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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Hanan was also convinced that the withdrawal wouldn’t happen. “In another few weeks, hundreds and thousands will come to the Yamit area, to strengthen us,” he said. “With God’s help there will be no withdrawal.” Quoting the rabbis, he added, “‘God’s salvation comes in the blink of an eye.’”

  Rabbi Levinger of Hebron delivered a Shabbat sermon in Yamit’s synagogue, urging squatters to be prepared for mesirut nefesh, martyrdom, if necessary.

  He’s lost his mind, thought Yoel; he’s telling Jews to commit suicide—

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Yoel told Esther afterward. “There could be blood.”

  The Bin-Nuns left their bare apartment in Yamit and moved into an abandoned house in a nearby agricultural village.

  THE ARMY SEALED the roads leading into Sinai. The thousands of protesters Hanan had promised were now effectively blocked. At most, mere hundreds would be able to slip through. The evacuation was scheduled for April 26, a week after Passover.

  A crowd gathered at a roadblock outside Yamit. It was an early spring morning, though in the desert it felt like summer.

  A teenager crawled under a police van and tried to puncture a tire; he was caught and dragged into the van. Protesters tried to push past police to retrieve him.

  Buses and jeeps appeared, filled with paratroopers. They lined up on the sand.

  Rabbi Ariel approached them. “Soldiers! Disobey orders!” he called out. “Don’t allow Jews to be uprooted from their homes in the land of Israel. This is against the Torah.”

  The rabbi was arrested for inciting insubordination.

  SONG OF THE SEA

  MAIL SERVICE AND garbage collection in Yamit were suspended. All stores, except for one grocery, were ordered closed. Then the phone lines were cut.

  A song by Naomi Shemer played on the radio, a plea against uprooting a sapling. The song became the anthem of a dying Yamit.

  Settlers responded with acts of faith. Yoel wrote a report about a harvest in one of the agricultural settlements. He sent the report via courier to Yisrael Harel, who had briefly returned to Ofra: “Following the first day of Passover . . . the residents of Atzmona [a Sinai settlement], along with many guests, went out to harvest the first melons that were planted three months ago. The harvest will continue with God’s help for another two months. . . . The event ended with singing and dancing. The 60-dunam area will produce, with God’s help, around 250 tons.”

  STUDENTS FROM YAMIT’S military yeshiva, arms around each other’s shoulders, led the crowd of religious Jews moving slowly from the center of town into the darkness, toward the sea. A young man bearing a torch, a pillar of fire, walked before them. There were high school students, old people, women with baby carriages. “Israel, trust in God,” they sang.

  It was midnight, the seventh day of Passover. The night, according to tradition, when the Red Sea split for the Israelites.

  The crowd came to the shore, where the desert met the sea. As waves broke behind him, Rabbi Ariel addressed the faithful. He spoke of the biblical figure, Nachshon Ben-Aminadav, the first to leap into the Red Sea even before it parted: “[Nachshon] plunged into the water without making rational calculations, without considering the security situation. He offered his life, and in his merit the miracle occurred.”

  Yisrael Harel, back for Yamit’s last stand, watched teenage girls looking expectantly toward heaven. What would happen to their faith, he wondered, when the bulldozers came?

  THE LAST STAND

  TALMEI YOSEF, A small agricultural settlement near Yamit, appeared deserted. Its lawns and vegetable gardens had withered; plastic from vanished greenhouses blew across the sand.

  A month earlier, Talmei Yosef had been evacuated by the army; even its greenhouses had been dismantled. The families that had built Talmei Yosef had been too traumatized to resist, quietly boarding the IDF buses that drove them into sovereign Israel. There they were taunted by Israelis envious of the financial compensation offered them by the government. Millionaire extortionists, some called them.

  As soon as the veterans left, Gush Emunim squatters took their place. And now the squatters were inside the red-roofed houses as the army returned.

  The soldiers wore caps, not helmets, and carried no arms. Among the soldiers were young women, assigned to evacuate the female protesters. The soldiers divided into teams and began knocking on doors.

  Yoel Bin-Nun had affixed a note to the front door of his borrowed house: “Officer/soldier, Shalom. . . . You are hereby warned that this act constitutes a crime against the people of Israel in its land.”

