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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  SURROUNDED BY HIS Ulpana girls in sandals and denim skirts and yoga-style pants, Yoel read from the small, heavily annotated Bible that had accompanied him on treks across the land. It was a bright spring afternoon in the Arab village of Silwan, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls. Rising in the near distance were the domes of the Temple Mount. The group stood on a hilltop overlooking Hezekiah’s Tunnel, built by the Judean king Hezekiah in 701 BCE to provide water for Jerusalem in preparation of an anticipated siege by the Assyrian king Sennacherib. Since the intifada, few Jews ventured into Silwan. But Yoel was adamant: We are not abandoning Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

  “[Hezekiah] appointed battle officers over the people,” Yoel read aloud. “Then, gathering them to him in the square of the city gate, he rallied them, saying, ‘Be strong and of good courage, do not be frightened or dismayed by the king of Assyria or by the horde that is with him, for . . . with him is an arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God.’ ”

  And then Yoel saw them: a half dozen young Arab men, pointing at him and the girls and whispering. “Stay here,” he told his students.

  Slowly, he walked toward the young men. A pistol was tucked in the back of his pants, concealed by overhanging shirt.

  Yoel noted that one young man appeared to be the leader. “Salaam alaikum”—Peace be with you—Yoel said in Arabic. “Alaikum salaam,” the young man responded, then added in Hebrew, “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “La, min Allah bas,” replied Yoel in Arabic: I only fear God.

  “Ah, good,” the young man said.

  Yoel didn’t know much more Arabic, and the conversation turned to Hebrew.

  “It’s good you came without a weapon,” the young man said. “Otherwise there would have been a balagan here.”

  “Why should we fight each other?” said Yoel. “Muslims, Jews, we all believe in God.”

  They parted with a handshake.

  THE INTIFADA WAS radicalizing not only part of the right but also part of the left. Peace Now was now advocating a Palestinian state—another Jewish fantasy, said Yoel, as if Yasser Arafat and the PLO were prepared to live in peace beside a Jewish state in any borders. The Jews, so long without the responsibilities of sovereignty, were reverting to the temptation of magical politics. Instead of tearing the nation apart between two unrealistic visions—annexation and land-for-peace—Israelis needed to reestablish a politics of realism, of consensus.

  Writing in Nekudah, Yoel suggested some elements of that elusive consensus: no annexation and no withdrawal, while conditioning any major initiative in peace or war on a solid majority. Yoel called for dividing the territories into Jewish and Arab cantons: Jews would vote in Israeli elections, Arabs in Jordanian elections. Yoel acknowledged that there was in his plan a measure of injustice for Palestinians, who would be denied national sovereignty, but there was no perfect justice in this world—especially given Palestinian rejection of Israeli sovereignty.

  The search for a politics of realism and consensus was, for Yoel, a theological imperative. That was the audacity of Yoel’s new theology: political pragmatism as precondition for redemption. In lectures to students he repeatedly returned to June 7, 1967, when he had stood on the Temple Mount with atheist kibbutzniks. That is how redemption comes: through unity, not through the purist separatism of Yehudah Etzion.

  Yoel discerned one leader capable of re-creating a national consensus: Defense Minister Rabin. True, relations between Rabin and the settlers were often strained. Rabin had outraged settlers by calling them a “burden” on the IDF—to which Yisrael Harel had responded in Nekudah that the state of Israel is also a burden on the IDF.

  But Yoel sensed that Rabin, unlike fellow Labor leader Shimon Peres, understood that a peace agreement with the Palestinians was impossible, and that only interim arrangements aimed at daily coexistence could work. Yoel noted that in 1975, when Rabin was prime minister, he had concluded an interim agreement with Egypt, in which Israel withdrew from part of the Sinai Desert without uprooting settlements. Gush Emunim, and Yoel too, had bitterly opposed Rabin then. But, Yoel now argued, we had failed to understand Rabin’s intentions. Unlike the Likud, Rabin had no illusions about genuine peace with the Egyptians, and so he’d preferred a nonbelligerency arrangement that was less than formal peace and wouldn’t require total Israeli withdrawal. And nonbelligerency, after all, was all that remained for Israel of its cold peace with Egypt.

