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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Meanwhile, progress on the eastern front was maddeningly slow. The tanks of the 90th Division were to have reached the Beirut–Damascus highway by now; instead, they were barely halfway there.

  The IDF’s strategy puzzled Arik. Why a frontal invasion, clumsy and predictable, which would allow PLO fighters to escape northward and regroup? Far more logical to land in the north and then proceed south, trapping the PLO forces. Why didn’t defense minister Ariel Sharon understand what was so obvious to Arik?

  Day three. Hundreds of trucks, loaded with tons of supplies assembled by Arik’s men over the last days, slowly moved through an opening in the border fence into Lebanon. Green hills, villages, apple orchards: a familiar Galilee landscape. Arik set up base near the village of Marj Ayun, just north of the border, and waited for instructions.

  Day five. Arik received an urgent message: Israeli tanks were trapped by Syrian forces near the village of Sultan Yakub, thirty kilometers north of Arik’s position. IDF artillery batteries had moved in, to provide cover for the tanks to escape. But the artillery units were running out of ammunition.

  Arik ordered 150 trucks, loaded with shells, to assemble. “I’m taking the convoy in,” he told his deputy, and left him in charge of the camp.

  With Arik’s jeep in the lead, the trucks headed into the mountains, toward Sultan Yakub. They rode on a narrow two-lane road with cracked asphalt, flanked by pine forests and steep declines. There were no railings.

  The convoy came to a halt: a traffic jam of hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers. Arik tried leading his trucks onto the opposite lane, but jeeps and personnel carriers transporting the dead and wounded were heading south toward the border. Why hadn’t anyone thought about the logistical consequences of moving two divisions on one narrow road?

  He would have to force his way through.

  Several tanks blocked the road. Arik shouted, “Pull to the side! I’m bringing ammunition to the front!”

  No response.

  “Get the hell off the road!”

  Arik jumped out of the jeep, ran toward the tanks. His three “falafels”—the circles of his colonel’s insignia—were noted: the road opened.

  Early afternoon. Arik’s convoy had barely moved a kilometer.

  Up ahead, a cluster of tanks blocked the road. The crews were taking a cigarette break. “Hevreh, move to the side,” Arik said. No response.

  He approached the commander. “I don’t have orders to let you through,” the commander said. “Get me your officer,” Arik demanded. He was handed a radio. “Arik, is that you?” said the voice on the other end. The tanks let him pass.

  A few hundred meters ahead, a lone tank stalled. Arik climbed on top, opened the turret. “Move!” he shouted below. “You’re holding up the war!”

  A groggy soldier emerged.

  “Get out of here! Now!”

  All through the day: shouting, pleading, directing traffic. Another hundred meters, another two hundred meters.

  TOWARD EVENING, ARIK led his convoy off the congested road. They came to a hilltop. Israeli artillery were shelling Syrian positions. In the valley below, Israeli tanks were burning.

  As the crates of shells were being unloaded, Arik received a call on his radio: the commander of the 90th Division, Brigadier General Giora Lev. An old friend: Lev had commanded the first tank unit to cross the canal in the Yom Kippur War, and Arik had stood on the shore to welcome him.

  “We’ve had a rough time, Arik,” said Lev. “There are many dead and wounded. You will have lots of tanks to repair.”

  Arik tried to respond but was unable to speak above a whisper. He had lost his voice on the road. He never fully recovered: his voice had become permanently hoarse.

  AVITAL GEVA GLIMPSES THE ABYSS

  BEGIN AND SHARON had promised the cabinet and the public a limited operation, creating a forty-kilometer cordon that would put the Galilee beyond Katyusha range. But Sharon, intending to expel the PLO from Lebanon and bring the Christian Phalangists to power, ordered the IDF to press on, and by the fourth day of the war, Israeli soldiers reached the edge of Beirut. There they lay siege to Muslim neighborhoods in the western part of the city, where thousands of PLO fighters were barricaded. If the PLO didn’t quit Beirut, Sharon announced, the IDF would invade.