  Yoel’s eight-year-old son, Odeyah—“Odi”—was troubled by the letter. “Abba,” he said, “it’s forbidden to tell soldiers not to do their job.”

  “Why, Odi?” asked Yoel. “Explain it to me.”

  “What if there’s a war,” said Odi, “and someone will say, I don’t want to fight?”

  Yoel stroked his son’s head and said nothing.

  When soldiers entered the house, Yoel sat on the floor like a mourner and was dragged away to a waiting bus.

  YISRAEL HAREL DROVE to Atzmona, a Gush Emunim “protest” settlement of trailers and tents, near Yamit.

  “I’m the head of the Yesha Council,” Yisrael told soldiers at the roadblock. That Yisrael expected to be allowed through reflected the ambiguous identity of an organization at once quasi-official and oppositional. The soldiers let him pass.

  Atzmona’s several dozen residents, many of them Mercaz students, had made a theological decision: they would not resist the soldiers because that would violate the authority—the sanctity—of the Jewish state. Nor would they call on soldiers to disobey orders. Instead, they gathered together, reciting Psalms.

  Several young men stood on a scaffold, pouring cement onto a skeletal structure: they were building Atzmona’s synagogue.

  Soldiers sat on the sand, waiting for the order to move in. Their commander, Amos, reminded them, “There aren’t two sides here.”

  Yisrael approached Amos, who recognized the head of the Yesha Council. Pointing to the building crew, Yisrael said, “Look what faith these people have,” and added, “Let them be evacuated last.” Amos agreed.

  A young woman, a settler from Hebron, asked Amos for permission to address his soldiers. Amos looked at Yisrael. Yes, Yisrael nodded. The kerchiefed woman spoke quietly about how the Jewish people had built a state from the wilderness, and now this good land would be returning to wilderness.

  Amos said to her gently, “We have to finish.”

  She ignored him, her voice turning shrill.

  Too bad, thought Yisrael, she doesn’t know when to stop.

  Settlers quietly accompanied soldiers to the buses. No one needed to be dragged. Several teenage girls collapsed, and were carried by female soldiers. The young men on the scaffold continued to pour cement.

  When all the other settlers had been removed, soldiers approached the building site. The workers laid down their tools and slowly walked toward the buses.

  All the hope destroyed in Sinai, all the youthful promise—

  Yisrael returned to his car and wept.

  TEN ACTIVISTS FROM a far-right fringe group, Kach (Thus), headed by an American-born rabbi, Meir Kahane, barricaded themselves in an underground bomb shelter in Yamit and vowed to commit suicide if the town were evacuated.

  Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren was flown down to Yamit and, shouting through a vent, tried to convince the protesters to emerge, but there was no response. One young man, a doctor named Baruch Goldstein who had recently immigrated from the United States and whose sister was barricaded within, stood outside, reciting Psalms.

  “THE EVACUATION HAS BEGUN,” announced loudspeakers mounted by protesters on Yamit’s rooftops. “Everyone to your stations. Soldiers! We tell you today to disobey the order. . . . For the rest of your lives you will carry the knowledge that you uprooted a city in Israel.”

  Hundreds rushed to the rooftops. Helmeted soldiers laid ladders
against the two-story buildings. Cranes lifted cages; from inside soldiers sprayed foam. Protesters threw stones and tried to topple the ladders with poles. Black smoke rose from burning tires. Loudspeakers played the staccato song “Ammunition Hill,” conjuring the spirit of the Six-Day War: “The sun rose in the east / over the fortified bunkers / over our heroic brothers / . . . on Ammunition Hill.”

  Young men in jeans and T-shirts, some in prayer shawls, were dragged into cages. “Shame!” cried the loudspeakers. The soldiers, warned by their officers against excessive force, didn’t use their batons.

  On one roof, high school girls in long skirts recited Psalms.

  A shofar sounded. “Eretz Yisrael!”—Land of Israel!—a man shouted.

  Yisrael stood on a rooftop with Sarah and the children. Protesters laid barbed wire down the middle of the roof. Somehow the Harels’ seven-year-old son Itai found himself on the wrong side of the barrier. Sarah reached over and retrieved him.

