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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  When teachers came looking for students cutting class, Avital helped them escape. “You’re creating anarchy,” the principal accused. “Listen,” replied Avital, not unsympathetic, “we’re giving students a chance to do things they couldn’t do anywhere else. Of course they’re going to want to come here.”

  The principal implicitly agreed: he paid Avital’s water and electricity bills.

  WHERE IS AVITAL GEVA?

  The question was asked with increasing puzzlement in the Israeli art world. Was he suffering from artistic insecurity, a nervous breakdown? One newspaper critic wrote that Avital had gone off to the desert.

  Old colleagues visited the greenhouse and left envious: Avital had managed to create a microcosm of his ideal world, the ultimate act of conceptual art.

  “When are you returning to us?” one asked.

  “Forget about me,” said Avital. “Now I grow tomatoes.”

  SOME OF AVITAL’S friends on the kibbutz were leaving for the city. But the greenhouse—“my Garden of Eden,” Avital called it—reminded him of why the kibbutz was so special. “Where else,” he told a friend, “would a community give away its best real estate for free, in the central square, to a lunatic like me?”

  Some kibbutzniks were beginning to ask that same question. When the second year of the greenhouse ended, without any sign that Avital intended to dismantle the big plastic structure in the middle of the kibbutz, the grumbling grew. Kol hakavod, it’s all well and good that Avital is working with youth and the youth are our future, but what exactly is this about? When we ask him to explain the project, the answer constantly changes. One time it’s about education, another time about new technology, yet another about renewing pioneering Zionism. Nu, really, we’re not an anarchists’ collective here. How much longer are we going to put up with this?

  ON A HOT JULY AFTERNOON, with two gold-painted calves’ heads strapped to the roof of his van, Avital drove to Hebron.

  He entered the narrow streets of the West Bank city, crowded with slow open-backed trucks and donkey carts. Cavelike shops sold live chickens, clay pots, harnesses, glass-blown vases. Some of the stone buildings seemed little more than ruins. Avital felt adrift in a foreign place whose claim to being home only deepened his disorientation. For settlers, Hebron, burial place of Abraham and Sarah, was the wellspring of Israel’s national life. But Avital felt the decrepit past trying, like a bitter old man, to stifle him. The anti-state of Israel.

  He was on his way to Hadassah House, an abandoned building near the market that had been a Jewish-run clinic before the destruction of the Jewish community in 1929. A group of Jewish women and children had taken over the structure, demanding that the Likud government allow them to remain. After the initial settlement of Jews in Hebron in 1968, the government had moved them to a suburb of white stone apartment buildings called Kiryat Arba, on a hill overlooking the city. But the settlers had never abandoned their hope of returning to Hebron.

  Avital’s old group of artist provocateurs had organized a counterprotest. Though Avital had resolved to keep away from protest art, this wouldn’t be some sterile exhibit in a museum. If Jews began moving into Palestinian neighborhoods, Avital felt, the result would be a bloodbath. Placing land before life seemed to him a kind of idolatry. A new golden calf. And so he’d bought two calves’ heads in an Arab village near Ein Shemer, painted them gold, and was now transporting them through downtown Hebron.

  He came to Hadassah House. Kerchiefed Jewish women peered from the grilled windows at the small crowd of protesters. One artist sat in a cage, perhaps mocking the squatters barricaded in Beit Hadassah, perhaps implying that all of Israel was being imprisoned by the settlers’ vision of permanent siege. Avital was deeply moved by the presence of kibbutzniks in work clothes and muddy boots, who seemed to have come straight from the fields. The real Zionists—

  Arab men in suit jackets over skirt-like pants and Arab women in gray housecoats and scarves tied under their chins stopped to watch.

  Several men, settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba, approached the protesters. Nervous Israeli soldiers stood between the two groups. If Hebron doesn’t belong to the people of Israel, a settler called out, then neither does Tel Aviv. By coming to demonstrate here, another settler shouted, you’re telling the Arabs that it’s permitted to spill our blood.

  Avital and his friends ignored the settlers’ taunts. Faith and memory versus art and peace: sacrament against sacrament. Avital laid his calves’ heads on the street and set them on fire.

