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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  They had argued during reserve duty. Vehemently, affectionately. Yoel loved Emil’s purity and determination. Every argument between them began in agreement: Israel’s situation was precarious, and drastic measures were necessary. Then what? We need to be strong, said Yoel. We need to be flexible, said Emil. We must stake our claim to what is ours, said Yoel. We must share the land, said Emil. Thwart those intending to destroy us, said Yoel. Try to negotiate with them, said Emil.

  And now he was dead. Killed by a Jew. For Yoel, that was the most devastating realization of all: though there had been no arrests yet, without doubt a Jewish hand had thrown that grenade.

  To toss a grenade into a crowd of Israelis risked killing the soldier with whom you shared a tent in basic training, the officer who led you into battle. And it had happened because of the atmosphere of hatred against the left. Traitors! PLO! If Emil Gruensweig were a traitor, then so was Yoel Bin-Nun.

  LATE AT NIGHT Yoel sat at his desk, rage overtaking grief. “Mourn and weep!!” he wrote in longhand. “For the unity of the people of Israel in its land, against which cursed hands have been raised. For the sin we have sinned—and yes, we too, on the fringes of our [settler] camp have sinned before God in the reckless and cowardly use of words with life and death implications—‘traitors,’ ‘PLO lovers,’ ‘enemy agents’—against an entire community . . . that fought in the ranks of the IDF despite its qualms and its pain [over the government’s policies]. . . .

  “And above all: For the innocent blood that has been spilled in the land. For us the land of Israel is not simply a homeland like France is for the French. This land cannot tolerate innocent blood. A man of faith, who fears Heaven and loves the land, will not say [about the murderer]: ‘He is an exception, a madman.’ These are modern, psychological expressions, emptied of the language of Torah. We say: ‘And innocent blood shall not be spilled in the midst of your land, which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance.’”

  The next morning, Yoel delivered the article to Yisrael Harel. Yisrael looked at the manuscript—words underlined, sentences followed by multiple exclamation marks—and shook his head. A speech, not an article. “Yoel,” he said, trying to be patient, “this isn’t a modern way of writing. You can’t underline words. And all these exclamation marks. In the army they teach us, ‘When you shout I hear, when you speak I listen.’ When you write more calmly, people can listen.”

  But Yisrael was upset by more than the style. Yisrael understood as well as Yoel the implications of Jew murdering Jew—a paratrooper, no less. But why did Yoel have this need to exaggerate his own camp’s flaws? “I’m no less pained by what happened than you,” Yisrael said. “But you’re setting yourself up as judge of your community. Criticize, but within limits. We are under attack from all sides. And now along comes one of our most important spiritual thinkers and justifies the demonization. Yoel, you can’t only criticize your community, you also have to defend it. You want to show the left how pure you are? Don’t do it at the expense of your friends and neighbors.”

  Nevertheless, Yisrael published Yoel’s accusatory lament in the next issue of Nekudah, beside a black-bordered photograph of Emil and a notice of mourning signed by the Yesha Council.

  MOUNTAIN OF BLESSING

  YISRAEL HAREL HAD AN IDEA. Each Independence Day was devoted to a theme, like the ingathering of the exiles and the longing for peace. Why not devote the coming independence day—Israel’s thirty-fifth—to the great pioneering effort of this generation, the movement from the narrow coastal plain to the mountains, the heartland? What better response to the campaign of hatred against the settlers?

  Yisrael made the necessary calls. Israel’s thirty-fifth anniversary would be officially celebrated by establishing a new settlement called Bracha, blessing, on Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, the biblical Shechem. When Joshua led the children of Israel into the land, he divided the tribes into two groups: one half of the people he positioned facing Mount Grizim, the mountain of blessing, the other half toward Mount Ebal, the mountain of curse. Those who followed God’s ways would be blessed, while those who defiled the land would be cursed.

  But the children of Israel could no longer agree about what was blessing and what was curse, which path led to life and which to death.

  SO NOW THEY’RE TRYING to expropriate Independence Day, thought Avital Geva. What next, hevreh, the flag?

