At their next meeting Begin acknowledged that Hanan had been right: there was no way to build settlements except under the auspices of the state. Given current political realities, Begin concluded, settlements would have to wait.
Redemption will not come from here, thought Hanan. The problem wasn’t Labor Zionism but secular Zionism. Even Begin had lost his fire. It was now up to the camp of believers to lead the nation.
WHY NOT NOW?
BEN-GURION AIRPORT, 8:00 p.m., November 19, 1977.
The Boeing 737 landed, the door opened, and out stepped Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat. Slight, bald, mustached, he smiled and waved, pleased with the sensation he had caused. Prime Minister Begin stood at the foot of the stairs, erect as the soldiers in the honor guard. Behind him stood members of the Israeli cabinet.
How is this possible? wondered Avital Geva, watching the event live on TV. Begin—fascist, terrorist—had managed what no Labor leader had been able to do, bring an Arab leader to Israel on a public mission of peace. Did this mean that only the Likud, with its doctrine of strength, could reconcile with the Arab world? For the second time in recent months, Avital felt his most basic assumptions about Israel inverted.
Sadat passed the row of cabinet ministers and paused before Ariel Sharon. “Aha, here you are!” Sadat said in English. “I tried to chase you in the desert. If you try to cross my canal again I’ll have to lock you up.”
“No need for that,” said Sharon, laughing. “I am glad to have you here. I’m minister of agriculture now.”
So this is how it ends, thought Avital. He recalled that surreal moment when his men had mingled with Egyptian soldiers in Suez City, and enemies shook hands and even embraced. In this crazy Middle East, anything could happen, even a sudden outbreak of peace.
The next day, Sadat addressed a hushed Israeli parliament, its raucous debates deferred now to awe. He declared the words that Israelis had waited a generation to hear from an Arab leader: “In all sincerity I tell you: We welcome you among us with full security and safety.”
Sadat proceeded to insist that Israel withdraw from all the territories it had won in 1967. Sadat understood: for all of Israel’s power, the Arab world held the psychological advantage. To convince Israelis to yield territory, they had to first be convinced they would get real peace in return. The only pressure Israelis couldn’t resist was an embrace.
Wherever Sadat went, he was met by welcoming crowds. Peace songs played on the radio. An artist mounted billboards bearing the words Drishat shalom—the colloquial term for “regards” but literally meaning, “demand for peace.”
At a reception in the Knesset, former prime minister Golda Meir told Sadat in English, “It must go on, face-to-face between us and between you, so that even an old lady like I am will live to see the day—you always called me an old lady, Mr. President.” Sadat and Golda laughed together. It didn’t get any better than this: not merely a suspension of hostility but the embrace of enemies at the end of war.
HAVE THE JEWS GONE MAD? wondered Hanan Porat. Sadat attacks Israel on its holiest day, kills and wounds thousands of Jews, and the people of Israel treat his propaganda maneuver as if the Messiah has come. This was nothing more than an attempt to force Israel back to the 1967 borders so that the Arabs could try again to destroy it. What sane people would trade parts of its homeland like meat hanging in the market? And for what? Mere recognition of its right to exist, words that will evaporate when the last territories are evacuated.
“I warned you not to trust Begin,” Yoel said to Hanan.
In fact, it was not yet clear what Begin had committed to offering in exchange for Sadat’s visit. Some nine thousand Israelis lived in the farming communities of Sinai and in its new town, Yamit, built by the Rabin government. In Sinai’s emptiness Labor had seen the way to fulfill its policy of resisting a return to the vulnerable 1967 borders without incorporating large numbers of Arabs. Would a right-wing government really uproot settlements built by the left?
Begin reciprocated Sadat’s gesture with a visit to Ismailia, and an Egyptian honor guard welcomed the leader of the Israeli right. Israeli radio played a new hit song: “I was born into the dream / After thirty years I believe it’s coming.”