  NEW JOURNALISM, OFRA STYLE

  MORNINGS, YISRAEL HAREL drove from his home near Ramallah to the Tel Aviv offices of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Professionally, personally, he had every reason to feel satisfied. He had fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a pioneer, and had managed to preserve his journalism career despite moving to Ofra.

  The Harels’ cramped space was filled with the happy freneticism generated by four children and their friends, so unlike Yisrael’s childhood home. Eldad, at fifteen the oldest of the Harel children, was a beloved counselor in Ofra’s Bnei Akiva branch. Yisrael’s wife, Sarah, was embraced by her fellow mothers, Ofra’s strong young women, who appreciated her capacity for enduring hardship without complaint, though she sometimes offended them with her critical manner. Sarah still maintained certain ultra-Orthodox customs, like buying only meat slaughtered in an extra strict fashion. But in other ways she had broken with ultra-Orthodoxy. She had recently completed a master’s degree and was working as a social worker.

  Still, Yisrael felt restless. He had recently turned forty, and life offered few new challenges. He could remain at Yediot Aharonot, one more editor who would never reach the top—and he suspected that being Orthodox, not to mention a settler, ensured that he wouldn’t. Or he could do what he really wanted: devote his life to settling Judea and Samaria, that urgent, fragile enterprise beset by enemies. He had none of the messianic certainty of Yoel Bin-Nun and Hanan Porat that settlement was irreversible. Yisrael was a Holocaust survivor; he knew that anything could happen.

  Almost two years after the Likud upheaval, the settlement movement seemed stymied by a friendly but timid government, fearful of American opposition. For all the political and media tumult around the settlements, there were no more than 20,000 settlers in the West Bank, 500 in Gaza. Four years after its founding, Ofra barely numbered 400 residents.

  Yisrael had a plan. First, create a magazine promoting the diversity of settler life and opinion to the Israeli public, break the media stereotype of settler as bearded fanatic.

  Then create an umbrella council that would organize the settlers into a decision-making body, represent their needs to government ministries and their positions to the media, functioning at once as lobby, assembly and, when necessary, protest movement.

  “Sarah, I’ve decided to quit Yediot and devote myself to public life.”

  She replied with a calmness that failed to conceal anxiety: “After all these years we finally have a secure financial base.”

  “I’ve been talking to heads of settlement councils,” Yisrael said, “and they’ve promised to fund a representative council, with proper salaries.”

  “They won’t keep their word,” replied Sarah, and said no more.

  In Yediot Aharonot they called it a leave of absence. But Yisrael knew as he cleared his desk that he was not coming back.

  IN THE EMBRYONIC communities of Judea and Samaria, there was anguish and rage. On March 26, 1979, at a White House ceremony with Sadat and President Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin committed Israel to full withdrawal from Sinai. For the first time, an Israeli government—the most right-wing in the nation’s history—had agreed to uproot Jewish communities. And Begin had become the first Israeli prime minister to recognize the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” He didn’t mean statehood in the West Bank and Gaza but a vaguely defined “autonomy.” Still, settlers feared that Begin was opening the way to a terrorist state in the hills overlooking
greater Tel Aviv.

  Most Israelis, though, saw the peace with Egypt as a vindication of Zionism. In the coastal Sinai town of Rafiah, a ceremony was held transferring Israeli control back to the Egyptians, a stage in the phased withdrawal. Among those invited were handicapped Israeli and Egyptian war veterans; young men missing arms and legs embraced.

  THE PREMIER ISSUE of Nekudah, the magazine of the settlements, appeared on December 28, 1979. Nekudah means “point” or “period”—and Yisrael Harel meant both a point on the map and an emphatic period at the end of a sentence. The cover of the first issue showed a crane moving a prefab house onto a West Bank hilltop, surrounded by emptiness. Building, transforming, defying, fulfilling: these were the themes of the articles crammed into the issue’s eighteen nonglossy pages, hardly adequate to contain such passion.

