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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  “Where is your shame, Arik? A kibbutznik, son-in-law of Hazan—how can you behave like a greedy capitalist?”

  “I’m ready to do whatever you want, Yisrael. Just one thing: you write the checks for the extra pilots that the company can’t carry.”

  “All right, all right, I’m familiar with your clever answers.”

  How to explain to Kaisar that all this began at a ceremony one summer evening in Kibbutz Givat Brenner, when eighteen-year-old Arik Achmon stood alone against the commune?

  “I’m prepared to offer generous benefits,” said Arik. “What’s fair is fair. But the rules of the game have to change.”

  Kaisar instructed the pilots to return to work. For now, he said, give that lunatic what he wants; we’ll force him to back down in court.

  THE PILOTS’ CASE against Arkia went to labor court. Arik knew he didn’t have a chance: the court would force him to fulfill the pilots’ collective contract. But he was prepared to shut down Arkia rather than give in.

  “Is there a way out?” Arik asked his lawyer.

  “There is a possible way out, if you have the courage. But no one has ever done it before.”

  “Speak,” said Arik.

  According to Israel’s labor laws, the lawyer explained, if you fire a worker, the case moves from labor court to civil court. There the issue is defined as a contract violation, and the employer must pay the worker 200 percent compensation. But the firing stands. Crucially, if the worker suspects he is about to be fired, he can apply to the labor court for a staying order. And in labor court it is nearly impossible to fire an employee. The key, then, was to get the dismissal letter into the employee’s hands and move into civil court.

  “The pilots won’t bear it,” Arik said, catching on. If they were fired from Arkia, they would never fly again in Israel; the market was simply too small. “They’ll back down and negotiate.”

  They devised a plan: as soon as the labor court issued its ruling forcing Arik to honor the pilots’ collective contract, Arik would dispatch letters to every pilot, informing him he’d been fired. Timing was crucial. If the letters weren’t sent simultaneously, pilots could warn each other and seek an injunction against the firing, keeping the case in labor court. But once they received the dismissal letters, the case would move to civil court.

  The morning of the verdict, Arik waited in his office—the “war room,” he called it. His personnel manager, Chaim Becker, a battalion commander in the paratrooper reserves, phoned from court: Now.

  Arik sent word to messengers waiting in taxis, each equipped with a letter and the address of a pilot. The one-line letter read: “In another 24 hours, you are fired.”

  That evening, a delegation of pilots appeared in Arik’s office.

  After all-night negotiations, they reached an agreement. The company had the right to fire pilots, and the collective agreement would be replaced with individual contracts. In return, Arik agreed to benefits like extra pay for flights on Shabbat and holidays.

  For the first time, the Histadrut acknowledged that privatization required new rules. And Arik Achmon seemed destined for one success after another.

  FOR THE SAKE OF HEAVEN

  IT WAS SATURDAY night, shortly after the end of Shabbat, and the earnest, short-haired young men crowding the study hall of the Mount Etzion yeshiva were still wearing their Shabbat white shirts and dark slacks and white knitted kippot. Many of the students had recently returned from the front, only to find their beloved rabbi, Yehudah Amital, under vehement attack from within the Orthodox community. Students had asked him to explain his recent pronouncements, and so he had summoned this unusual meeting—not a political talk but a religious talk about politics.

  Speaking in a formal and slightly archaic Hebrew, Amital asked forgiveness from his students: “I have made you uncomfortable by turning to the media. . . . [But] I am convinced that these matters must be expressed for the sake of Heaven, for the honor of the Torah and for the honor of the land of Israel.”

  During the siege of Beirut, Amital continued, “I had hoped to hear at least a hesitating voice [among the rabbis]. . . . But the most unequivocal voice in support for an invasion [of Beirut] was heard in fact from the representatives of religious Zionism. . . . The fact that these voices were accompanied with biblical verses, sayings from the rabbis and expressions in the style of Rabbi Kook, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing, fills me with horror.

