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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Arik wanted to hire architectural and consulting firms from abroad; Kaisar wanted only Israelis. “You’re screwing with me again?” he said.

  “Yisrael, we don’t have the expertise. This is a chance to do things the right way, not the way we usually do.”

  They compromised: for every firm hired from abroad, an Israeli firm would be hired to work with it.

  They argued about location. Kaisar wanted to move the airport to the Negev desert, to encourage development of Israel’s most neglected region.

  “Why drag everyone to the south?” said Arik. “You can’t impose ideology on practical need.”

  Kaisar yielded to the vision of a new, normal Israel.

  URI BEN-NOON, CEO of the Dead Sea Works, was an unlikely friend for Arik Achmon. Paunchy, gray bearded, with an extra-large knitted kippah, Uri was a devout Jew who liked to quote the Talmud and his father, a Chabad Hasid who had been exiled by the Communists to Siberia. Uri offered Arik insights into the weekly Torah portion; Arik didn’t know what he was talking about.

  They had met in the early 1960s, when Uri joined Company A, 28th Battalion, then under Arik’s command. Uri, Arik quickly realized, wasn’t the kind of soldier likely to charge into machine gun fire; Uri, who didn’t like to run at all, once claimed to be a radio operator to avoid a training exercise. But Uri had social skills, so Arik appointed him company clerk, in charge of manpower. Uri never forgot that it was Arik who had insisted the unit’s kitchen become kosher, allowing religious soldiers to feel at home.

  Years later, when Arik resigned from Arkia, Uri had been one of the very few in the business community to stand by him, finding him a job. After Arkia, Arik liked to say, I learned that I could fit all my real friends into one taxi and still have room. Uri Ben-Noon was one of those friends.

  And now, having recently become CEO of the Dead Sea Works—one of Israel’s most profitable companies, producing fertilizer from the Dead Sea—Uri hired Arik as his consultant.

  In Uri the CEO, Arik recognized a soul mate. They shared a fierce commitment to truth: if Arik found anything wrong with my conduct, Uri said appreciatively, he wouldn’t cover for me. And they shared a respect for employees: Uri came to work at 6:00 a.m., to greet the morning shift.

  Uri intended a major company expansion. The Dead Sea was rich in magnesium, the lightest metal in industrial use; yet the company was only producing potash. “My managers don’t think big,” Uri explained to Arik. “Each of them is in his own separate world. I need you to get them to act like a team.”

  Arik met with each of the two dozen managers separately. He began by introducing himself, though that was hardly necessary: everyone knew that Arik had been Uri’s commander.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Arik said, and proceeded to listen. Just as Yehudit had admonished him: Pay attention to people. It wasn’t easy. How can I sit here for two hours listening to this nudnik? But slowly he began to understand: a company isn’t an abstract system, it’s a living organism. People like to talk about themselves; if you appear interested, it helps build trust. Sometimes Arik found himself genuinely interested. What the managers revealed about their lives and thoughts helped him understand the company’s weaknesses and strengths. He had always focused on accomplishing the mission, even if that meant ignoring the emotional needs of others. Now the mission required paying attention to those needs.

  The managers suspected him of being a spy for Uri. Some shared sensitive information with Arik, to see whether it leaked. “You don’t know me yet,” Arik said, “but you’ll learn that what you say to me in confidence stays with me.” Gradually he won their trust and became a channel of communication between Uri and his staff.

  Even as he protected confidences, Arik tried to protect Uri. When a manager whom Arik felt was disloyal to Uri was up for promotion, Arik protested. “Don’t be so hard, Arik,” Uri admonished. “Sometimes even you have to learn to forgive and forget.”

  IN MAY 1993, Arik turned sixty. He gave himself a present: a renewed subscription for skydiving. Leaping from the plane, stretched out toward earth, he felt an old vigor and self-confidence, a man astride his world.

  FIRST FRUITS IN VENICE

  THE METAL OUTLINES of a greenhouse were already visible when Avital, laughing and running toward his friends, appeared in the Venice fair grounds. In three weeks, the Biennale would open, and with it a fully functioning replica of the Ein Shemer greenhouse. An advance team of kibbutzniks had been working for nearly a week, clearing and measuring and fastening. “You’re amazing, amazing!” Avital exclaimed, grabbing his friends and kissing them.