  “Utzu eitzah v’tufar!”—Their plans will come to naught!—the protestors around them sang. Yisrael didn’t join in. Instead, he took photographs. Therapy, he told himself.

  Soldiers reached the Harels’ roof. “Disobey orders!” Sarah shouted at them. “Don’t uproot settlements!” the Harel children chanted. Soldiers lifted them down the ladders.

  GENERAL CHAIM EREZ, commander of the Sinai evacuation, entered the home of Rabbi Ariel. Leave us for a few minutes, Erez told his soldiers.

  The rabbi said to the general, “After destruction comes renewal. Let’s drink l’chayim.” They raised shot glasses.

  IT TOOK THE army two days to remove 1,500 protesters from the rooftops and from inside the houses. Few were wounded, none seriously. Thanks to the restraint of the army and the relative restraint of the settlers, the struggle for Yamit turned out to be a kind of theater, a play about civil war.

  The last to be evacuated were the radicals in the bunker. After failed attempts to penetrate the steel door, a bulldozer crashed through a side wall. Protesters threw chairs; soldiers sprayed them with foam. “Let’s see you hurt a rabbi!” shouted their leader, Meir Kahane, as he was dragged outside.

  What could be salvaged—greenhouses, prefab structures, giant refrigerators in packing plants, five hundred dunams of trees, even bomb shelters extracted from the earth—was shipped back to Israel. The rest was bulldozed.

  General Erez addressed his soldiers: “I believe that the sacrifice the state made was necessary. There was an opportunity [for peace] that couldn’t be missed. . . . Those resisting the withdrawal aren’t more Zionist than those who evacuated them, and they don’t love Israel more than we do.”

  SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE, among them Yoel and Hanan and Yisrael, managed to slip back into the ruined town.

  They gathered at an IDF memorial for soldiers who had fallen in Sinai’s battles. The memorial had been a series of concrete pillars, which now lay toppled and scattered. Sand blew in the hot wind. A singed smell rose from the ruins of the dynamited shopping center.

  The ceremony began with the symbolic tearing of clothes of a mourner. The honor of being the first to “tear” was given to Avraham Bar-Ilan, Yamit’s town planner. Immediately following the ceremony, Bar-Ilan intended to drive to Gaza, to become regional planner for its new settlements. What better response of a faithful Jew to hurban than to build in the land of Israel?

  An army jeep appeared. “Don’t start up again,” a megaphone called. “Leave the area.”

  Yoel ignored the order and read aloud, from his pocket Bible, Ezekiel’s vision of resurrection: “The hand of the Lord was upon me . . . and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones . . . and, lo, they were very dry. . . . And He said unto me: Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered: O Lord God, Thou knowest. . . . Then He said unto me: ‘Prophesy over these bones. Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live.’ ”

  Yoel thought of the photographs taken in the death camps just after the war, the mounds of corpses that hadn’t yet been burned. And of the state of Israel that arose three years later. A Jew couldn’t help being an optimist. Even here, among the ruins.

  Hanan read aloud a list of Sinai’s destroyed settlements and vowed to return.

  They sang “Hatikvah,” the anthem of hope. They walked to the last intact building in Yamit, a synagogue. There they removed the round, wood-encased Torah scrolls. Slowly, silently, they walked toward the road out of town. Soldiers and police joined the procession.

  PART FOUR

  MIDDLE AGE

  (1982–1992)

  Chapter 22

  THE FORTY-FIRST KILOMETER

  ARIK ACHMON GETS CAUGHT IN A TRAFFIC JAM

  ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, June 4, 1982, as he was working in his garden, enjoying the beginning of the short Israeli weekend, Arik got the phone call he’d been expecting for months. “It’s Operation Big Pines,” his deputy commander said. “We need you at the base by tomorrow afternoon.”

  For months the army had been preparing an assault against the PLO infrastructure in Lebanon. Though an uneasy American-brokered cease-fire had been in place on the northern border, Arik believed it was just a matter of time before Israel was forced to protect its towns and kibbutzim from periodic Katyusha attacks. Now that time had come. The Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, had just been wounded in an assassination attempt, Israeli planes had bombed PLO camps, and the Galilee, in turn, had been hit by Katyushas. The government had decided to send the IDF into southern Lebanon to uproot the PLO’s “state within a state.” Though the terrorist group that had shot the ambassador had in fact split from the PLO, Arik agreed that sooner or later the IDF would be forced to act, and it might as well be now.