  “Nothing should worry us more than another war. Every fallen soldier wounds the soul of the Israeli public, and beyond that, every war weakens the attachment of many Jews to the land of Israel.” If peace becomes possible, he concluded, he would prefer a smaller state that would attract large numbers of Jewish immigrants than a larger state without peace and with fewer Jews.

  The young men listened in silence. The rabbi asked for questions.

  Hanan Porat sat in the last pew, holding his head in his hands. Hanan loved Rabbi Amital, had regarded him as his teacher and partner in restoring Jewish life to the Etzion Bloc. It was on Hanan’s initiative that Rabbi Amital had founded the Mount Etzion yeshiva after the Six-Day War. The rabbi had performed Hanan’s marriage ceremony. In his presence Hanan felt the power of Jewish survival, that one can endure anything and still remain a faithful Jew.

  But now the man of faith was faltering.

  Hanan raised his hand. Amital smiled and beckoned with both hands: Come up.

  As he approached the Torah Ark, Hanan silently prayed: God, guide my speech, may I not utter unworthy words about my teacher and friend, Rabbi Amital.

  Amital gestured toward the lectern. For a moment they stood together. With his long graying beard, suit and tie, and old-fashioned black yarmulke, Amital conveyed the wisdom and caution of the centuries. Hanan, approaching the age of forty but with shirt untucked and knitted kippah jaunty on the side of his head, still conveyed the urgency of youth, the refusal to wait any longer for redemption. He remained the same young man who had founded the settlement movement in the summer of 1967: without pomposity, incapable of duplicity, known to everyone as simply Hanan though he too was an ordained rabbi.

  Holding either side of the lectern, Hanan began with the Torah portion of the week: God commanding Abraham to leave his homeland and his family. The commandment to settle Canaan, Hanan noted, obliges Israel to conquer the land, even at the price of war. “Can the value of a piece of land be greater than the value of human life? Why are we obliged to go to war, to kill and be killed, for inert territory? . . . How can the expectation of tikkun olam, repairing the world—which is so Jewish—the longing to see all the nations spiritually elevated, be reconciled with going to war, with destruction and blood, with mourning and orphanhood?

  “Rabbi Amital, we cannot avoid this question.”

  In fact, Hanan determined, there was no contradiction between conquering the land and creating peace, because the return of the holy people to the holy land was a precondition for world peace. “The message of peace will come only from the Mountain of the House of God”—from the rebuilt temple. “Only from the power of a world transformation in the hearts of people will internal values change and will the craving for power and pride, the source of all wars in the world, be defeated.”

  The land of Israel, then, wasn’t real estate to be traded away for an ephemeral political peace, but a divine trust containing the hope for world peace.

  “What do I ask of you, Rabbi Amital? Only that together we will merit . . . the blessing which you recited before me on the day of my wedding: ‘Bring rejoicing to the barren one [the land of Israel] by ingathering her children with joy. Blessed are You, Lord our God, Who gladdens Zion through her children.’”

  Rabbi Amital let Hanan have the last word.

  YOEL BIN-NUN’S RESPONSE to Rabbi Amital appeared in Nekudah. I understand the rabbi’s anguish about the extremists in our midst, wrote Yoel, but he is wrong to posit the unity and spiritual value of the Jewish people against that of the land of I
srael. There is no hierarchy of values here, insisted Yoel: “People and land are entwined. As it is written in the book of Samuel II: ‘Who is like Your people Israel, one nation in the land.’ The [kabbalistic work] Zohar notes: It is one nation when it is in the land. And without the land there is no unity for the nation of Israel.”

  MEIR ARIEL GROWS A BEARD

  THE FIRST SNOWS were falling in the mountains of Lebanon when Meir’s unit was called back to the front. No longer with the 55th Brigade, Meir was serving in an antitank unit. His fellow reservists were mostly kibbutzniks, like him, approaching middle age.

  They were stationed on a mountaintop overlooking the Christian town of Jezene, south of Beirut. Following the Sabra-Shatila massacre, the IDF had withdrawn from Beirut. The fantasy of a new Lebanon was over. The Shiites, who had initially welcomed Israel as a liberator, now turned against the new occupier.

