The sin of secular Zionism, wrote Ben-Dov, was in trying to replace Jewish chosenness with the mediocrity of normalization. The secular state was stripping the Jews of the faith that had once sustained them. Ben-Dov proposed replacing the secular state with a theocracy governed by updated laws of the Torah—just as Yoel and Yehudah envisioned. But unlike Yoel, who felt gratitude for the state, Ben-Dov despised it. This is what Jews had dreamed of and suffered for, one more little nation-state with petty politicians and a second-rate copy of Western culture? Where was the grandeur that Jews had imagined would result from their return home?
Yehudah marveled at the ability of Ben-Dov, writing in the 1950s, to anticipate the current crisis of secular Zionism. It was as if Ben-Dov had written directly to him.
Yehudah showed Ben-Dov’s book to Yoel. “If we follow his path,” Yoel told his student, “we will be left with no state and no kingdom.”
“He shows a way forward,” countered Yehudah. “Rabbi Kook doesn’t give us a program.”
“There are no shortcuts, Yehudah. Even an avant-garde has to look backward and make sure the nation is following.”
Yoel, thought Yehudah, has the emotional dependency on secular Zionism that an abused child has on his parents.
THE LEAN, RED-BEARDED young man in jeans and knitted kippah and work boots stood on a roof overlooking the Temple Mount. Peering through binoculars, he observed the changing of the guard of Israeli police at the Mughrabi Gate and the patrols of Muslim officials in the plaza around the Dome of the Rock. He jotted down their schedules.
Yehudah Etzion had a plan, the ultimate plan: to cleanse the Mount of the abomination of its spiritual occupier. And he had potential partners. A terrorist underground was forming to stop the withdrawal from Sinai. The group included two dozen settlers and their supporters, among them combat veterans with knowledge of explosives. The only way to stop the withdrawal, some concluded, was through an act so drastic that it would convulse the Middle East and make it impossible for Egypt to offer even its pretend-peace to the Jews. An act, say, like blowing up the Dome of the Rock.
For Yehudah, it wasn’t a great conceptual leap from airbrushing the Dome of the Rock out of the photograph of the Temple Mount in the poster he and Yoel had conceived to the decision to actually remove the Dome. But the purpose of removing the Dome, he told his friends, shouldn’t be merely to stop the withdrawal, but something far more grand: this would be the founding act for the redemption movement envisioned by Shabbtai Ben-Dov.
Underground members stole explosives from an army base, and Yehudah dug a pit for the cache in a friend’s farm in the Golan Heights. They debated scenarios, including bombing the Dome of the Rock from the air. But an air force pilot who had joined the group refused to steal a plane from his base, and the group searched for an alternative plan.
In fact, most members were ambivalent about blowing up the Dome of the Rock. Won’t Muslims attack Jews around the world in retaliation? What right do we have to endanger them? And what if we cause an Arab invasion of Israel?
“Our enemies are already doing everything they can to hurt us,” Yehudah reassured them.
Yehudah didn’t let on that he too had qualms. To bring dynamite into the Holy of Holies, center of divine peace—how dare they? He knew all the arguments Yoel was likely to make if he learned of Yehudah’s plans: King David wasn’t allowed to build the Temple because he was a warrior; the altar had to be made of stone uncut by blade, an implement of war. There was, Yehudah readily admitted, an element of sin in his plan.
Yehudah was soft-spoken, without hatred for Arabs. He admired their rootedness in the land, wished the Jews could be more like them. But someone had to take responsibility for this pivotal moment. And how to cut the umbilical cord of the new world being born without blood?
SEPARATIONS
WEARING HIS UNIFORM brown shirt and pants, Udi Adiv was led by a guard to the concrete table divided by a metal net. Sylvia, elegant as always, was waiting on the other side. She looks great, thought Udi ruefully. They pressed fingers through a hole in the net.
“Listen, Sylvia,” Udi said, looking away. “This can’t continue. I want a divorce.”
Sylvia was silent.
“Don’t you love me?” she said finally.
“Of course I love you.”
“So why?”