ARIK ACHMON HATED being taken for a fool. How could he have been so gullible? Everything the politicians and generals had claimed—that the Arabs only wanted to destroy Israel, that the conflict was insoluble: lies. Worse than lies: self-delusion. Even Arik had bought into the clichés. Sadat had reached out before the Yom Kippur War, there were hints of a truce that could have been expanded into negotiations, but Israeli leaders ignored his overtures. Now Sadat comes to Jerusalem, and the truth is exposed for all to see.
Arik’s conclusions were being debated by Israelis. Some said that if only Israel had withdrawn from the banks of the Suez Canal before the war—as Dayan had wanted to do but Golda did not—Sadat might have begun a peace process rather than a war process. Yet even some on the left acknowledged that Sadat had needed a military victory to bolster his credibility among Egyptians before his journey to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, the war continued to claim its victims. The IDF’s chief of staff during the Yom Kippur War, David “Dado” Elazar, died of a heart attack at age fifty-one, broken by the commission of inquiry that had turned him into the scapegoat for the war’s failures. Arik joined a memorial service at Tel Aviv University for Dado, whose calm under fire had helped win the war.
Arik ran into Yisrael Harel at the entrance to the hall. “Shalom, Arik,” Yisrael said, reaching out his hand.
Arik shook it without enthusiasm. “Generations to come will weep over what you are doing in the territories,” he said abruptly. “You will make peace impossible. You are bringing about the destruction of the Third Temple.”
Yisrael was silent. Finally he said, “Arik, I ask only one thing: that whatever disagreements exist between us won’t affect our friendship.”
“Of course, Srulik,” Arik replied, his tone softening. “What a question.”
AFTER THE LAST of Ein Shemer’s families had finished tending their tomato patches for the night, Avital Geva spread out a long strip of burlap and painted a slogan: “Peace Is Better Than the Complete Land of Israel.”
“Hevreh?” Avital said to the high school students assisting him, “we’re taking back the streets from Gush Emunim.”
They were preparing for a demonstration of a new peace movement that didn’t yet have a name. Avital was feeling desperate. The euphoria of the Sadat initiative had been replaced by mutual recrimination, prompted in part by renewed West Bank settlement building. Begin and Gush Emunim were working together again. However frustrated Hanan and his friends were by the slow pace of settlement—the settler population was growing by mere hundreds—embryonic communities were spreading. Some settlements were disguised as military outposts, implementing Begin’s initial suggestion to Hanan of settlement by subterfuge.
Avital and his kids had driven around the countryside, writing graffiti on walls and signposts announcing the coming demonstration. Only when two of his boys were arrested for vandalism did Avital stop.
On Saturday afternoon, April 1, 1978, Avital filled a kibbutz van with young people and drove to Tel Aviv, to the Square of the Kings of Israel, a concrete expanse ending in the ugly monolith that housed the municipality. They hung their banner from two lampposts and went to eat hummus.
Toward sundown, the square began to fill. Young couples with babies and dogs, three generations of kibbutzniks, teenagers in the blue work shirts of Labor Zionist youth movements—a gathering of the secular left-wing Ashkenazi tribe. Until May 1977, they had never thought of themselves as a tribe. The rest of the country was divided into tribes—religious Zionists and Sephardim and ultra-Orthodox and Arabs—while they were simply Israelis, the Israelis. But Begin’s rise had reduced them to one more tribe, reviled by other tribes as elitist and defeatist.
Now they were here to reclaim Zionism from th
e right. The slogans on their signs evoked the very elements championed by Gush Emunim—patriotism, security, resolve. “Zionist Values, Not Territory.” “Security, Not Settlements.” “Flexibility Requires Courage.” Onstage a banner read “Peace Now,” and that became the movement’s name.
“Forty thousand people!” an astonished voice announced from the podium. They had lost their national preeminence; they were losing their socialist passion. But there was a new cause to galvanize them. The camp that had built the state would bring it peace.
An elderly man across a police barricade shouted, “What do you want, to give everything away? The Jews don’t make war, the Arabs make war.” Many Israelis felt the same way: Did the Arabs have a peace movement pressing their leaders to compromise? Now, in addition to all the pressure directed against Israel, there would be pressure from within.