  Meir’s platoon settled into an abandoned stone villa. With each war, the transformation from civilian into soldier became harder for Meir to manage. He seemed to move in slow motion as he padded his body before setting out on patrol: seven ammunition clips, two grenades, two canteens, bulletproof vest. His most cherished piece of equipment was a pocket notebook in which he wrote lines for songs.

  Meir added a new last line to the song he’d written after the Yom Kippur War, “Our Forces Passed a Quiet Night in Suez”: “Our forces are passing a quiet night in Sidon,” the Lebanese port city.

  WITH HIS BEARD and Hasidic sidelocks, Moshe Landau was a singular presence in the unit. Moshe was a newly observant Chabad Hasid who believed that redemption was imminent. The more commandments a Jew fulfilled, Chabad taught, the more he enhanced the accumulation of goodness that would break through the density of matter and fill the world with light.

  Moshe sat on his mattress on the floor, studying a text about gematria, numerology, divining hidden meaning and patterns through the numerical equivalent of Hebrew words. Meir, uninvited, sat down beside him and peered into the pocket-size book.

  “What are you reading?” Meir asked. Moshe was reluctant to say. How could he possibly explain a complicated text to someone without a religious background?

  Meir persisted. Moshe, relenting, explained, “Every Hebrew letter has an equivalent number. Alef is one, kuf is a hundred. HaKadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy One Blessed Be He, gave us the written Torah, but the Torah has a soul. If we study gematria, we can better understand what He wanted to say to us.”

  Take the word Elohim, Moshe continued, one of God’s names, whose numerical equivalent is identical with hatevah, the Hebrew word for nature. “The Holy One is showing us that He and nature are the same. Everything you see is God Himself. When I see a leaf or a stone, I don’t see the thing itself but the Owner Who created it and the Power that sustains it. God is trying to say to us: It’s not nature, it’s Me.”

  “If God is infinite,” asked Meir, “why did he create a finite world?”

  God, Moshe explained, is both nature and beyond nature.

  “Interesting,” Meir said, got up, and left.

  In fact Meir was fascinated. He loved the Hebrew language, the way one word formed another, creating a web of meaning, like adam (man) and adama (earth). The very structure of Hebrew reflected the faith of the Hebrews in a purposeful, interconnected universe. For Meir, discovering gematria only deepened the majesty of Hebrew. God created through letters and numbers, the building blocks of reality. Hebrew spoke the hidden order of the universe. In conveying the messy details of life in the language of meaning, Meir could perhaps redeem his chaotic world.

  MEIR RETURNED HOME on leave. He had grown the beginnings of a beard. His long curly hair remained black, but the beard was white.

  “What’s this?” Tirza demanded, afraid that Meir was becoming devout.

  “A protest,” explained Meir. “I’m not shaving until we get out of Lebanon.”

  “Why are you waging war at my expense?” said Tirza. “If you don’t shave, you won’t have a wife. Choose.”

  Meir shaved.

  CRASH

  ARIK ACHMON HAD outmaneuvered the strongest workers’ committee in Arkia, stared down the Histadrut, proven that privatization required new rules. But Arkia’s financial situation was becoming desperate.

  The two Boeing 737s Dadi had ordered were delivered in early 1983. Dadi had hoped to begin paying for them by selling planes he had bought two years earlier. The system had worked until now: Arkia sold its used planes for cash, and bought new planes on credit. But now there were no buyers for the used planes.

  The division of labor between Arik and Dadi had been complete: Arik was responsible for operations, Dadi for buying and selling planes. But now Arkia’s debt was growing by tens of millions of dollars.

  Arik told the board: It’s Dadi or me. “Kibbutznik fool,” Dadi taunted him. “You don’t understand anything.”

  Arik counted his supporters: a clear majority.

  But when the board gathered, it voted to relieve both Arik and Dadi of their positions, while retaining them as advisers.

  Arik quit.

  A few days later, Dadi was reappointed deputy CEO.

  “What was I thinking?” Arik told Yehudit. “That I could be straight with them? That there could be trust in business? You tried to warn me about Dadi—but as usual I knew better. Dadi promised something to somebody, I’m sure of it. I don’t know how, but he screwed me.”