  The morning of Independence Day 1983 was cloudy, with a forecast of heavy rain. Avital and friends set out in one of Ein Shemer’s panel trucks to the Peace Now demonstration at Mount Gerizim.

  They crossed the old border and stopped to take in the view. From this incline the coast was plainly visible. There were the giant chimneys of the electric company near Hadera that provided power to half the country; and farther south, the apartment buildings of Netanya and North Tel Aviv. Along the 160-mile-long coastal strip from the Lebanon border to Gaza were crowded most of the country’s population, its major cities and industry and ports and lone international airport. The settlers had a point about the old borders, thought Avital. It’s not a defensible country—

  A car stopped, and three settlers got out. “What are you doing here?” asked a heavyset man, pistol on hip. His tone, Avital noted, was not curious.

  “We’re going to the demonstration,” said a kibbutznik named Levi.

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  “This is our country too,” countered Levi.

  The settler pulled his gun and pointed it at Levi’s head.

  “Whoa, hevreh,” said Avital, “let’s take a break here.”

  The gunman’s friends pulled him aside, back into the car.

  The kibbutzniks waited until they drove away. Levi wrote down the number of the license plate.

  It was pouring when they arrived at Mount Gerizim. Thousands of protesters were in the valley below. Their signs—“A Curse to the Jewish People on the Mount of Blessing”—wilted in the rain. Avital pulled up the hood of his soaked coat. Mud clumped on his work boots.

  On the mountain, cube-shaped prefab houses awaited their new residents, and a dais with wet flags awaited government dignitaries. A few thousand celebrants—far fewer than the number of demonstrators below—huddled under umbrellas.

  Yisrael Harel noticed several Peace Now activists walking up the dirt road to the settlement and suspected mischief. He approached the IDF commander of the central front, General Ori Orr, and asked him to prevent disruptions. Orr dismissed the request. He’s against us, Yisrael thought.

  Yisrael wandered down to the valley. He saw a familiar hooded figure. “Avital!” he shouted. They embraced.

  Yisrael confided, “I’m worried that if your hevreh try to disrupt the ceremony, there could be violence.”

  “I’ll speak to the hevreh,” Avital reassured.

  There was no need after all for disruptions: the rain turned to hail, government officials abandoned the dais, and the ceremony was canceled.

  PROSPERITY IN KIBBUTZ EIN SHEMER

  EIN SHEMER RESEMBLED a construction site. The founders’ courtyard was being transformed into a museum of Zionist pioneering. A new neighborhood was rising. And the long-debated sports center was finally being built—not on the ruins of the greenhouse, as some had hoped, but nearby.

  The kibbutz was subsidizing its building projects by borrowing massively. And why not? With runaway inflation, interest rates were low. The right-wing government had removed some basic subsidies from the kibbutz movement. Water was more expensive, and there was debate within the kibbutzim about whether to stop growing water-intensive crops like cotton. But with the easy money flowing, that seemed like a relatively minor setback.

  Ein Shemer was learning to live with the decline of socialist passion. When three families removed their children from the communal children’s house and insisted on raising them at home, members voted against expelling the rebels. Some of Ein Shemer’s women now wore perfume and modest jewelry. The kova tembel, beloved fool’s cap, gav
e way to truckers’ caps. On May Day, a lone half-empty bus, shared by Ein Shemer and Gan Shmuel, was dispatched to the workers’ march in Tel Aviv.

  Phones were installed in every apartment. No longer would members need to line up in the evening before the kibbutz’s single pay phone.

  Then the kibbutz secretariat decided to distribute color TVs to every apartment. Avital appealed to the secretariat to reconsider: in a year of 300 percent inflation, we should be cutting our budget, not overspending. Who, he asked, will be held responsible when the inevitable crash comes?

  At the weekly kibbutz meeting, Avital’s proposal to suspend distribution of color TVs was rejected. He and Ada were given a color TV too.

  MEIR ARIEL GETS A NEW JOB

  “WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?” Meir said to the secretary general of Mishmarot. “Ein Shemer lets its writers sit and work. Why not consider my work as a musician and composer as work for the kibbutz?”

  “You don’t earn enough from your music,” the official noted. “The kibbutz can’t afford to carry you.”

