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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Even in hard-line Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein was considered extreme. He was a disciple of the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane, who had been assassinated by an Arab terrorist in New York in 1990. Kahane created a Jewish theology of vengeance and rage. The purpose of the Jewish people, he had preached, was to defeat Amalek—the biblical tribe that attacked the Israelites in the desert and whose evil essence passes, in every generation, into another nation seeking to destroy the Jews. When Jews erase Amalek, God’s name will be glorified and the Messiah will come.

  The ultimate Kahanist holiday was Purim. Haman, as the Scroll of Esther pointedly notes, was a direct descendant of the king of Amalek. The holiday is the story of triumph over Amalek.

  Kahane’s minuscule movement, Kach, was banned from the Knesset for racism. And Kahanism was marginal among the settlers. But not in Kiryat Arba. Its town council even had a Kahanist member—Dr. Goldstein. Kahane had loved his doctor disciple: “There is no one like Baruch,” he’d said, no one so willing to sacrifice.

  Lately Goldstein was in despair. He’d been treating too many terrorist victims; a close friend had died in his arms. Goldstein blamed the government and the IDF for weakness, for desecrating God’s name in its war with the new Amalek, the “Arab Nazis,” as he called them. Interviewed by a journalist, the doctor had said, “There is a time to kill and a time to heal.”

  Baruch Goldstein approached the entrance to the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

  “Purim same’ah”—happy Purim—he greeted the Israeli guards. They assumed that Dr. Goldstein was on his way to morning prayers.

  As he walked the worn stone steps that led up to the sand-colored, fortresslike building, Goldstein carried with him the accumulated humiliations of Hebron. The Jewish pilgrims confined by Muslim rulers to the seventh step of this building. The massacre of Jews in 1929. The terrorist attacks that embittered the Jewish return after 1967.

  He entered a small room with a high domed ceiling, the shrine of Abraham and Sarah. Two stone cenotaphs behind bronze gates marked the graves in the cave below. Jewish prayer books and Bibles crowded the shelves: this was the building’s synagogue. An adjacent hall, marking the graves of Isaac and Rebecca, was the mosque. A green metal door separated the two rooms. Goldstein opened the door. From the hall came chanting: “Allahu akbar,” God is great.

  He entered the hall and hid behind a pillar. Men were bent on embroidered prayer rugs. Kerchiefed women were grouped along a wall. The hall was especially crowded: it was the Muslim fast of Ramadan.

  He fired.

  Panicked men ran for the door, directly into the line of fire, trampling those still prone on prayer rugs. “They’re killing the men!” a woman screamed.

  He ran out of bullets. Reloaded. Emptied the second clip and loaded a third. A fourth. He was firing not at men in prayer but at Haman and Hitler and Arafat, at Amalek.

  As he paused to load his fifth bullet clip, he was overpowered. By the time soldiers arrived, twenty-nine worshippers were dead, dozens more wounded. There was blood on the prayer rugs, on the stone floor and walls. The murderer, beaten to death, lay in his own blood.

  AS SOON AS the morning reading of the Scroll of Esther ended in Kfar Etzion, Hanan Porat headed toward Hebron. Hanan was a father figure to the settlers, and today his place was among his people in Kiryat Arba. Reporters would soon be descending on the town; left-wing politicians would be demanding a government crackdown on all the settlers, not just on their extremist minority. Hanan intended to strengthen the settlers’ spirits, and urge them, too, to condemn the massacre, not to allow the left to taint a whole community with the act of a renegade.

  Before leaving home Hanan assembled a plate of hamantaschen and other sweets, a symbolic offering for the holiday. He put on a peddler’s cap, a kind of joke: on Purim it was customary to dress up, enhance the merriment. All the more important, given the gloom of this day, to push back with the spirit of Purim.

  Hanan loved Purim. For Jewish mystics it was a day to transcend this world of duality and taste the world to come, where there is no evil, only good. According to one tradition, a Jew was supposed to get so drunk on Purim that he couldn’t distinguish between Haman and Mordechai—Amalek and Israel. Evil as illusion, a foil to invigorate the good, as Rabbi Kook taught.

  Purim was a time of wildness, of rupture in mundane reality. And now Hanan had to deal with the consequences of a madman who had distorted the holiday’s redemptive meaning.

  Hanan wasn’t surprised to learn that the murderer had been a follower of Meir Kahane. Hanan had long regarded Kahane and his misfits with an almost aesthetic distaste. Outsiders. Not part of us— In Brooklyn Kahane had organized vigilante patrols to protect Jews in urban neighborhoods, and he had tried to do the same in Judea and Samaria, as if the Jews were a besieged minority in their own country. Hanan despised Kahane’s thuggish style, his apocalyptic messianism, so unlike the optimistic messianism of the Kookians. Hanan had always dismissed Kahane’s followers as mere nuisance, best ignored.

  A crew from Israel’s Channel 2 TV was waiting at the entrance to the Kiryat Arba town council. Hanan ignored the crew and greeted friends standing inside the doorway. “Happy Purim!” he called out, smiling. “Happy Purim, hevreh!”

  “Are you happy, Hanan Porat?” the reporter asked.

  “We’re happy because today is Purim,” Hanan replied. “On Purim you must be happy even if there are crises. I came to strengthen the people here. But I consider what was done terrible.”

  He entered the office and forgot about the interview.

  That night Channel 2 news showed Hanan, in peddler’s cap, smiling and wishing his friends happy Purim. “We’re happy because today is Purim,” he told the camera. “On Purim you must be happy even if there are crises.”

  And that was it. Without his condemnation of the massacre. As though he were indifferent. Happy.

  For many Israelis, the enduring image of the Hebron massacre became a grinning Hanan wishing Baruch Goldstein’s neighbors a happy Purim.