  If we continued to demand Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, Yoel warned, we will end up with nothing, just like in Sinai. But if we separate settlement building from annexation, we might find Rabin our most effective ally.

  YITZHAK RABIN OFFERED his usual limp handshake to the two men in knitted kippot who had come to his office at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. The message of that perfunctory handshake was, Let’s dispense with protocol and get straight to business.

  Rabin gestured to the two settlers to sit and prepared himself for an unpleasant conversation about the IDF’s lack of resolve toward the intifada.

  “We’re here to encourage you to run for prime minister,” Yisrael began.

  Rabin raised his eyes from the desk. His long and dour face showed surprise. “I assumed,” he said slowly, in his deep monotone, “that you were here to talk about settlement issues.”

  For all his anger at Rabin, Yisrael sensed that the greatest danger to the settlements came, paradoxically, from the right—that only a right-wing leader would have the credibility among the public to withdraw.

  What prompted their private initiative, Yoel explained to Rabin, was the nation’s demoralization. The intifada showed no signs of easing, a no-win war with the Shiite Hezbollah militia was dragging on in the “security zone” in southern Lebanon, and the unity government was faltering. We need a leader truly committed to national unity, said Yoel. “All of Zionism’s historic accomplishments were achieved when the nation was united. Like the Six Days. And our failures happened when we were divided. If we tilt too far right or too far left, the ship will be destabilized.”

  Despite himself, Rabin was intrigued. He had surely never expected to hear any of this from settler leaders. Still, Rabin was careful not to reveal his political ambitions, and shifted the conversation to the security situation.

  Later, Yisrael would say that they had wasted their time, that Rabin was no different from other Labor politicians blinded by the illusions of the left. But Yoel disagreed. The abrupt and strangely shy defense minister, he insisted, represented the best of the historic Labor Party. Yoel didn’t know it then, but the respect he felt toward Rabin was mutual.

  WHAT’S WITH THE ADIV FAMILY?

  AT 9:00 A.M., on September 9, 1988, two men and two women were led handcuffed into the Jerusalem District Court. The defendants, Jewish members of a Trotskyite faction called Derekh Hanitzotz, Way of the Spark, were accused of belonging to a Palestinian terrorist organization. Among them was a thirty-four-year-old with graying hair named Asaf Adiv. His older brother, Udi, sat among the defendants’ relatives and friends.

  More than any other family member, Asaf had been traumatized by Udi’s trial and imprisonment. Asaf joined a Trotskyite faction that even others on the Israeli far left regarded as a cult; he worked in factories to rouse the workers to revolution. Udi had tried to reason with him: Yes, socialism, but scientific socialism, not the Trotskyite fantasy of a workers’ revolution—let alone in Israel, where workers tended to vote Likud. Asaf had responded angrily when Udi, as precondition for release from prison, had repudiated his underground activities, and finally stopped speaking to him altogether. Asaf hadn’t even come to his parents’ house to welcome Udi back from prison.

  On a visit to London, Asaf and his friends had contacted a representative of the Marxist PLO faction, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP)—the group responsible for one of the worst terrorist attacks, the Ma’alot massacre in a high school in northern Israel in 1974. (Udi, before his arrest, had hoped to conta
ct the DFLP.) The Israeli Trotskyites were given underground aliases: Asaf was “Nasser.”

  Back in Israel, though, their activities hadn’t gone further than publishing an anti-Zionist newspaper. Unlike Udi before his arrest, Asaf and his friends had no intention of supporting the Palestinians with violence.

  Yet shortly after his arrest Asaf pleaded guilty to charges of subversion. That was because his interrogators, he explained in court, had threatened to arrest Udi if he didn’t cooperate. But now he was rescinding that guilty plea. Udi was touched by Asaf’s loyalty.

  Udi got a call from a radio interviewer. So what’s with the Adiv family? the interviewer asked.

  We’re very political, Udi replied.