  Afterward Meir told Tirza, “They’re not letting me breathe. Maybe we should leave for Tel Aviv.”

  “And wait for you to make a living? We’d starve first. I’d have to keep an eye on you every minute. The first week in the big city you’d get hit by a bus.”

  Meir laughed.

  A PROFILE OF Meir appeared in the weekly Koteret Rashit; he had to be coaxed into doing the interview. “His songs are played mainly between 2 and 5 in the morning on Army Radio,” wrote the reporter. “Meir Ariel. [The name] means very little to very many—and a great deal to a few. For them he’s the greatest of songwriters, the Israeli Bob Dylan.”

  Question: “You and Shalom Hanoch began from the same place, Kibbutz Mishmarot. At least in terms of public status, he’s gone much farther. Are you jealous of him?”

  Answer: “I was jealous for a long time. I didn’t have too many conceits, but I did think well of myself [as a musician]. My ego was inflated. It was hard for me to see him leap forward and overtake me.”

  Shalom was also interviewed: “Meir is a unique talent, and he has something to say. But he’s not ambitious enough. . . . If he had to make his living from music he would try harder, he’d get somewhere. He doesn’t go the conventional route, he allows himself to ignore the public. That’s the advantage of a kibbutznik singer, but it’s also a disadvantage.”

  In his low-key way, Meir was in fact trying to nurture a career. Once a week he sang in a small club in Jaffa. A good night drew a few dozen people. The audience—army age, heavily kibbutznik—rarely varied: hard-core fans, who knew all the words to the songs.

  One night Tirza joined him. She was one of the few people in the room who couldn’t sing along: she didn’t know the words.

  Afterward, Meir was given an envelope with cash, a percentage of the night’s take.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Tirza asked.

  “What for?” he replied. “It goes straight to the kibbutz.”

  “This is your money! You’ve already put in a full day’s work. You’re now doing an extra shift for the kibbutz. And how do you know no one is going to pocket it?”

  Meir offered his sad, knowing smile.

  ONE EVENING AFTER WORK, Meir said to Tirza, “You’re speaking to the new secretary general of Kibbutz Mishmarot.”

  “That’s the funniest thing I ever heard,” said Tirza.

  The secretary general—the mazkir—was elected by the kibbutz members and was a two-year position, combination ombudsman and representative to the kibbutz movement institutions. Meir was always available to listen to a kibbutznik’s lament; now he would actually be in a position to help. And, as one of his musician friends put it, who if not Meir could assist the misfits and malcontents who took too many sick days and smoked too much hashish and wouldn’t be able to survive anywhere else but on kibbutz?

  On paper, Mishmarot was thriving. There were some 150 members, the largest number in the kibbutz’s history. Its plywood factory was the biggest in Israel. But Meir knew the truth. Mishmarot was losing its reason for being. Many of its young people were leaving. The kibbutz was no ordinary society; unless nurtured, it would wither.

  Meanwhile there were human needs that required attention—an old-timer who wanted better housing, a young person just out of the army who wanted to study literature. Meir tried to accommodate them all. “Tembel!” the treasurer shouted at him. “You’re bankrupting the kibbutz!”

  Meir’s job, as he saw it, was to place people before institutions. At the weekly kibbutz meeting he addressed members not as “comrades” but with the bourgeois honorific “ladies and gentlemen.” One of his friends, Yehudah, mentioned that he’d never had a bar mitzvah: Yehudah had been sent to Mishmarot as an immigrant child, and when his class had its collective bar mitzvah, only the children of Mishmarot members were included. A few days later Yehudah, now age fifty, received a book from Meir with this inscription: “To Yehudah, for whom they didn’t make a bar mitzvah.”

  Meir sat in his office, bare feet on desk, doodling grotesque faces, which he then hung on the wall. He amused himself with little routines, like pretending to be a busy executive. When a friend phoned, Meir shouted to his empty office, “Hevreh, quiet! Can’t you see I have an important call?”

  IN THE NEIGHBORING KIBBUTZIM, the news that Meir Ariel had become mazkir only confirmed that Mishmarot wasn’t a “serious” kibbutz. Its most successful crop, they joked in Ein Shemer, was musicians.