“Why?” said Udi, suddenly angry. “I’m a symbol. You can’t undermine me by taking a different political position.”
Sylvia was part of a Trotskyite faction, and Udi was a disciple of Che Guevara. The Trotskyites believed in a revolutionary working class, the Guevarists in a Third World uprising against the West.
“But that’s my belief,” she said quietly. “We don’t have to agree completely. I don’t tell you what to think, and you can’t tell me what to think.”
It wasn’t only the politics, Udi continued. She had let him down in other ways, like when she’d ignored his request to bring books and underwear for one of the prisoners. “You behaved selfishly,” he said.
“I want to stay connected with you,” Sylvia said.
“It’s over.”
Back in his cell, several hours passed before he restored himself to emotional equilibrium.
UDI PRIDED HIMSELF on being the good Jew, proving to Arab prisoners that not all Jews were racists. Yet the distance between Udi and his fellow prisoners only grew. Even the Marxists among them, he was shocked to realize, weren’t entirely free of religious faith. Secular and fundamentalist alike dreamed of a return of the golden age of Arab rule. Udi tried to reason with them. “The revolution will be class-based, not ethnic-based,” he said. “The workers of all nations will bring the revolution.” To no avail. He didn’t even bother trying to counter the Holocaust denial most of them took for granted.
Udi was friendly with all his fellow prisoners, even with the Muslim fundamentalists who in their long beards and white skullcaps repulsed him because they reminded him of Gush Emunim settlers. When a cellmate needed help in writing a Hebrew appeal to the Supreme Court, or tutoring in English, Udi didn’t hesitate. But he was close to no one, and spent almost all of his time reading. Days would pass without a real conversation.
IN THE PRISON LIBRARY Udi found a collection of Freud’s writings. He came to a conclusion that disturbed him: there were areas of reality that Marxism couldn’t explain. Of course Marxism remained true in its understanding of history, the collective movement of humanity; but the individual had an inner life beyond the reach of ideology. It’s not that Udi hadn’t realized this before, but somehow its moral significance had eluded him. How much importance should a revolutionary give to individual needs? What happens when those needs conflict with the collective good?
Udi had a new visitor with whom to explore these ideas: Leah Leshem, who had been in his apartment the night of his arrest and who’d left after the trial to study in Paris. Leah had never stopped loving Udi. In Paris she would obsessively seek out political films about violence and torture, which gave her nightmares but which also linked her to Udi. When she felt lonely in a strange city, she thought of Udi, stoic in his cell, and resolved to be strong too.
Now that Udi had divorced Sylvia, Leah was hoping to take her place.
Though she shared Udi’s radical politics, Leah was not an activist. In a letter to Leah after a visit, Udi warned, “The relationship between us cannot be compartmentalized: a warm, ideal, individualist relationship on the one hand and a practical political relationship on the other.”
Still, Udi didn’t reject Leah’s overtures, and she became a regular visitor to Ramle Prison.
THE LETTUCE WAR
FROM THE EIN SHEMER NEWSLETTER: “A query: To whom? I don’t know! Maybe to Avital? But I know he couldn’t care less about anything that touches, bothers and worries [his fellow] comrade. . . . How much longer will we have to suffer the total freedom of [Avital’s] donkeys, whether in our neighborhood, and in the gardens, but not in the greenhouse?”
&n
bsp; Fair enough, thought Avital. His three donkeys—Ferdinand and Isabella, named for the Spanish monarchs who expelled the Jews in 1492, and Shulem, Yiddish for shalom—did on occasion trample the neighbors’ flower beds. And sometimes his kids got a little rowdy, singing into the night around the campfires they built outside the greenhouse; and sometimes they got carried away and tossed plastic into the flames, and the smell wasn’t so pleasant. And then there was that unfortunate incident when Avital loaded the donkeys into a new kibbutz van, and they’d chewed the upholstery and relieved themselves in the back. Okay, sorry. But tell me, hevreh, are we going to become bourgeois farmers and worry about our rose beds?
Avital had his supporters, including the editor of the newsletter: the letter complaining about the donkeys was accompanied by a drawing of three adorable donkeys smiling mischievously as they chew the neighbors’ flowers.