  Now Arik Achmon understood why the IDF had largely opted for a frontal assault. As the siege went on into July, it became increasingly clear that the war had political, not just military, goals. In sending the 90th Division to seize the Beirut–Damascus highway and the Israeli air force to bomb Syrian targets, Sharon intended to expel the Syrians, too, from Lebanon. Only by expelling both the Syrians and the PLO, Sharon believed, would the Galilee be secure.

  Yet the IDF had never before fought a war intended to transform the political reality of a neighboring country. Sharon knew that the cabinet, and the Israeli public, would not likely support such a far-reaching war. And so he bluffed his real goal. In doing so, Sharon risked the trust and unity of a people’s army.

  The national consensus supporting the invasion collapsed. For the first time, war didn’t unite Israelis but actively divided them. There had never been antiwar demonstrations while soldiers were at the front; now protesters, many of them demobilized reservists, gathered outside the prime minister’s house in Jerusalem. “We Don’t Want to Die in Beirut,” read one sign. “You are leading the Jews to the ovens!” an elderly man shouted at the protesters. Doves accused hawks of risking Israel’s most precious strategic asset, the willingness of its people to fight. Hawks accused doves of eroding the country’s will with a Western naïveté fatal in the Middle East. Hawks and doves, though, agreed about this: the greatest danger to Israel was now internal, and the danger was coming from the rival camp.

  AVITAL GEVA STOOD on the edge of the cliff and looked down into the besieged city. Smoke rose from an Israeli air raid. Beirut, with its dozens of multistory buildings, made Tel Aviv seem provincial. What the hell are we doing here? Never had the IDF been sent to conquer an Arab capital. Even in victory, Israel always knew its limits. But with this government there appeared to be no limits. And soon the reservists of the 55th Brigade would have the honor of being among the first to go into Beirut. In Suez City the paratroopers had fought in four-story buildings. How did you take over a city with twenty-story buildings?

  It was early August, and Avital and his friends were camped in the olive orchards of Kafr Sil, a village just above Beirut’s airport. This was the second call-up for the 55th Brigade in less than two months. The brigade had been been mobilized at the beginning of the war but experienced little fighting. Now it had been drafted again. In briefings, commanders showed aerial photographs pinpointing the buildings their units were to seize, but the men didn’t need aerial maps: the buildings were clearly visible.

  Meanwhile, the Israeli air force was bombing PLO positions in West Beirut, trying to force Arafat to evacuate. Water and electricity were cut. It was Israel’s first full-scale asymmetrical war against terrorists embedded in a civilian population. And civilian casualties were increasing.

  The veterans of the 55th Brigade were approaching middle age, and this would likely be their last war. But there was little of the old feeling of purpose. At night, they sat around campfires, but no one sang.

  “Okay,” said Avital, “so we cleared the PLO hevreh out of the south. We did what we had to do. We all know who Mr. Arafat is. Okay. But what’s next? So we’ll go into Beirut. And change the government in Lebanon. And if the Syrians don’t agree, then what? Damascus? Hevreh, where does it end?”

  Yisrael Harel was one of the few to defend Sharon. “Hevreh,” he said, “I can’t help wondering what’s happening here. In the War of Attrition, didn’t we bomb cities along the canal? But then there was no protest movement, no Peace Now. Ah, but then the Labor Party was in power. Now, suddenly, we hear that ‘this isn’t our war.’ Why, because now the Likud is in power?”

  “Yisrael,” said Avital, smili
ng, “why don’t you plant a flag here and build a settlement?”

  HANAN PORAT ISSUED a statement congratulating the IDF and the government for “restoring” southern Lebanon—the lands of the biblical tribes of Naftali and Asher—to the people of Israel. In an interview with the settlement magazine Nekudah, Hanan explained that he wasn’t demanding that the government build settlements in southern Lebanon, only reminding Israelis of their birthright.

  But that was the public Hanan; privately, he was grieving. His daughter, Tirza, had lost her fiancée, Nadav, in Lebanon. Hanan had loved Nadav for his modesty, his devotion to Israel; he felt as if he’d lost a son. Hanan wrote this poem: “My God / bless me to be like Nadav / Pure in heart and deed / he walked in Your ways / and loved You so / until he went to the cedars of Lebanon / went, and didn’t return.”