  Avital Geva borrowed a kibbutz car and drove to Mishmarot to congratulate Meir. They lived mere minutes apart, but over the years had met only in reserve duty. Now Meir had become a spiritual partner for Avital, a fellow artist trying to reenergize the kibbutz.

  Avital found Meir in his office, barely more than a cubicle, in a concrete row of little apartments.

  “Wow, Meir!” said Avital, hugging him. “When I heard you were taking on the job I couldn’t believe it. Meir Ariel? Unbelievable!”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Meir. “I’m actually enjoying it.”

  “And the endless meetings and all the nonsense?”

  “This is my chance to give something back to the kibbutz. I’ve decided to take a break from performing—I want to focus on the job.”

  “Meir, I promise you: whatever sacrifice you make now will come back to you a hundredfold. You’ll see, it will change your work. You’ll be creating from a different place. Your music will thrive.”

  MISHMAROT HAD A small factory manufacturing eyeglass frames, and Tirza convinced the manager to let her try her luck as sales representative. Beautiful, charming when she wanted to be, she traveled to a trade fair abroad and returned with a year’s worth of orders. A few months later she traveled abroad again and repeated her success.

  She approached the manager of a failing kibbutz factory near the Lebanon border that produced sunglasses and offered to represent its line too. The manager agreed, and Tirza returned with more orders than the factory had ever received. Unkind neighbors speculated that she got her orders by sleeping with buyers. They can’t possibly hate me as much as I hate them—

  Success made her restless. Between sales trips she was treated like any other worker, running the machines and making frames. That seemed to her a waste of her talent. She had a better idea: Why not set up a sales company for all kibbutz factories, with her as head?

  Her manager vetoed the plan.

  Tirza confronted Meir. If they try to stop me from taking my next career step, she said, I’ll quit the kibbutz and go into business for myself. “I don’t expect you to quit, Meir. It’s good for you here, you should stay. And don’t worry, I won’t move out, I’ll just give up my kibbutz membership.”

  Meir said, “Here in this house I am your husband. If you want to speak to the mazkir, make an appointment with him during work hours.”

  At the next weekly meeting, Meir began, “Ladies and gentlemen, our comrade, Tirza, has a proposal to raise
. Because of my personal involvement, I am asking your permission to excuse myself.” He left the room.

  The kibbutzniks voted against Tirza. “That’s it,” she said to Meir afterward. “I’m finished with them.”

  ARIK ACHMON DISCOVERS VULNERABILITY

  “SO, ARIK,” SAID HIS BOSS, the CEO of Hamashbir Hamerkazi, “what do you think of my managerial skills?” Hamashbir Hamerkazi was the purchasing company for the kibbutz movement, and for the last year Arik had headed one of its subsidiary companies.

  “You really want to know?” replied Arik. “I think the way you run this company is a disgrace. You’re burning the money of the kibbutzim. You would never be able to compete in a market economy.”

  Arik expected—hoped—to be fired. Instead his boss, mindful of Arik’s connections with Yehudit’s father, Hazan, let it be known through an intermediary that an apology would suffice. Arik responded, “It’s time to part ways.”

  Since that encounter nearly a year had passed. And for the first time since the age of eleven, when he was assigned to work in the cowshed of Kibbutz Givat Brenner, Arik was without a job. The word going around was that he’d been reckless with Arkia’s money. Arik suspected that Dadi was spreading stories about him. Former associates didn’t return his phone calls. Arik Achmon, who had always known exactly what to do in any situation, suddenly had no options.

  Meanwhile, the Achmons’ financial situation was deteriorating. With Arik unemployed, Yehudit was supporting the family, struggling with the mortgage.

  Arik had left Arkia without compensation. Foolishly, during all his years in the company, he had waived the right to a contract. Arik had reasoned: I’m a stockowner; besides, if I ever leave the company, my friends on the board will take care of me.

  The board did make him an offer: Return the 7 percent stock you own in exchange for $100,000—the same sum he would have received as compensation if he had a contract. Arik didn’t know what the board knew: had he gone to labor court, he would have been awarded that sum even without a contract, because he was entitled to the same benefits that other managers received. And he wouldn’t have had to return his stock.