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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  In his inaugural speech as prime minister, Rabin presented a vision of the Jewish state integrated into the family of nations, fulfillment of the Zionist dream of normalization. The old order was changing, Rabin had said then, and Israelis had to stop believing that the whole world was against them. Challenging the biblical saying of Balaam, Rabin declared that the Jews were not fated to forever dwell alone. If Israel was to find its place in the new world, it had to abandon its psychological ghetto.

  Seeing Rabin and Arafat together at the White House ceremony signing the Oslo Accords, Arik felt that vision was about to be fulfilled.

  YISRAEL HAREL WATCHED Rabin shake Arafat’s hand and thought, They’ve lost it. Israel’s ruling elite, the children and grandchildren of the pioneers, had lost their socialism, and now they were losing their Zionism too. All that remained for Israel’s elite was an ideology of peace. A false peace. A peace of fools.

  Normalization, Yisrael feared, was happening prematurely, before the Jewish state had been accepted as normal. How would this people continue to make sacrifices for survival, retain its alertness? Rabin himself had said in a candid moment that he feared an exhaustion among his people. But exhaustion was no basis for policy, not for a people confronting existential threat.

  Yisrael was writing a weekly column for Ha’aretz, the left-wing newspaper, as a token right-wing voice. In his columns he bemoaned the loss of pioneering ideals. If leftists opposed settlement in Judea and Samaria, he asked, then why weren’t they settling in the Galilee and the Negev, areas within the borders of pre–’67 Israel that were at risk of losing their Jewish majority?

  Yisrael had loved the kibbutzniks from the moment he first encountered them as sailors on the illegal boat that transported his family and other Holocaust refugees trying to reach the land of Israel. The kibbutzniks had carried a broken people on their backs. But now they were depleted, their revolutionary passions spent. Like my friend, Arik Achmon, the kibbutznik of North Tel Aviv—

  Yisrael was tormented by a heretical thought: Could it be that the ultra-Orthodox were right? That the secular Zionists were doomed to fail because they had excised the soul of the Jewish people, its religious faith, creating an identity too thin to transmit?

  He confided to a journalist: “I used to say that if I had to be confined to a desert island, I would prefer to be with my kibbutznik friends from the paratroopers. But I can’t trust them with the Jewish future anymore.”

  Urgent—Personal!

  September 29,1993

  The Prime Minister

  Mr. Yitzhak Rabin

  Mr. Prime Minister!

  As you know, I have been trying these last years, and investing mighty efforts, to attempt to prevent a dangerous schism in Israeli society, in particular over Jewish settlement.

  But how could Yoel continue in that role after Rabin had done the unthinkable and legitimized Arafat?

  Soon, if there will not be a drastic change, I will no longer be able to influence [settlers] in a moderate direction.

  The letter was replete with exclamation marks, combined exclamation and question marks, underlined words—the sputtering style that Yisrael Harel had tried to erase from Yoel’s writings for Nekudah but which, in his current agitation, Yoel couldn’t suppress.

  Yoel took some comfort from the fact that the Oslo Accords didn’t explicitly call for a Palestinian state or the redivision of Jerusalem—both of which, Rabin told the Knesset, he opposed. The only way to prevent the Oslo Accords from leading to a Palestinian state, Yoel insisted, was to recognize the Yesha Council as an official parallel body to the new Palestinian Authority, with control over the settlements. But if Rabin continued on his present course, wrote Yoel, “I fear a great explosion.”

  YOEL WAS SHOWN into the prime minister’s office and left alone with Rabin. No aides or note-taker, Yoel noted appreciatively. A gesture of trust—

  Yoel had resolved to avoid emotion: his relationship with Rabin, he understood, was based on an exchange of analyses of Israel’s situation. And discretion: aside from his wife, Esther, he told no one about their deepening connection.

  “The premise of the peace process is wrong,” Yoel said to Rabin. “Fatah is not more moderate than Hamas. They share the same goal. There is a division of labor between them: Hamas continues with terrorist attacks while Fatah pushes for diplomatic gains. Strategically they are working together.”