Still the complaints were having an effect—especially since maintaining the greenhouse was expensive, and the economy was worsening. Inflation had hit triple digits, and agricultural exports were suffering. The situation had become so difficult that the kibbutz had reverted to the old practice of group weddings, to save on expenses (though reasonable requests for changes on the menu would be accommodated, the newsletter promised).
The kibbutz planning committee determined that a new sports center should be built on the prime spot where the greenhouse sat. As for the greenhouse, it would be either moved to a peripheral location or else dismantled. Avital was informed after the fact; he hadn’t even been given a chance to defend himself.
“I see this as a personal affront,” he wrote to the newsletter. “But I have objective arguments, which I will briefly cite.” He went on for two pages, hitting at Ein Shemer’s most sensitive point: its fear of losing its youth to the city. “We’re not talking about buying a tractor,” he wrote mockingly. “I believe that the goal of keeping connected with the boys and girls [of the kibbutz] and giving them challenges and opportunities to create—in our midst—is the central problem and main goal of the entire kibbutz movement, and of Ein Shemer especially, given the high percentage of young people who leave. . . . Have we completely lost our identity? Are boys who work in agriculture and grow vegetables for our kitchen and love this place and this land—is that less important than muscle-building?”
Avital’s supporters forced the committee to bring its plan for a sports center to a vote among the comrades.
After dinner, when the kibbutzniks returned to the dining room for the weekly meeting, they found affixed to the walls lettuces grown in the greenhouse. Some were hanging from the rafters.
“It’s not fair,” complained an opponent of the greenhouse. “Avital is trying to manipulate us.”
Avital knew his people: How could they oppose encouraging young people to grow such beautiful lettuce?
The kibbutzniks voted to retain the greenhouse. “For now,” noted the resolution.
MEIR ARIEL ENCOUNTERS LIGHT
MEIR RETURNED HOME from the cotton fields, removed his muddied boots and the kaffiyeh wrapped around his head.
“Tirza,” he began. “Something happened in the fields today.”
“Nu?”
“I was crying out to the heavens. And I got an answer.”
“What do you mean, you got an answer?”
“I encountered God.”
“Are you on drugs, Meir?”
“No. Tirza, listen. I don’t know what happened to me, but it was real.”
What had he experienced? Fields transformed to light, all forms dissolving back into their common essence? Had the universe revealed to him that there is no death, only changing forms of oneness?
Meir didn’t say. But whatever it was he’d experienced that day, Meir’s faith in God was confirmed.
“TIRZA,” SAID MEIR, “there’s just one thing. Please, no more nonkosher meat in the house.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t care what you eat outside the house. Eat, enjoy. But I want the house to be kosher.”
Tirza was quiet. Then she said, “My father has just given us a pail of meat.” Her father hunted wild boar. “What do you want me to do, just throw it out?”
“Finish the meat, but then no more.”
“All right, Meir. We’ll do it your way. All I ask is that you don’t start surprising me with all that religious nonsense.”
“I promise you,” said Meir, “no surprises.”
Chapter 20
BUILDING DIFFERENT ISRAELS
ARIK ACHMON, CEO OF PRIVATIZATION
KANAF-ARKIA WAS THRIVING. By contrast, the parent company, Arkia, was a disaster. In debt, with aging planes, some of them dating to the 1950s, with too many employees and an all-powerful workers committee that vetoed layoffs, Arkia symbolized all that was wrong with Israel’s statist economy. How do you make a small fortune in Israel? went the joke. Invest a large one. No one even quite knew how much Arkia was worth; its managers could do no better than present books that were two years old.
As angry as Arik was with the Likud and its settlement policy, he found common ground with its stated commitment to a free market and privatization. And the first test case for privatization, the government decided, would be Arkia.
Arik and his partners placed a bid. Arik had big plans for Arkia: open new domestic routes, break El Al’s monopoly on flights abroad, and fly charters to Europe. But most of all he intended to turn Arkia into a model of efficiency and worker-management relations. He would fire extraneous employees and offer those remaining shares in the company’s profits. A humane capitalism, pursuing profit while protecting the worker. A capitalism worthy of a son of the kibbutz.