“We want peace more than we want Shilo,” a speaker said, referring to a new settlement near Ofra. A reservist in the army’s most elite commando unit told the crowd that soldiers had the right to fight for peace. There was no peace movement like this anywhere—led by those who had fought the last war and would, if necessary, fight the next one. A speaker appealed to Begin: “We know that no one is more concerned with achieving peace than you. All we ask is that you heed our voice, the voice that until now has been the silent majority, and that you not be captive of an extremist minority.” Who would have believed it, thought Avital. The left upholding Menachem Begin against the right.
Avital looked around and saw in this crowd his ideal Israel. Strangers smiled at each other’s children, said “Excuse me” when they wanted to pass rather than elbow their way through. Where else could you bring together so many Israelis, that edgy people always on the verge of annihilation or redemption, and produce such an orderly and good-natured crowd? The sane Israel that wanted nothing more than to live, that knew that historical rights were not absolute and that only security needs, not biblical longings, could justify occupation, and that Israel’s ability to win the next war depended on knowing it did everything it could to bring peace.
“SONG OF PAIN”
YOAV KUTNER, LATE-NIGHT DJ on Army Radio, was ecstatic. Finally: an Israeli album worthy of Dylan himself.
Meir Ariel’s new album—his first since Jerusalem of Iron a decade earlier—was called Shirei Hag u’Moed v’Nofel, Songs of Holidays and Festivals and Falling. Holiday and festival songs evoked the kibbutz tradition of group singing. But the seemingly incongruous word falling suggested another, darker meaning, revealing a typical Meir wordplay: Songs of Spinning, Losing Balance, and Falling.
There was nothing like it in Israeli music. The album was poetic and discordant, tender and mocking. Meir’s Hebrew combined the latest slang with rabbinic expressions, referenced the poems of Alterman and of the medieval Spanish Jewish poet Solomon ibn Gabirol, creating a language at once bawdy and exalted.
Kutner played the album incessantly for his small but devoted audience of insomniacs and soldiers on night duty. As DJ, Kutner was on a sacred mission: to educate the Israeli public in the intricacies of rock music. He did marathon sessions on Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and on such vexing questions as whether Paul McCartney was secretly dead. He saw this as his contribution to Zionism: bringing rock ’n’ roll joy to the Jews. Kutner knew the healing power of music. As a teenager, he’d fallen off a cliff during a hike and awakened an amnesiac. One of his first recollections was prompted by hearing Simon and Garfunkel sing “The Sound of Silence.”
Meir’s album opened with “Song of Pain,” perhaps the first Israeli song to frankly confront the Palestinian haunting of the Jewish return. “Song of Pain” tells a story—all the songs on the album tell stories—about a competition over a woman between Meir and a young man identified as an “educated Arab.” Meir repeatedly invokes that phrase to mock his own liberal conceits. The Educated Arab woos the young woman away from Meir, and the song becomes a metaphor for the struggle between Arabs and Jews over the land.
“Song of Pain” was based in part on Meir’s experiences among his neighbors in the Arab Israeli villages near Kibbutz Mishmarot. When tensions were unbearable at home, he would escape to friends there for days at a time.
Kutner felt no anxiety about playing “Song of Pain” and offending his superiors, because the IDF’s official station was remarkably unmilitary; right-wing politicians repeatedly called for shutting it down, accusing it of being a bastion of the left. Kutner was no aberration but in some sense the soul of Army Radio. Besides, no one really cared what that lunatic did at two in the morning.
Reviewers loved the album. At age thirty-seven Meir seemed finally about to begin his musical career. In one newspaper interview, he was asked how he felt about being compared to Dylan. “I prefer to be called by my name,” he replied, and if Dylan were Meir, he would have probably said the same. Asked about the “singing paratrooper” of the summer of ’67, Meir noted, “I never saw myself as a paratrooper, in the full meaning of the word. And to this day I don’t think I’m a great singer. The result was that I felt like a double fraud.”
Despite the reviews, the album sold poorly. Meir occasionally played in a small club in Jaffa, and those concerts now attracted a few dozen passionate fans. He soon recognized their faces.