  And then Avital got to work. Kneeling, he screwed metal arches together. Someone in a cherry picker sawed off branches extending into the greenhouse space. Wooden planks were hammered into chairs. Avital had agreed in the end to build a new greenhouse rather than dismantle the one in Ein Shemer, and that meant more work against a pressing deadline.

  They were middle-aged men in blue work shirts, young people in T-shirts. There was no boss; the collective trusted itself.

  ON THE EVE OF SHAVUOT, the harvest holiday of first fruits, they completed the basic structure. As they unrolled the plastic roof, church bells were ringing.

  Exhausted and energized, Avital’s team gathered around a long wood table for a celebratory meal of vegetables and white cheese. Rafi baked pitot in a small clay oven. On a gas burner, Turkish coffee was brewing in a blackened tin pot, just like in Ein Shemer.

  Rafi offered a kibbutznik’s version of blessing: “Okay, so let’s bless the fruit of the vine, of the field.” He quoted the Bible: “‘A holiday of Shavuot shall you make for yourself.’ A time to plant, a time to sow . . . and to eat.” Laughter. “At this hour, as the final preparations on the kibbutz are being made for the ceremony of the first fruits, as Comrade Hankeh has made her peace with the Yemenite dance for the ceremony—” Laughter. “At this very hour we are eating a dairy holiday meal with bread the work of our hands. Happy holiday!”

  Gideon Ofrat appeared, as relieved as he was joyful. “Hevreh, really, what amazing work,” he said. “In whatever name I speak for—art, the state of Israel, whatever—thank you.”

  THE FORTY-FIFTH BIENNALE opened on June 9, 1993. There were acrobats on stilts trailing streamers, women with shaved heads wearing wings. An empty frame hanging from a tree turned passersby into momentary portraits. In the Russian pavilion, conceptual artist Andrei Monastyrsky celebrated Soviet kitsch. In the German pavilion, Hans Haacke tore up the floor; a sign on the wall read “Germania,” Hitler’s name for Berlin. The American pavilion exhibited new works by the eighty-one-year-old sculptress Louise Bourgeois; her name was engraved over the Greek-pillared entrance.

  In the midst of this celebration of the artist, of pure art, Avital and the hevreh grew cucumbers. There was much curiosity about the Israeli exhibit. It was undeniably beautiful: a three-meter-high domed plastic structure overflowing with greenery, at its center a long fish tank with sheets of water pouring from showers above and turning the air into mist; at once moist with new life and ethereal, shimmering and transparent. But what exactly was it doing here?

  The very presence of the greenhouse challenged the other exhibits, just as Ofrat had hoped: is there a purpose for art beyond its own expression? It was, in its way, an echo of the ancient argument between Athens and Jerusalem: was the highest human achievement aesthetics or divine service?

  Avital, of course, would not have put it that way. And yet as the greenhouse evolved into a holistic model, Avital’s idea of existence had become holistic too. Nothing was extraneous. It was a vision of a purposeful universe.

  Avital loathed being turned into the center of attention, becoming part of the show. When an Israeli TV crew filmed him watering plants, he said testily, “Leave me alone.”

  Unfazed, the reporter turned to the camera: “The message here is that the greenhouse is the work of a team.”

  Finally Avital relented and gave a brief interview to th
e Israeli crew, but only to emphasize the centrality of the hevreh: “This is what defines us: a group of young people, all of them army graduates, all of them serious— And the fact that we can work together for years— And we’re not alone. In Israel there are hundreds of places where hevreh work together, doing great things. Thanks to”—he clasped his hands—“being together.”

  Avital Geva, age fifty-two. The camera showed a man with bright blue eyes, short graying hair, spare long face, stubborn chin, bashful yet mischievous smile. In his tank top and baggy blue kibbutz pants, he looked like one more worker in the greenhouse, just as he intended.

  Yet Avital was acutely aware that, for many Israelis, his egalitarian vision wasn’t the future but the past. At the Biennale, the state of Israel was celebrating its collectivist heritage just as the kibbutz was beginning to concede defeat. Even Ein Shemer had recently shut down its children’s house, returning its young people to the nuclear family. And most kibbutzim were deeply in debt to the banks. Ein Shemer had avoided bankruptcy only by selling ninety dunams of orchards to a developer, who was building a shopping mall on land that Avital and his friends had cultivated.