Not surprisingly, Arik happened to know the right person. The Likud’s finance minister, Yigal Horowitz—nicknamed “Mr. I-Don’t-Have” for his refusal to subsidize special interest groups—was an old friend of Arik’s. They had met in 1955, when Horowitz, then an independent farmer, had bought twenty cows from Arik, then manager of Kibbutz Netzer Sereni’s cowshed. With his keen eye Horowitz had noted that Arik delivered the same cows that Horowitz had chosen—an unusual act of good faith in a business where deception was widespread. And Horowitz never forgot it. Over the years, when they met at farmers’ conventions, Horowitz would refer to Arik as the most honest cowhand in Israel.
Arik’s main competition for the bid was a group formed, as it happened, by Horowitz’s two sons. Arik reassured his partners: If we make a convincing case, Horowitz will be fair. Horowitz, though, wasn’t convinced. After all, a subsidiary company buying out the parent company would be unusual anywhere, let alone as Israel’s first test case for privatization. Horowitz phoned Arik for reassurance. “We have real concerns about whether we can trust Arkia to your hands,” he said. “Are you really serious, Arik?”
“Serious, ready, and clear about what we want.”
They met in the finance minister’s office, a small room with a plain table and wooden chairs without padding. “I’m giving you Arkia,” Horowitz said. “Two things decided in your favor: your company’s experience, and the integrity of your group. I already knew in 1955 that Arik Achmon is an honorable man.”
There was one more obstacle to overcome. Arik needed the approval of the Histadrut labor union, which owned 50 percent of Arkia and was deeply suspicious of privatization. He would need inside help. And it so happened that one of Arik’s closest childhood friends, Moisheleh Bankover, was now the Histadrut official in charge of negotiations. Arik and Moisheleh had studied together in kibbutz boarding school, they’d been drafted together, their military numbers were separated by a single digit, they had gone through officers training together.
Arik told Moisheleh he intended to give employees a 25 percent share of Arkia.
The deal was signed in December 1979. Kanaf-Arkia paid $1.5 million for 75 percent ownership of Arkia, along with assuming Arkia’s $3.5 million debt. Employees were granted the remaining stock. Arik became CEO, and
his partner, Dadi Borowitz, deputy. Horowitz raised a toast on shot glasses of brandy. What a country, thought Arik. Thanks to the sale of twenty cows, he was being given the chance to help modernize the Israeli economy.
“SHALOM, MY NAME IS ARIK and I’m the new CEO of Arkia.”
Several hundred employees were assembled in a hall in Ben-Gurion Airport. Arik’s appearance was meant to emphasize his direct style: unlike the previous CEO, who wore a jacket and tie, Arik wore jeans and a plaid shirt.
“My philosophy is simple,” he explained. “A company has the right to earn a profit. Employees have the right to honorable wages and fair advancement in reward for productivity. I see two legitimate options for employees: one, to work by the book; two, to strike. Sanctions, slowdowns, are the cancer of the Israeli labor force. For me, sanctions are not legitimate, because you aren’t fulfilling your responsibilities but you’re still getting paid as if you were.”
He stood feet apart, half smile anticipating the test of combat.
“Don’t try to educate us,” a woman called out.
Arik stared at her for what seemed like a very long time. You people don’t have a clue who you’re dealing with—
Finally he said, “You had better forget everything you think you knew until now. And whoever can’t adjust should forget about working for me.”
Arik approached his new mission just as he had planned his military missions: flexible in tactics, fixed on goal. Ruthless if necessary, generous when possible. He readily accepted the Histadrut’s insistence on collective agreement with the ground workers, and granted longer vacations and salary increases to diligent employees.
“ARIK, YOU’RE GOING TOO FAR,” complained one of his partners. “You’re acting like a kibbutznik.”
“Base salaries will be determined by what the company can afford,” Arik replied. “But what matters to a worker isn’t only how much money he makes but whether he feels he is treated fairly.”
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 40