  “Nonsense,” retorted Rabin. “They are divided by an abyss of hatred.”

  Yoel mentioned a slogan he had recently seen on a wall near Ramallah: “Fatah and Hamas Together until Victory.”

  “It’s just a slogan,” said Rabin, waving his hand in dismissal.

  Then he said, “We’re not here to convince each other about the things we don’t agree on, but to find those things that we do agree on.”

  They agreed on this: no withdrawal to the 1967 borders, an undivided Jerusalem, a security border along the Jordan Valley. No settlements, said Rabin, would be moved in the interim stages of an agreement.

  If Rabin remains committed to an interim rather than a comprehensive approach, thought Yoel, we can work together.

  “I will continue writing to you,” said Yoel, “but I absolve you of any responsibility to reply. You are the prime minister, you will make the decisions. I only ask that you read what I write.”

  Rabin nodded and offered his limp handshake.

  THE TRAITOR AND THE PROPELLERS

  THOUGH THE CRUCIAL details had yet to be negotiated, many Israelis reacted as if the war was over. At a progovernment rally in Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, young people released balloons and danced with giant Israeli flags and leaped ecstatically into a pool of water. State schools were instructed to offer education for peace. Army Radio played peace songs.

  With rare exceptions, the Israeli media uncritically embraced the Oslo process. Newspapers assured readers that they would financially benefit from peace; on the cover of the financial section of Yediot Aharonot appeared a drawing of a dove with a hundred-dollar bill in its beak. A Yediot reporter was dispatched to Tunis to write about Mr. and Mrs. Arafat at home; Yasser, the reporter noted, personally served his guests soup.

  A majority of Israelis supported the Oslo Accords. Partly the changing mood was a result of the intifada: a growing number of Israelis had concluded that the price for absorbing the territories was too high, that occupation undermined Israel’s Jewish and democratic values, that the Jewish people hadn’t returned home to deprive another people of its sense of home. And so if the right’s policies had led to the intifada, then the left’s policies ought to be given a try. The 1970s and ’80s had been the decades of Greater Israel, and the ’90s seemed about to become the decade of Peace Now.

  There was also, as Rabin noted, the changing international atmosphere. During the Sebastia showdown of 1975, much of the public had supported Gush Emunim as an expression of its contempt for the UN’s Zionism-racism resolution. But Israel was no longer being instantly demonized, and Israelis responded with a readiness to take risks for peace.

  Israel was once again reinventing itself. For the first time in almost twenty-five years, inflation dropped below 10 percent. Thanks largely to Russian immigration, the economy was expanding by about 6 percent a year. Though the population had grown by 10 percent in four years, the threat of mass homelessness passed. Instead, Russian families doubled up in small apartments, worked at two or more jobs, and quickly entered the middle class. It was Israel’s most “normal” immigration: most Soviet immigrants had come to be part of not a Jewish state but a western state; Israel was simply as far west as they could reach. Yet they were also becoming Israeli. In Russia, families tended to have a single child, an expression of uncertainty about the future; now hopeful immigrant parents were risking a second.

  Foreign investors, Michelin-star chefs, California winemakers—all were discovering this new Israel. Israelis were traveling the world and returning with a longing for the civility of ab
road. There was less pushing in lines at the bank and at bus stops. The claustrophobic sensation of too many survivors from too many traumas pressing against each other in too little space was easing. Once, when the six beeps announced the hourly radio news, bus drivers would turn up the volume and passengers fall into communal silence; now, on days when there were no terrorist attacks, drivers and passengers ignored the news.

  Privatization of government companies, first tested by Arik Achmon a decade earlier, was on the agenda. The miracles of capitalism: instead of the two-year wait for a telephone under the old system, the wait was now a matter of days and dropping. Even the notorious government bureaucracy wasn’t immune to the new spirit: one could now get an Israeli passport in one day, delivered to your door. A new commercial TV channel easily overtook the government channel. Then came cable: twenty channels, two hundred channels! Products from around the world appeared on supermarket shelves—Italian pasta replaced the local noodles made bright with yellow dye. McDonald’s opened with celebratory media coverage: Israel was truly becoming part of the world.