  YOEL BIN-NUN APPEARED, in civilian clothes, in Kafr Sil. He had been discharged from the reserves several years earlier, following a hiking accident on the Golan Heights in which he broke a leg. But with the hevreh at the front, he couldn’t keep away, and so he’d hitched his way north.

  Avital greeted Yoel with a hug. “Here’s the man!” Avital exclaimed.

  The latest argument around the campfire was about Colonel Eli Geva, commander of an armored brigade who had announced he would refuse an order to invade Beirut, and who had been dismissed for insubordination. That was a first for the IDF. Some of the men were angry at Eli Geva: a yefei nefesh, a delicate soul—not a compliment.

  “Eli Geva is trying to stop something terrible from happening,” countered Avital. “I wish I had his courage.”

  “Let me tell you what I learned from my eight-year-old son, Odi,” said Yoel. “We were in Sinai, just before the evacuation. Odi said to me, ‘Abba, it’s forbidden to speak against the soldiers, only against the government. And it’s forbidden to tell soldiers not to obey an order.’”

  “‘Why, Odi?’ I asked him. ‘Explain it to me.’”

  “‘What will happen,’ said Odi’ ”—and now Yoel’s voice was a talmudic singsong—“‘what will happen if there is a war and someone will say ‘I don’t want to fight’? Odi said it in Sinai. After the destruction of the Temple, prophecy wasn’t only given to fools but also to children.”

  ARAFAT REFUSED TO evacuate West Beirut. If Israel invaded, he warned, he would ignite hundreds of PLO arms caches buried under apartment buildings and schools and mosques. On August 12, Sharon ordered saturation bombing of West Beirut. There were hundreds of casualties, many of them civilians.

  Under pressure from his Lebanese allies, Arafat broke. On August 21 thousands of PLO men began boarding ships in Beirut harbor, bound for Tunisia and Libya and Iraq. Arafat boarded a ship for Athens.

  The men of the 55th Brigade were sent home.

  DAYS OF PENITENCE

  ISRAEL WON, AND THEN LOST. On September 14, Bashir Gemayel, the pro-Israel head of the Christian Phalangist militias and newly designated president of Lebanon, was assassinated by Syrian agents. The IDF moved into West Beirut to prevent PLO units left behind from regrouping. On September 16, Phalangist fighters moved into Sabra and Shatila, two refugee camps in West Beirut, and massacred hundreds of Palestinians. One Phalangist in spiked shoes stomped a baby to death.

  Though no Israelis were involved in the slaughter, the IDF had allowed the Phalangists to enter the camps, assuming their mission was to fight the remaining PLO forces there. And the IDF had provided flares to help the Phalangists to identify PLO fighters. World outrage was directed against Israel. “Goyim kill goyim,” Begin was reputed to have said bitterly, “and they blame the Jews.”

  This time, many Israelis shared the world’s outrage. Even if Sharon and IDF commanders hadn’t known what the Phalange intended to do, they should have suspected: in Lebanon, massacre was the preferred method of retaliation. Israelis shouted at each other on street corners: You’ve disgraced the Jewish people! You’re encouraging our enemies! One Israeli woman, a Holocaust survivor, refused to let her son in the front door when he returned home on leave from Lebanon until he assured her that he hadn’t been near the camps. When Begin emerged from a synagogue in Jerusalem on Rosh Hashanah, demonstrators shouted, “Murderer!”

  Peace Now announced a protest rally in Tel Aviv to demand a commission of inquiry. In the greenhouse in Ein Shemer, Avital and his kids prepared banners.

  “I’m not going,” said Avital’s wife, Ada. “Why do we always have to blame ourselves? Arabs massacred Arabs. Let’s hear some self-criticism from our Arab neighbors for a change.”

  “You’re right,” said Avital. “But this whole war is rotten, and this is a chance to bring down the government.”

  Ada relented, but on this condition: she would bring a poster demanding that Arabs also demonstrate for peace. “And stay close to me,” she said.

  Hours before the rally began, the Square of the Kings of Israel in Tel Aviv was already filling with Israelis desperate to be cleansed from the shame. There were hand-written signs: “What Else Has to Happen?” “If I Forget Sabra and Shatila, May I Forget Jerusalem.” “Why Did My Son Die?” And many Israeli flags.

