime minister often didn’t. Israel Television, he announced, was making the following projection: the Likud—“not more and not less”—has won.
Impossible, thought Avital, though he’d anticipated precisely this result. Menachem Begin, that hysterical little man who despised socialism and spoke about the Holocaust as if it were still happening and who promised to fill the West Bank with Jews—prime minister of the state of Israel? Begin, Avital believed, would destroy Israeli democracy, drag the country into war.
The anxious young faces around Avital reflected his own fear. He tried to comfort them: “Hevreh, don’t worry, eventually the wheel will turn again.”
But to himself he said, This is the destruction of the Temple—
“THE COMMANDER OF HISTORY has spoken,” Yoel Bin-Nun declared to Esther, invoking his most cherished description of God. They were watching Haim Yavin in their tiny salon, which also functioned as their bedroom and Yoel’s study.
From outside Yoel heard cries of “Mazal tov!” Settlement building throughout Judea and Samaria would now become official policy. Labor, thought Yoel, deserved to be defeated, the arrogant humbled. This was historic justice for all those whose dignity Mapai had trampled.
But he felt no joy at Labor’s defeat. If not for Labor, there would be no Jewish state. Though most Labor leaders opposed the settlement efforts of Yoel and his friends, Labor knew what it meant to settle and build. They understood the settlers’ passion, even when they disagreed with them.
Yoel mistrusted the Likud. Begin had never been a pioneer, hadn’t worked the land, regarded settlements as abstract points on a security map. However paradoxical it seemed, Yoel could imagine the Likud withdrawing from settlements sooner than Labor.
One of the veteran ideologues of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, appeared on screen. The majority has spoken, Mr. Ben-Aharon, the interviewer said. “If this is the people’s decision,” replied Ben-Aharon, “I’m not prepared to respect it.” As if a law of nature had been violated.
So much for the left’s democratic values, thought Yoel. Tonight Israel has finally become a real democracy.
WEARING A KIPPAH, Menachem Begin went to the Western Wall, placed a note in a crack, and recited a blessing of gratitude.
Finally, thought Yisrael Harel: an Israeli prime minister who honors Judaism. Who could imagine Rabin, or for that matter Ben-Gurion, praying at the Wall? Labor leaders were ingrates toward the very force that had preserved the Jews as a people and inspired their return to Zion. Now the Jewish state would make its peace with Judaism.
Begin, the first Holocaust survivor to become prime minister, had been brought to power by a new coalition—a revolt of all those who saw themselves as Jews first, Israelis second, like Sephardim and religious Zionists.
This coalition of outcasts from the Labor Zionist ideal of “real Israeliness” was presided over by Zionism’s ultimate outcast. While most of the Labor movement had accepted the UN’s 1947 plan partitioning the land into a Palestinian and a Jewish state, Begin’s right-wing “Revisionists” had been bitterly opposed. As leader of the Irgun underground, Begin had been hunted not only by the British but by Labor Zionists, who feared that his anti-British violence would endanger the chances for a Jewish state.
In the most bitter accusation of all, Revisionists blamed Labor leaders for failing to seriously attempt to rescue the Jews of Europe. This much was unarguable: more than any Zionist leader, Begin’s revered precursor, Zeev Jabotinsky, had tried to warn them. Flee the coming storm, he pleaded through the 1930s in Warsaw and Riga. And learn to shoot. Don’t be the only people—you of all peoples!—that doesn’t know how to protect itself.
Jabotinsky died in 1940, of heart failure, unable to save his people. But now his disciple, Menachem Begin, would protect the remnant, give the Jews the gift of secure and defensible borders. The most bitter schism in Zionist history was about to merge with the schism over the future of the territories.
Pressing a Torah scroll to his chest, Begin danced with settlers living in the army camp near Sebastia. There will be many more settlements, he promised.
Prime Minister Begin’s first official act was to admit into Israel sixty-six Vietnamese boat people who had escaped the Communist regime and been denied entry across Asia. Their plight, he explained, reminded him of Jewish refugees from Nazism who had been turned away by every country, with only the sea to claim them.
THE ATMOSPHERE ON Ein Shemer seemed to Avital like a funeral—a funeral for the Israel they had helped create, and which, for all its flaws, had tried to keep faith with its highest aspirations. Some kibbutzniks could barely speak.
More than grief, more than fear, Avital felt anger—against his own camp, for ignoring the reasons for its electoral failure. He vented in Ein Shemer’s newsletter: “Several weeks have passed since the elections . . . but we haven’t heard one bit of self-criticism.” To our shame, he continued, it was successive Labor governments that presided over the destruction of Zionist ideals, allowing the pursuit of wealth to become the new Israeli ideal. “The spirit of pioneering and volunteering has disappeared. We need to chan
ge this reality.”
In the late afternoon, when his friends had finished work and patches of shade eased the late June sun, Avital paced in the orchards. Was he ready to detach from the art world and devote himself to renewing the kibbutz? Was he ready to help restore social justice to the Zionist dream? He had no clear vision, no plan, only the trust, almost religious, that his intuition would lead him to his place of truth.
HANAN PORAT INSTRUCTS THE PRIME MINISTER
FOR GUSH EMUNIM, it was the summer of extravagant dreams. Hanan presented Prime Minister Begin with a plan for the immediate creation of twelve new settlements, and spoke of settling the territories with a million, two million Jews. It felt to him like a kind of jubilee, a renewal of pioneering Zionism.
Begin declared Ofra a legal community, ending its limbo status. Several dozen families moved into mobile homes, and blueprints were drawn for permanent housing.
But as autumn approached, there was growing anxiety within Gush Emunim about Begin’s resolve. Under pressure from the Americans, he hadn’t actually founded any new settlements. What was he waiting for? “You can’t trust the Likud,” Yoel warned Hanan. “They would uproot settlements for a peace agreement.”
A few days before Rosh Hashanah, Begin invited Hanan for a talk.
Speaking in his formal Hebrew, Begin acknowledged that American pressure was preventing him from founding new settlements. But, he continued, there was nothing stopping Hanan and his friends from acting without government permission. And then, Begin added, he would simply tell the Americans that he was outmaneuvered.
Hanan was appalled. Menachem Begin, the hero who expelled the British and carried the hope of restoring the wholeness of the land through decades in the opposition—acting like a ghetto Jew trying to appease the prince?
“As a man of honor,” said Hanan, “you cannot agree to these kinds of tactics.”
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