  The main feature was a profile of the new agricultural settlements in the Gaza Strip. It was titled “500 Against 350,000”—the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the area. In the next issue, Yisrael published the protocols of a Knesset debate over the future of Gaza’s settlements. “The key to defending Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, is found in Gaza,” declared agriculture minister Sharon. “I want to send a warm blessing from this podium to the settlers of the Katif Bloc [in Gaza]: Your efforts today are significant for future generations.”

  Left-wing Knesset member Meir Pa’il, a Palmach veteran and military historian, noted that since Sadat’s visit to Israel, the fate of Israeli settlements in Sinai was now uncertain, and that residents there knew they were likely to soon be evacuated. “The disappointed residents of [Sinai settlements] Yamit and Sadot should be enough for us, before we add to their number the disappointed residents of Katif [the Gaza settlement bloc]. I agree that . . . they are very good people. Someone who goes to settle there is, I think, by nature a fine person. He is doing it out of deep faith and is certain that he’s doing something positive. But those who send them—and it’s them I’m speaking about—in the end, they will have to look [the settlers] in the eye and explain to them how they will be evacuated and why they will be evacuated.” Added Pa’il: “I told Arik Sharon a hundred times: I weep when he builds Katif, and I’ll weep when he removes Katif.”

  NEKUDAH FUNCTIONED LIKE a movement bulletin board. In Ofra, the foundations were being laid for the first fifty permanent houses. A Japanese convert to Judaism, a descendant of samurai warriors, had moved to Kedumim. In Kfar Etzion the chickens seemed to have a disease, but still, twenty thousand eggs were being laid every week.

  Nekudah conveyed, too, the community’s resentments and fears. The Israeli media, Nekudah complained, routinely violated its own ethos of impartiality in covering the settlers. Reporting that government television Channel 1—still the sole TV channel—had broadcast an item about the settlements that quoted only opponents, Nekudah noted dryly: “Typical.” At times Nekudah combined question marks and exclamation points to convey its ire.

  Yet Nekudah encouraged self-criticism and even published opponents of the settlements. It ran poetry with mildly erotic imagery. The Orthodox community had never experienced anything quite like it. Some were grateful to Yisrael; others accused him of pandering to the left. Among Nekudah’s minuscule staff they joked that some readers took out subscriptions only to be able to cancel in protest.

  Sarah was right: the community didn’t ensure Yisrael’s livelihood. There was never enough money to actually pay Yisrael a salary.

  Yisrael set up office in a prefab building in Ofra, with two desks and one telephone. When visitors came, the secretary, an Ofra resident, went home to prepare coffee. On the wall hung a photograph of Shimon Peres planting a sapling in Ofra, shortly after the settlement’s founding. Peres, now head of the Labor Party, had since become an opponent of the settlement movement, and the photograph expressed Ofra’s longing to be part of the consensus.

  Yisrael recruited smart young people with no journalistic experience and taught them how to become reporters, hoping to raise a generation of Orthodox journalists who would portray their community fairly in the mainstream media. He paid minimal salaries and demanded long hours that sometimes went through the night. He bullied, mocked, demanded, cajoled. He phoned a reporter at five in the morning to berate her for some obscure offense. Employees had to make do with sarcastic jibes instead of compliments. “A truck load of medals is on its way to reward you,” he said to a staffer who had run the magazine in Yisrael’s absence.

  Even those who weren’t intimidated by his insults submitted just the same. Yisrael wasn’t asking you to help him, but the Jewish people. Even small requests became tests of commitment: Fail me, and you fail Jewish history. As much as they resented him, the young people stayed, at least for a while, because they knew that Yisrael, for all his flaws, was who he claimed to be: a Jew so totally committed to the well-being of his people that he had merged with it. If Yisrael didn’t represent the highest aspirations of his people, he surely embodied their fears.

  TO THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD

  THE TEMPLE MOUNT gave Yoel Bin-Nun no peace. Its tantalizing proximity lured and accused: You liberated me and then abandoned me. The Mountain of God bereft of Jewish prayer—under Jewish sovereignty! As though the Exile, God forbid, hadn’t ended. “Har habayit b’yadeinu”—the Temple Mount is in our hands—Motta had said in his deceptively simple manner on that morning in June 1967. But then, the war barely over, Moshe Dayan had removed his shoes at the entrance to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, sat cross-legged with Muslim authorities, and handed back exclusive authority on the Mount, surrendered the keys to the kingdom. As if he were the defeated party.