  The cease-fire had forbidden PLO attacks along the northern border; but PLO terrorism against targets elsewhere in Israel, and against Jewish communities in Western Europe, continued.

  For many Israelis, the murderous intent of the PLO was embodied by the fate of the Haran family. Three years earlier, PLO terrorists crossing from Lebanon by sea broke into the home of Danny and Smadar Haran, in the northern coastal town of Nahariya. They caught Danny and the Harans’ four-year-old daughter, Einat, took them to the shore, shot Danny, and smashed Einat’s head against a rock. Meanwhile, Smadar had been hiding in a closet with her two-year-old daughter, Yael; to keep Yael from crying, Smadar had pressed her mouth shut and accidentally smothered her. It was a story that could have come from the Holocaust. Filth, Arik called the terrorists.

  For the sixth time in its thirty-four years Israel was about to go to war. And one way or another, Arik Achmon had been involved in every one of those wars. In a normal country, a forty-nine-year-old CEO doesn’t go off to battle. But you deal with the reality you’ve been given. Arik knew no better definition of Zionism than that.

  Arik finished cutting the grass. Then he called his business partner, Dadi Borowitz. When Arik had left the 55th Brigade to form the 862nd Logistics Brigade, Dadi had insisted on joining him, so Arik put him in charge of field headquarters. Dadi, Arik liked to say, is connected to me by an umbilical cord.

  On Saturday morning Arik said good-bye to Yehudit, who knew better than to ask useless questions like how long he would be gone, and drove his company car to his base in the north. For the last year he had spent increasing time there, preparing his brigade for its mission in a war in Lebanon: supplying the 90th Armored Division, which was to seize the Beirut–Damascus highway close to the Syrian border and prevent Syrian forces from assisting the PLO. In war games, in constant inspections of the brigade’s supplies of tank and artillery shells and C-rations and medicines, Arik had worked his men until he felt they were ready.

  As Arik entered the gate, dozens of trucks—My trucks—were pulling out. “Where to?” he asked. Requisitioned, he was told. He checked the orders; nothing to do. “Replace the missing vehicles,” he told his staff. “Use whatever proteksia you can. But no ‘borrowing’ without permission.”
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br />   The base filled with reservists and with civilian vehicles requisitioned for the war—vans, trailers, open-backed trucks from the Tnuva dairy cooperative, most of them unsuitable for moving tons of ammunition.

  Arik was summoned to IDF field headquarters at Kibbutz Misgav Am. On the invisible map of terrorist attrocities that Israelis carried in their heads, Misgav Am was a landmark. Two years earlier, terrorists had invaded the kibbutz’s children’s house, seizing seven children as hostages; one child was killed in the IDF rescue mission.

  Arik was told: a new division has just been formed, and you will have to supply them too. “Can you do this, Arik?”

  Impossible—he barely had enough men to take care of the 90th. How could he provide logistics units for the whole eastern front? To say nothing of ammunition and fuel and food?

  “We’ll manage,” Arik said.

  THE TANKS BEGAN crossing the border on Sunday morning. Soldiers waved V’s from turrets and held Israeli flags. As they entered the villages of southern Lebanon, Shiites as well as Christians threw rice and candies, welcoming the IDF as liberators from the hated PLO, which had terrorized southern Lebanon.

  Arik’s force gathered in the ripening apple orchards of Kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch, near the border. Men spread sleeping bags and tied blankets to trees for shade. Drivers slept under their trucks. There were explosions in the distance.

  Day two. Still in the apple orchards. The most intense fighting was happening to the west, along the coast, where infantry and tank units were battling PLO forces in refugee camps. PLO members fired at the advancing Israelis from mosques, schools, hospitals. IDF loudspeakers warned residents to flee. Tens of thousands of civilians, in cars and trucks, on foot, crowded the roads heading north. In some camps PLO fighters allowed civilians to leave; in others, they held civilians as hostages.