  Kibbutznik fool.

  Chapter 23

  CIVIL WARS

  FRATRICIDE IN JERUSALEM

  EMIL GRUENSWEIG, A thirty-five-year-old kibbutznik, peace activist, and reservist officer in the paratroopers, didn’t want to go to the demonstration. “It’s not going to make any difference,” he said to a fellow activist in an uncharacteristic moment of despair. He had just returned from reserve duty in Lebanon, wanted to spend the evening working on his master’s thesis, about the rights and limits of free speech. No, his friend insisted, this demonstration is important, you need to be there.

  It was February 10, 1983. Under pressure from much of the Israeli public, the government had formed a commission of inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre. On February 7 the commission, headed by Supreme Court chief justice Yitzhak Kahan, had submitted its findings: though Defense Minister Sharon had no advance warning of the massacre, he bore indirect responsibility for allowing the Phalangists into the camps and should resign. The cabinet was about to meet in emergency session, and Peace Now was planning a march to the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, to demand Sharon’s dismissal.

  Emil Gruensweig, son of Holocaust survivors, had wandered with his family through Europe and South America before immigrating, as a teenager, to Israel. Here, he felt, he had finally come home. He moved to Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev Desert, taught high school there, and helped found an Arab-Jewish summer camp. For Emil, peacemaking was the responsibility of ordinary people. The difference, he would say, between having an opinion and being committed to one’s opinion was the willingness to pay a price for it.

  Since the Lebanon War, his natural optimism had faded. Though he’d opposed the war, he went when his reserve unit was summoned. It was also a hard time for him personally. Recently divorced, he had left the kibbutz and moved to Jerusalem. With his receding hairline, he looked prematurely middle-aged.

  Toward evening Emil joined the demonstrators gathering in Zion Square in downtown Jerusalem. There weren’t many of them, perhaps a thousand. Far-right activists who had come to disrupt, along with passersby from the city’s working-class and ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, surrounded the protesters. “PLO!” some shouted. “Kibbutzniks!”—as if that too were now a disgrace.

  Pushing, punching. Someone spat in Emil’s face. “Traitor! I’ll finish you off!”

  They began marching toward the prime minister’s office. Emil linked arms with other protesters, formed a line, and led the besieged procession. “Sharon, go home!” they chanted. Emil, wearing only a sweater in the co
ld Jerusalem evening, marched in the center.

  Counterprotesters along the route became more violent, grabbing posters and kicking. Helmeted police appeared helpless. Water poured down from a balcony.

  They reached the prime minister’s office. Police finally separated the protesters and the taunters, some of whom had followed the marchers all the way. The rally ended with the singing of “Hatikvah.”

  Protesters began dispersing.

  And then—an explosion. Smoke. Screams. “Why are you screaming? What happened?” “Grenade! They’ve thrown a grenade!”

  Many of the protesters knew the smell of an exploded grenade. But in the middle of Jerusalem, near the prime minister’s office?

  Emil lay on the ground, silent, a piece of shrapnel in his neck.

  Ambulances evacuated the wounded. Emil bled to death on the pavement.

  INSIDE THE PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE, the cabinet voted to endorse the Kahan Commission and dismiss Sharon.

  Ever since he was a boy, Sharon had been an outsider. In his farming village, Kfar Malal, his parents were so estranged from their neighbors that he had grown up without knowing what the inside of his friends’ homes looked like. In the army he’d been repeatedly denied promotions for which he was most qualified. He’s reckless and untrustworthy, opponents said; his military exploits leave behind too many bodies. Supporters, though, regarded him as a savior, the IDF’s most brilliant commander, inspiring his men to victory. And when the country was in desperate need, whether to stop terrorist incursions in the 1950s or defeat the Egyptians in 1973, it invariably turned to Sharon. And then, invariably, rejected him.

  And now he had been dealt the final humiliation. Don’t worry, Begin tried to reassure him. Great deeds still await you.

  YOEL BIN-NUN HEARD the name on the radio and held his head. Emil—