  Udi was relieved that there was one detail of the family’s politics that the media didn’t know. For the last five years, Sylvia’s father and Udi’s former father-in-law had been held incommunicado in an Israeli prison for spying for the Soviet Union. Dr. Marcus Klingberg, former deputy director of the Institute for Biological Research, Israel’s top-secret research center for nonconventional warfare, had handed over Israel’s most sensitive data to the patron of Israel’s Arab enemies. Israel’s security establishment regarded Klingberg as the most dangerous spy in the country’s history—so dangerous that even his warders weren’t told his true identity.

  Sooner or later the public would learn about Klingberg, and then, Udi knew, the phone calls would come. His one consolation was that he was no longer married to Sylvia. Imagine what the media would do to me if I hadn’t divorced her—

  THE TRIAL OF ASAF and his friends ended with a plea bargain. The defendants confessed to membership in a terrorist organization and received relatively lenient sentences. Asaf was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

  In contrast to the rage and fear around Udi’s trial, the atmosphere this time was relatively subdued. No taunting crowds outside the courtroom, no hysterical headlines. The circumstances were different, but so was Israel. The country seemed to want to exonerate its wayward children. We accept the plea bargain, a Shin Bet official told a reporter: “These are people who were innocently manipulated by a terrorist organization.”

  UDI’S WIFE, LEAH, was frustrated. Udi preferred privacy to intimacy, seemed more interested in reading than in talking. As if he were still in prison, holding off the outside world. She tried to give him space, not rebuke him when he abruptly walked away mid-conversation. She told herself to be patient, that old prison habits would eventually pass.

  They tried to adopt a child. But the authorities turned them down. The couple sued, and the judge declared: Udi Adiv is unfit to be the father of an Israeli child.

  We need to get out of here, Udi said to Leah. Go somewhere where no one knows the name Udi Adiv.

  In June 1989 he received a BA in philosophy and Middle Eastern studies from Tel Aviv University. He was accepted by the University of London for a doctoral program in political science.

  At Ben-Gurion Airport Udi was called aside. He was frisked, his suitcase searched. An agent opened a tube of toothpaste and squeezed. Toothpaste dripped. Udi laughed.

  ARIK ACHMON REINVENTS HIMSELF AGAIN

  ARIK WAS MANAGING a subsidiary company for one of Israel’s wealthiest men, shepherding packages from abroad through customs, and he’d had enough. He had helped found Israel’s domestic aviation industry, commanded a brigade, overseen the country’s first experiment in privatization. What was he doing trapped in a dead-end job, a cog in someone else’s ambitions?

  On January 1, 1990, Arik made a new year’s resolution: he would quit his job and become a management consultant. He assumed he needed no formal education in management. He had, after all, spent most of his life trying to make systems more efficient, from the Netzer Sereni cowshed to his logistics brigade in the IDF.

  And so, at age fifty-seven, Arik Achmon was starting again. He put out word that he was available for consultations. Weeks passed, then months, and no one called. Arik was patient. “I’m halfway there,” he joked with Yehudit; “the consultant is ready, he just doesn’t have any clients.” She bought him a computer. “Meanwhile, learn how to use this,” she said.

  THE FIRST CALL came from the director of the industry department of the national kibbutz federation. “Arik, we have a problem on Ein Gev,” the director, an old friend, said.

  Kibbutz Ein Gev was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Until the Six-Day War, its farmers and fishermen had lived under Syrian guns on the Golan Heights just above. Now the kibbutz was trying to cope with growing debt. One kibbutznik had an idea for an improved electric blanket, Arik’s friend explained, and he’d convinced the kibbutz to set up a factory. But the factory was faltering, and the inventor, who was also the CEO, refused to step aside. “He comes from a powerful family on the kibbutz and no one can stand up to him. He thinks he can conquer the world with his electric blanket. Meanwhile the kibbutz is pouring money into a black hole. You’re a kibbutznik, Arik, you understand the sensitivities. Plus he’s a fighter pilot, a war hero.”

  “Kibbutz politics don’t worry me,” said Arik. “And taming pilots is my second profession.”

  “I want you to become the company’s chairman. Do what you can to control him.”

  After a month with Arik, the CEO resigned. For the next two months Arik ran the factory alone. Then he hired a new CEO. Soon afterward the factory shut down and the pilot left the kibbutz.