  Yoel helped found an organization called El Har Hashem (To the Mountain of God), to lobby politicians and rabbis to change the ban on Jews praying on the Mount. Yoel understood the rabbis’ fear of violating the inner core of sanctity. But he had studied the talmudic texts describing the Temple layout and determined that the Holy of Holies was situated in the area of the Dome of the Rock. Several leading rabbis, including Chief Rabbi Goren, had reached the same conclusion.

  Most rabbis, though, weren’t convinced—even Rabbi Zvi Yehudah opposed tampering with the Mount. El Har Hashem held a conference in Ofra to overturn the rabbinic ban; four hundred rabbis were invited, barely forty came.

  Frustrated, Yoel said to a fellow activist, “We need to bring thousands of Jews to stand before the Temple Mount on the eve of Passover.”

  “And what will we do?” asked his friend.

  “We have to show God that we are ready for redemption.”

  “If you have a realistic idea, Yoel, I’m ready to listen. But I’m not going to demonstrate against God.”

  LATE AT NIGHT, when Ofra was in total stillness, broken only by the footsteps of the two men on security patrol and the distant cry of a coyote, Yoel paced in his cramped living room. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were filled with the mystical writings of Rabbi Kook and Alterman’s poems and accounts of archaeological excavations and well-worn sets of the Bible whose margins were marked with Yoel’s notes—ancient and modern Israel absorbed into a seamless sacred canon.

  Yoel was often joined by Ofra’s founder, Yehudah Etzion. The two friends were preparing a manuscript about how to adapt the laws of the Torah to a modern state. The Torah was a blueprint for God’s relationship with a holy nation living in a holy land. But in exile the Torah had lost its national dimension, and rabbis had dealt only with the needs of Jewish communities and individuals. Now the Torah had to be brought home, restored to itself.

  For Yoel there was nothing theoretical about the relationship of the Torah to the collective. His most intense moments of prayer were requests for the nation, his moments of spiritual elevation and depression reflections of the nation’s condition. Authentic Jewish religious experience happened through the collective. Yet Yoel was also an intensely private person, who preferred to pray at home rather than in a congregation, and whose political and religious instincts were contrarian.

  Strained with l
ack of sleep, Yoel explained to Yehudah that it wasn’t enough to long for the days of old, as a Shabbat hymn put it; the old needed to be renewed. Consider the biblical injunction to leave the land fallow every seven years. How to give those who work in a modern economy the experience of participating in a cycle of work and rest? “One part of the nation is involved in minute halachic questions, and the other part ignores it completely,” Yoel said. “We need to take the concept of the sabbatical year in agriculture and extend it to other areas. Everyone should be entitled to a sabbatical.”

  “And how do we prevent the collapse of the economy?” asked Yehudah.

  “A committee will decide which workers are needed to maintain essential services,” said Yoel.

  He could almost see it: just as Friday became Shabbat, so would the secular state of Israel evolve into the messianic Kingdom.

  Evolve, Yoel emphasized: that was the crucial movement. Classic Kookian theology: the secular state as indispensable precursor, first flowering of redemption.

  “Secular Zionism has outlived its usefulness,” Yehudah retorted. “It performed an essential historical purpose, but it has lost its way. Now it is up to us create the next phase of Zionism and lead the people.”

  “There will be no redemption for Israel,” said Yoel, “without working together with our secular partners.”

  YEHUDAH’S DESPAIR ABOUT secular Zionism was encouraged by a new mentor, an obscure far-right ideologue named Shabbtai Ben-Dov. A veteran of the most extreme anti-British underground, the Stern Group, Ben-Dov was a self-taught philosopher who knew thirteen languages. When Yehudah was in high school, Ben-Dov, a family friend, had given him a copy of his book The Crisis of the State and Israel’s Redemption. With its too-long sentences and references to political philosophy, the book had meant little to Yehudah then. But he read it now with the intensity of someone encountering revelation.