  BACK HOME, AVITAL received an invitation to participate in an art exhibition in Japan. He wrote, “If you want to see me, come to Ein Shemer. I’m busy working on the roof of the greenhouse with the children.”

  Government officials, potential donors, and old friends came to congratulate him. One of them was Arik Achmon.

  “Avital, I’m deeply impressed by what you’ve accomplished,” said Arik. “You’ve come a long way from harnessing my daughter to a plow.”

  Avital laughed and gave Arik a pot of mint.

  A PRECIOUS INHERITANCE

  MEIR ARIEL WAS walking past a synagogue in Tel Aviv early one evening when a man standing at the entrance waved him over. We need a tenth man to complete the minyan, the prayer quorum, he said. Meir readily agreed. After prayers—too fast for Meir, who lingered over the words—he was invited to return for the synagogue’s afternoon Talmud class.

  The next day Meir joined the men around a long table, listening to them argue with the ancient rabbis. Meir had long since become expert in Bible, quoting from memory long passages from the Prophets and the Song of Songs. But here was Jewish knowledge that had been denied him on the kibbutz.

  Meir became a regular in the synagogue’s study circle. His parents’ generation of Jews had been the first in three thousand years to sever the continuity of religious faith, a necessary rebellion, perhaps, to create a new life in the land of Israel. But now the son was restoring the Jewish millennia to the Israeli decades.

  Every morning he withdrew to his study and prayed in phylacteries. Sometimes he would spend as long as two hours reading from the prayer book, savoring the sacred Hebrew, talking to God in his own lyrical Hebrew. Then he would work on a song.

  Tirza couldn’t understand why Meir was wasting his time in prayer. When a friend called, asking for Meir, Tirza said, “He can’t talk now, he’s swaying.”

  Prayer calms me, Meir explained to her. To a friend, he said, “If not for the Torah, I’d be in an institution.”

  ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, in the hours before sunset, Meir swept the yard of his house near the sea, paid his tab at the grocer so as not to carry debt into Shabbat, then took an especially long shower, purifying the body and washing away the week. As a favor to him, Tirza lit Shabbat candles. Meir stopped smoking for twenty-four hours and tried not to violate Shabbat by driving. He preferred to perform, he said, during the “six days of creation.” But when he had a performance on Friday evening that he felt compelled to play, he would circle his car in a ritual of his own making and declare the vehicle his temporary home—honoring the spirit of Shabbat if not quite its strict observance. Then, with Tirza driving, he would fill a silver goblet with wine and bless it. If his Judaism was to be authentic, it had to be an expression of his being, not an imposed set of rules.

  Word got around that Meir Ariel—of all people!—was becoming an observant Jew, and a journalist for the newspaper Ma’ariv came by to interview him.

  Her questions were about the technicalities of observance, which she read off like a shopping list. Do you light a fire on Shabbat? Separate meat and milk dishes? How much time do you spend studying Torah? The questions revealed her anxiety: Was Meir Ariel, the bohemian whose songs broke all the taboos of Hebrew music and who championed marijuana and spoke openly of his open marriage, about to be lost to secular Israel?

  Meir answered patiently, trying to expand the conversation to ideas, avoid being labeled.

  “So that’s it?” asked the journalist. “Now you’re Orthodox?”

  “I’m not exactly secular and not exactly Orthodox,” Meir replied. “I’m pareve. . . . [I haven’t] gone all the way in observing the commandments.”

  He felt, he said, like someone who’d been given a precious inheritance and was now assessing its worth.

  “How can you as a religious person perform in a pub?”

  “It is an honorable place where people gather, like a synagogue. . . . We are in the land of Israel, in clubs where people allow themselves to be happy.”

  And why didn’t he wear a kippah?

  “I’m waiting for the moment of love. One should take that on with love and feeling. Maybe I’m postponing many [other observances] so as not to frighten my environment.”