By the standards of Israeli music in 1978, the album was an eccentric work. The singer’s voice, though compellingly earnest, was thin, the songs too long to be played on conventional radio, the lyrics so personal they were often incomprehensible, and the themes—infidelity, drugs, madness, the alienation of Arab Israelis—unsettling. The song that, musically at least, most approximated a conventional hit was “Terminal,” Meir’s fantasy about taking monthly trips to the airport to help him recover from mental collapse. But an ode to madness was hardly likely to find its way to the hit parade. Israelis wanted Hebrew song to remind them of what was best about themselves, a last repository of national innocence. Meir was trespassing on sacred ground.
Meir tried to accept his status with equanimity: he would never be Shalom Hanoch, revered by the crowds, but he would have a devoted audience, however small. The Meir Ariel of 1978 was less tormented, more self-confident. He was learning to regard his own flawed being with the same pity with which he regarded the inadequacies of others.
Meir mentioned to Tirza that his album had come out. But Tirza, afraid perhaps to discover in his songs a lover who wasn’t her, appeared indifferent. Meir didn’t mention the album again.
FACTS ON THE GROUND
EIN SHEMER’S JUBILEE YEAR ended. The greenhouse had succeeded beyond Avital’s hopes. Kibbutzniks spent their leisure hours cultivating tomatoes, offering each other agricultural advice while Avital brewed Turkish coffee. The kibbutz allowed him to spend most of his workday in the greenhouse, and Avital hadn’t felt so fulfilled since his early years in the orchards. He had no doubt that his life in the art world was over. He wanted to offer his creativity to the kibbutz. But what?
“You need to be silent for a few years,” said Ada. “Do something that no one will know about.”
The greenhouse: in its seething silence he could raise Ein Shemer’s next generation of farmers, teach high school students cooperation and love of labor and the land, the values of the kibbutz.
Avishai, Ein Shemer’s secretary general, was skeptical. Another year of the greenhouse? But we had agreed it would be a project for the jubilee, a way of bringing the kibbutz together. What was the point of extending it?
“Avishai, our young people know nothing about agriculture. It’s unbelievable! On Ein Shemer! Let me take hevreh from the high school and work with them. We’ll bring in the newest technology. It will be an amazing educational experience.”
He can’t say no to that, Avital thought. “Give me one more year.”
Well, why not? thought Avishai. Everyone loves the greenhouse. And the young people love Avital. Maybe this will calm him down.
AVITAL BROUGHT IN rusted fans and a hot plate and
discarded couches and turned the greenhouse into a teenage hangout. They came to talk with him about the future of the kibbutz and their imminent army service and their girlfriends. But most of all they came to work. “Hevreh,” Avital exhorted, “let’s do something interesting here. We have the space, we have the energy—Yallah!” The lights in the greenhouse were on at all hours; young people slept on the dirt floor and sometimes forgot to get up the next day for classes.
Avital had been given one more year, but in fact he regarded the greenhouse as permanent. How did the hevreh from Gush Emunim call it? Establishing facts— He had no plan for the greenhouse, only an intuition that the loves of his life converged in this cavernous space beneath a plastic roof that tore in the wind and where community seemed to grow as effortlessly as tomatoes.
An Ein Shemer member who did reserve duty with a scientist from the Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research brought the scientist to the greenhouse. He sat with Avital on a pile of sand. “You have the best ideas about agriculture in the world,” Avital said. “We have the best young people. Tell us what to do.”
The scientist suggested creating a hydro-solar greenhouse that would retain heat in pools of water, over which a spraying system, to be activated on cold nights, would create the effect of a tropical waterfall and generate heat. Avital drew a sketch, and his kids scavenged the kibbutz’s garages and workshops for discarded pumps and motors. When the scientist returned the following week, he was amazed to see the system running.
The hydro-solar greenhouse was successful but, as it turned out, irrelevant. In Israel, with barely three months of winter, there was little need for a hothouse that would retain so much heat. Still, Avital considered the experiment a success because it had stimulated his young people.
The next project was growing vegetables on recycled water—the first hydroponic system in Israel. The greenhouse was also the first in Israel to grow vegetables in planters; for soil Avital used lava, culled from extinct volcanoes in the Golan Heights.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 38