  The MC, actress Hannah Meron, stood on an artificial leg: she had lost a leg in a terrorist attack. “I refuse to live in shame,” she told the crowd of hundreds of thousands, referring to Sabra and Shatila.

  In the density of bodies, Ada got separated from Avital. Acutely nearsighted, she perceived the crowds as a devouring blur.

  Ada held up her dissenting sign: “Where Are the Peace Protests in Umm al-Fahm?”—an Arab Israeli town near Ein Shemer. Protesters mistook her for a right-wing provocateur. What is she doing here? someone demanded. You don’t belong here, someone else said. Ada wanted to say: I’m from your camp! But why do we all have to think the same way, just like the right?

  But her voice caught, and she couldn’t get out the words.

  YISRAEL HAREL LED a delegation of settler leaders to Ariel Sharon. After Yamit, Yisrael had vowed to cut off all relations with Sharon. But now he told the defense minister, “Whatever there was between us I’m putting aside.”

  It was the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, known as the Ten Days of Penitence. And in the religious Zionist community anguished voices were demanding a national self-reckoning. Rabbi Yehudah Amital, head of the Mount Etzion yeshiva, invoked rabbinic Judaism’s most damning language: the government, he said, had desecrated God’s name, a sin that not even Yom Kippur can cleanse.

  Amital condemned those of his fellow rabbis who had called for an invasion of Beirut. And he ridiculed Hanan Porat for calling south Lebanon part of Israel. Was the state of Israel obliged to conquer every part of the land promised to Abraham? In placing settlement in Judea and Samaria as its highest value, he accused, religious Zionism was distorting the Torah. Judaism’s hierarchy of values put the well-being of the people of Israel before the wholeness of the land of Israel. Israel should sacrifice that precious posession for the sake of genuine peace, if that ever became possible.

  This, from the rabbi whose book about the spiritual meaning of the Yom Kippur War, Ascent from the Depths, had been promoted by Hanan as the spiritual textbook of Gush Emunim.

  The redemption movement now had its first heretic.

  ARIK ACHMON DECLARES WAR

  ARIK RETURNED FROM Lebanon to a company in crisis. The war had devastated Arkia. Israelis stopped vacationing abroad, and Arkia’s charters to Europe were canceled. Only recently the company had bought its first jet, which now sat idle. Arik’s partner, Dadi, had bought another two jets that were scheduled to be delivered in a few months. What were they going to do with them? And how would they pay for them?

  Even worse for Arkia, President Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of the American aviation industry was overwhelming the market with used planes—and selling used planes was a major source of Arkia’s profits. The collapse of the Israeli tourism industry was temporary, a result of the war; but the devaluation of the market for used aircraft was long-te
rm. Arkia was facing the prospect of multimillion-dollar debt.

  Arik announced a freeze in raises and canceled a course for Arkia pilots to learn how to fly a jet plane. The next day, pilots showed up late for work.

  Arik suspended them. He told the pilots’ work committee that he was canceling their collective contract and would agree to their return only on the basis of individual contracts.

  The transportation ministry backed Arik. His board of directors backed him too. “We’re the test case for privatization,” he told the board. He “wet-leased” planes (along with pilots) from a rival company—“They’re robbing us blind, but I don’t care”—and continued flying to Eilat.

  To Yehudit he said, “I’ve entered the battle of my life.”

  ARIK’S CONFLICT WITH the pilots was into its second month when he was invited to meet with the head of the Histadrut’s work committees, Yisrael Kaisar.

  The gray building with little windows that was headquarters of the Histadrut mega-union was known to Israelis as “The Kremlin.” With its bureaucrats who could never be fired and the old lady pushing the tea cart, this was the fortress of socialist Israel. There was no labor union like it anywhere: not only did it represent the workers, but it also owned many of the factories.

  Kaisar’s office, Arik noted, was perhaps three times as large as that of the finance minister. The Yemenite-born Kaisar was one of the few Sephardim in the Labor hierarchy; he wore a white shirt with its collar spread open over his jacket collar, in the old style of Labor politicians.

  “Who are you to go against the Histadrut?” he demanded.

  Arik smiled. “Yisrael, leave the theatrics aside. Unlike you, I don’t have big factories where no one knows what’s happening. At the end of the month, I have to face the banks.”