  THE SETTLERS AND their supporters reacted to Oslo just as Yoel had feared. The end of Zionism, they were calling it. One protest poster read: “For sale: Used State, 1948 Model, in Good Condition.” In opening the way to an Israeli withdrawal, Rabin, some said, was leading the Jews to another holocaust: after all, even Labor Party dove Abba Eban had once called the pre-’67 lines “Auschwitz borders.”

  The attacks against Rabin turned brutal. Posters of his face wrapped in a kaffiyeh appeared on the streets of Jerusalem. Graffiti declared him a traitor. Stickers demanded, Oslo Criminals to Justice. In the magazine Nekudah, a settler leader compared Rabin to Philippe Pétain, the French general who collaborated with the Nazis. In an editorial, Yisrael Harel denounced “the government of evil.”

  Rabin reciprocated the contempt. He compared antigovernment protesters to “propellers,” spinning pointlessly. “They don’t affect me,” he said dismissively, using a Hebrew phrase which could also be interpreted as “I couldn’t care less about them”—which is exactly how the right understood it. He compared the Likud to Hamas and labeled both the enemies of peace, outraging his opponents by implying that the chief democratic opposition was no better than a murderous fundamentalist group committed to Israel’s destruction.

  How were Israelis to argue with restraint when both right and left were convinced that if their opponents prevailed, the state would be not merely diminished but destroyed?

  Terrorism intensified. The stabbing sprees in Israeli cities continued; dozens of Israelis were killed and wounded after the signing of the Oslo Accords, more than in the year before the peace process began. Rabin noted that the attacks were initiated by Hamas, which opposed the agreement, and called the new terrorism victims “victims of peace”—a phrase that further outraged his opponents. Arafat, Rabin insisted, would control Hamas more effectively than Israel ever could because he would be operating without the constraints of the rule of law—“without the Supreme Court and B’tselem,” an Israeli human rights NGO, as he cynically put it.

  Yoel watched with horror as his community and the leader he loved turned against each other. How could students of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, the camp that had consecrated Jewish unity and the Jewish state, speak with such contempt for the government of Israel—for the man who brought the victory of the Six Days?

  But Rabin too, Yoel believed, was hardly blameless. How could the man who had given the people of Israel its moment of greatest unity initiate a process that was leading to its unraveling?

  Every few weeks Yoel would sit up late at night and write another letter in longhand to Rabin. The prime minister’s bureau chief, Eitan Haber, would include Yoel’s latest fax in Rabin’s weekend reading package. In one letter Yoel pleaded with Rabin to reach out to the settlers: “Most settlers are not personally hostile to you, the relationship can still be salvaged.” He urged Rabin to be firm in negotations with the Palestinians, berated him when Yoel sensed weakness, praised him—grudgingly—when Yoel sensed strength. “Congratulations (for now?) on your firm stand,” he wrote Rabin. He offered the prime minister political advice: the Israeli public doesn’t want a leader perceived as desperate for peace at any price. He signed one letter “with respect and anxiety,” another, “with pain.”

  The letters contained urgent requests. Ofra needed a bypass road around Ramallah. The Gaza settlements needed access to the Mediterranean shore. Settlements needed land on which to expand, otherwise they would become isolated islands. Only the IDF, and not Palestinian police, must be responsible for security on roads leading to settlements. Yoel challenged Rabin: If we share the same goal of preventing a PLO state and an Israeli withdrawal to the ’67 borders, then you have no choice but to strengthen the settlements.

  Rabin treated Yoel’s requests seriously. Yoel wrote Rabin about ensuring Israeli control over an ancient synagogue in Jericho, where settlers were praying and studying. “As far as I know there were no provocations there,” Yoel wrote. “And if there were—let’s deal with it together.” Rabin’s office wrote back, saying that religious life in the synagogue would remain under Israeli control. Construction began on a bypass road between Ofra and Jerusalem. And the Gaza settlements were given access to part of the coast.