  Chapter 28

  ALMOST NORMAL

  THE HANDSHAKE

  IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT, August 28, 1993, and Ofra had just experienced the most depressed Shabbat in its history. Its residents had known many traumatic moments—terrorist attacks and the Sinai uprooting and the Jewish underground and the intifada. But nothing like this. The day before, the media had reported on a deal, concluded during secret negotiations in Oslo, between the Rabin government and the PLO. The details were still unclear, only that Israel and the PLO had agreed to recognize each other and enter into formal negotiations. And as a show of goodwill, Israel would turn over most of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho to Arafat. In Ofra the news was greeted like a death sentence.

  Yisrael Harel was waiting outside his house when the black government car, accompanied by a jeep with border police, appeared. The call had come from Motta Gur just as Shabbat ended: at a time like this, explained Motta, he wanted to be with his friend Yisrael. Motta felt a debt to Yisrael. As chief education officer of the 55th Brigade, and then as head of the paratroopers’ commemoration efforts, Yisrael had helped preserve the legacy of the battle for Jerusalem.

  “How is everyone?” Motta asked, resting his hand on Yisrael’s shoulder, just as he had when he last visited Yisrael’s home, during the mourning for his son Eldad. “Lousy,” said Yisrael, managing a half smile.

  Yoel Bin-Nun saw the vehicles parked outside Yisrael’s home and hurried over. Others did too, until Yisrael’s living room was crowded with neighbors.

  Motta listened silently to their rage and grief. Had the government lost its mind? Did Motta really think we could make peace with an archmurderer whose life’s purpose was to destroy the Jewish state? How could you, liberator of Jerusalem, be part of a government that endangered Israel’s hold on Jerusalem, to say nothing of the lives of thousands of Israelis in Judea and Samaria and Gaza? In the end the PLO wasn’t interested in Ofra, it wanted Tel Aviv. Nothing would come out of this pretend peace except blood.

  “Friends,” said Yisrael, seeking calm, “Motta has come on a private visit.”

  Motta, now deputy defense minister, was pale and very thin. Yisrael knew Motta’s secret: he was fighting a rare cancer known as carcinoid, which spreads with agonizing slowness. Motta asked Yisrael to take him and his secretary to an inner room. There, she gave him a shot of morphine.

  Motta returned to the salon. Looking around at the angry, anxious faces, he said, “I’m here as a friend. I know you are in pain. But I want to be clear: I support the agreement. I think this is a good strategic move for Israel. T
his can save the state from demographic disaster and raise our status around the world.”

  Yoel could hardly control himself. How could Rabin, of all people, have legitimized Arafat? Had he been wrong about Rabin all along? For months Yoel had been trying to get settler leaders and Rabin to reach a compromise over building in the territories. In a meeting with Rabin, Yoel had warned him that there would be no peace between Arabs and Jews without peace among Jews.

  And Motta: just recently Yoel had gone to see him and pleaded, Don’t surprise us. At the very least give us, the settler leaders, some warning if you are about to radically change the status quo. Work with us; we can help control emotions among our people.

  Yoel said now, “You promised me, Motta: no surprises. Instead you’ve left us with the phone dangling in the air and you’ve cut the cord. What am I supposed to say now to my community?”

  “Look, Yoel, I’m here,” Motta replied. In fact Motta too had been taken by surprise by the Oslo agreement. “Whatever problems come up, I will be your address,” he promised the settlers.

  Yoel of course had his own address. However heartbroken, he resolved not to give up on Rabin just yet. Perhaps that connection could help contain the damage.

  ARIK ACHMON WATCHED the TV broadcast from the White House as President Clinton nudged a reluctant Yitzhak Rabin to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat, and thought, We can do business with him. Of course Arafat is detestable, but he’s no fool. He understands that America is the only superpower and that he has no choice. If we compromise, so will Arafat.

  Arik had met Rabin on several brief occasions, in the army and then in Labor Party circles, and each time confirmed the same impression: Rabin is the best of us. Modest, awkward in the spotlight, he placed the nation’s interests before his own. Like the best army officers, he was open to change, curious about opposing opinions. When elected prime minister in his first term, in 1974, he’d been the first sabra—native-born Israeli—to lead the country; now, nearly twenty years later, he was still Israel’s only sabra prime minister. Unlike the prime ministers born in Eastern Europe, Rabin wasn’t haunted by anti-Semitism, and rarely spoke of the Holocaust. He took the ability of the Jews to defend themselves as a given. Only a leader with that kind of self-confidence, believed Arik, could make peace.