  OTHER JOBS SOON FOLLOWED.

  One night, after listening to Arik on the phone with a client, Yehudit said, “All you did was tell him what’s wrong with his company. You didn’t ask him what he thinks.”

  “He’s not paying me to hear his own ideas,” Arik said.

  “Arik, you have to learn to listen to people. You act like you know better than anyone.”

  “But it so happens that in this case I do know better.” He was genuinely perplexed.

  “Arik, how do I put up with you? You’re dealing with human beings, not abstract systems.”

  Listen to the client, she says. What am I, a psychologist? Who knows: maybe it’s worth a try—

  TEL AVIV UNDER SIEGE

  THE SIREN, RISING AND FALLING, came at 2:00 a.m. Arik and Yehudit slept through it.

  But the explosion, which sounded as if it were coming from down the block and shook the windows of their house, did wake them. “Yehudit,” Arik said laconically, “it seems that something is happening.”

  It was January 18, 1991. The Americans were bombing Iraq, and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who had vowed to burn half of Israel, had just fired the first Scud missile at Tel Aviv, which fell about a kilometer away from the Achmons’ home. In the weeks leading up to war, every Israeli citizen had been given a survival kit for nonconventional warfare, including gas mask and atropine injection against nerve gas; families with small children were given plastic cribs to encase them. Arik had dismissed the preparations as a kind of hysteria. “Saddam won’t dare attack us with chemical weapons,” he’d said to Yehudit. And even if he did attack, Arik continued, his warheads held barely enough chemicals to affect a few buildings in the vicinity of a fallen missile—a fact that failed to calm his wife.

  “Arik, what do we do?” Yehudit, nervous, asked now.

  “Let’s set up the sealed room,” he said. It will help calm her—

  Yehudit retrieved the supplies she’d bought for a “sealed room” as precaution against nonconventional attack—plastic sheets to cover windows, first aid kit, canned food and bottled water, wet towel to place under the door against chemical penetration.

  More explosions.

  Eight missiles—all with conventional warheads—fell that night on the Tel Aviv area. A few people were lightly wounded from the blasts, but four died from their gas masks, including two elderly women who suffocated because they forgot to remove its seals and a three-year-old girl who was strangled when her panicked father pulled the straps on her mask too tightly.

  The next day Yehudit’s daughter, Amira,
and her two small children moved in. When the siren sounded, they rushed into the sealed room and put on gas masks. Arik, though, refused to wear his. “I’ll join you in the sealed room, but there are limits,” he said.

  “You’re undermining the family’s morale,” Yehudit complained. “If you’re joining us you should wear a mask.”

  “I’ll solve the problem for you,” he said.

  When the next siren sounded, he sat in the living room, watching TV.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life, Arik found himself useless during war. Retired as commander of the logistics brigade, he had asked to continue serving in some capacity and been assigned to a unit attached to the general staff, whose mission was to plan logistics in real time if an unexpected front—say, against Egypt—opened during war. But there was nothing for the unit to do now: this was a missile war, and there was no tangible front.

  Instead this turned out to be Yehudit’s war. She joined a team of psychologists treating Tel Aviv residents—like the man who’d left his armchair when he heard a siren, and seconds later the tail of a Scud crashed through the ceiling, sending fragments into the chair.

  The Scud attacks were a reversal of the wars Israel had known. The home front was now the battlefield. This was also Israel’s first war that wasn’t a communal experience. Each family was on its own, in its sealed room: an atomized war for a postcollectivist Israel.

  And for the first time in its history Israel was under attack and wasn’t hitting back. The government acceded to American requests for Israeli restraint, to maintain Arab support for the war against Saddam. But the government lacked an adequate missile shield and couldn’t even protect its people. The Americans delivered Patriot missiles against the Scuds, but those were experimental and often inaccurate.

  With every siren Israelis repeated their ritual of confinement, waiting in sealed rooms for the soothing voice on the radio to tell them when they could remove their gas masks. They listened skeptically to the reassurances of their leaders and to military experts who had insisted before the war that Saddam wouldn’t dare attack.