  Yoel had no official standing among the settlers; many considered him an irritant or worse, a virtual sellout. Yet Rabin devoted hours to conversations with him. The requests were all one-way; Rabin never asked Yoel to convey a message to settler leaders, never urged him to try to temper settler opposition. For Rabin the meetings were an end in themselves. He needed to know how his policies were perceived by a worthy opponent.

  Yoel tried explaining the settlers to Rabin: “You must understand our situation,” he wrote. “On the one hand Hamas has declared open war on us. . . . On the other hand, the PLO is fighting against Jewish settlement in Yesha on the diplomatic front. . . . Even angels would be hard-pressed to remain steady under such pressure.”

  And Yoel tried explaining Rabin to the settlers: He isn’t our enemy! When the Yesha Council invited a pyschologist to suggest ways of unnerving Rabin, Yoel was outraged: We are pouring oil on the fire! Yoel reminded settler leaders that, as prime minister during his first term, Rabin had withdrawn from parts of Sinai but, unlike Begin and Sharon, hadn’t uprooted a single settlement there. So who was left, who right?

  Yoel had resolved not to divulge his meetings with Rabin to settler leaders. But he did confide in Yisrael Harel.

  “You’re naive,” said Yisrael. To himself he added: Rabin gets thousands of faxes, and Yoel thinks he has a personal relationship with him. Yoel always has to imagine himself at the center. Now he’s adopted Rabin as a father figure.

  A SETTLER NAMED Chaim Mizrahi was murdered while buying eggs in a Palestinian village. The killers turned out to be members of Arafat’s Fatah. Only after intense pressure from the White House did Arafat condemn the killing—by fax.

  “During our [last] meeting,” Yoel wrote Rabin, “you repeated two or three times the sentence: ‘As long as the Shin Bet tells me that it is Hamas [that is behind the terrorist attacks]—it’s Hamas!’ Two days later it was revealed that the murder of Chaim Mizrahi, may God avenge him, was carried out by Fatah!”

  Rabin, warned Yoel, “was trapped in a conceptual failure”—a charged term that evoked the behavior of Israeli leaders who, in the days before the Yom Kippur War, ignored approaching danger because they believed the Arabs were incapable of attacking. Like Golda Meir, Yoel was implying, Rabin was ignoring reality.

  And yet, continued Yoel, astonished, Rabin was intent on transferring guns to Fatah—weapons that would sooner or later be turned against Israel. “Until now I thought I knew where you want to go, and I knew we disagreed. Now, though, I don’t know where you are leading us! Do you know??”

  Yoel was warning of two approaching disasters. The first was external: after winning territorial concessions from Israel, Arafat
would betray the peace process and return to terrorism. The other threat, though, would come from within. Growing despair among the settlers and their supporters would lead to “acts of desperation.” The result, he wrote Rabin, would be a tragedy for them all.

  DESECRATION OF GOD’S NAME

  SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN on February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a physician in the town of Kiryat Arba near Hebron, put on his reservist uniform, though he was not on reserve duty, loaded the Galil assault rifle he kept in the closet, and put another four bullet clips in his pockets. He moved quietly, so as not to awaken his wife and children. Then he walked toward the Tomb of the Patriarchs, burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah.

  It was the holiday of Purim, which celebrates the undoing of Haman’s plan to destroy the Jews of ancient Persia. And the thirty-five-year-old physician was on his way to write the next chapter of Jewish triumph over their enemies.

  Tall, soft-spoken, with long beard and sidelocks, the Brooklyn-born Dr. Goldstein was noted for his piety. Every morning he immersed himself in a mikveh, a ritual bath. Often, when his busy schedule permitted, he would join the dawn prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. His neighbors could call the doctor at any hour, and he made house calls. He had treated hundreds of Israelis wounded in terrorist attacks; whenever an attack occurred in the Hebron area, the army immediately beeped him.