  THE SHOCK AND REVULSION among Israelis toward the massacre were profound. Dozens of rabbis, among them those from settlements, signed a letter stating that “there can be . . . no forgiveness for the murder of people at prayer before the Creator of the world.” Speaking to the Knesset, Yitzhak Rabin excommunicated the mass murderer from the community of Israel.

  In Kiryat Arba, opinions were divided. Some residents hailed Goldstein as a savior. Rumors spread that the Palestinians had been planning a massacre of Jews and that Goldstein had preempted them—a Purim miracle. A thousand mourners walked in a muddy field in a drenching rain to bury Dr. Goldstein, beside a park dedicated by the town council to Meir Kahane. Yisrael Ariel, the former rabbi of the destroyed town of Yamit, eulogized Goldstein and compared him to Rabbi Akiva and other martyrs.

  In his lead editorial in Nekudah, Yisrael Harel denounced the massacre as a “repulsive act . . . that should shake the soul of every person created in God’s image. . . . We are not part of the same camp [with those who support the massacre]. . . . Our camp . . . will continue to be built with holiness and purity.”

  Then, in a second editorial appearing just below the first, he abruptly changed tone: “The attacks against us have been so relentless, so hateful, that we were tempted to wonder whether the tragedy that happened in Hebron—and it was great, but fateful especially for us, the settlers—was greater than the Holocaust.” The two sides of Yisrael Harel: Humane and empathic, mocking and self-pitying.

  Hanan Porat had feared that the settler mainstream would be blamed for Goldstein, and that was precisely what happened. The symbol of that convergence was Hanan himself.

  Columnists accused Hanan of rejoicing despite the massacre, and wondered whether he would have shown any less enthusiasm for celebrating Purim had there been Jewish victims. “Haman Porat,” taunted Labor Knesset member Haggai Merom. The beautiful boy of religious Zionism, leader of the orphans of Kfar Etzion, wounded paratrooper, hero of Seba
stia: the gloating face of the Hebron massacre.

  It’s a lie! Hanan told friends, journalists, colleagues in the Knesset. They edited out my condemnation! They’re trying to destroy me, and through me, the settlement movement! I, Hanan Porat, a supporter of mass murder? I, who denounced the Jewish underground, including some of my closest friends? Who insisted on coexistence with our Arab neighbors in Kfar Etzion and sought no revenge for the murder of our parents? When a friend was killed by terrorists a few years ago before Purim, I still said, “Happy Purim,” because that is what a Jew affirms!

  The denials scarcely helped. Israelis recalled not only Hanan’s “Happy Purim” but the smile that went with it.

  Yoel Bin-Nun was furious with Hanan. He had desecrated God’s name: Yoel knew of no more damning indictment. So what if they edited his condemnation? That was no excuse! Who knew better how to manipulate the media than Hanan Porat? He should have known how his comments, his demeanor, would emerge on TV.

  For Yoel, the incident was an expression of Hanan’s long pattern of denial. Like reassuring protesters in Yamit that the evacuation wouldn’t happen because, according to the logic of redemption, it couldn’t happen. Or refusing to offer a realistic plan for the Palestinian problem. Of course Hanan hadn’t celebrated the massacre. He was only trying to do what he always did, encourage the people, impart a bit of light. But his behavior revealed that he hadn’t absorbed the severity of the moment. Hanan’s inexhaustible optimism, his faith in imminent redemption, were both strength and fatal weakness. Redemption was an opportunity, not an excuse to deny reality.

  Yoel decided there was no point in arguing with Hanan. And that decision, he knew, marked an ending between them.

  Personal Only!

  March 25, 1994

  Prime Minister

  Yitzhak Rabin

  Shlomot!

  There is a vast and worrying gap between you and the public at large. . . . The public doesn’t trust the PLO, and rightly so, and continues to see it, and ongoing Palestinian terrorism, as an existential threat. . . . There is wide popular support for Jewish terrorism! . . . If you won’t understand this, and if you won’t insist on an end to [Palestinian] terrorism as an absolute pre-condition for negotiations [with Arafat], you are likely to forfeit both the peace process and the prime ministership. . . . The key is in your hands!

  Even as he warned Rabin of the consequences of his ill-conceived policy, Yoel warned the settlers of the consequences of Jewish terrorism.

  The next victim of right-wing violence, Yoel predicted in Nekudah, would be a Jew. “The murder of gentiles [by Jews] ends with the murder of Jews. . . . The threats are already being heard, the justifications are already being written. . . . Words that are spoken don’t remain in the air. There are those who absorb the message and rise up and act.”

  DESPITE THE OSLO ACCORDS—because of them, said critics—Palestinian terrorism reached its highest level in years. Hamas sent suicide bombers into markets and onto buses. Left-wingers blamed Baruch Goldstein for provoking Palestinian revenge; right-wingers countered that Hamas needed no pretext to kill Jews. Rabin declared that the best answer to Hamas terrorism was to strengthen the peace process with Arafat. But many Israelis now blamed Arafat himself for encouraging terrorism. Rabin’s assurance that Arafat would suppress terrorism wasn’t happening. Arafat speaks about the “peace of the brave” on CNN, Israelis noted bitterly, but preaches holy war in Gaza.

  Ariel Sharon compared the left’s faith in peace with Arafat to its old infatuation with Stalin—a fatal inability to distinguish enemy from friend, mass murderer from peacemaker. And he warned that handing over control of most of Gaza to Arafat would lead to Katyushas on neighboring Israeli towns like Ashkelon and Ashdod.

  Arik Achmon laughed when he heard that one. Katyushas on Ashkelon! The right knew only how to frighten. What did they think, that the government would allow Katyushas to fall on Israeli cities? That the IDF was incapable of dealing with a few rockets?

  In a speech in a Johannesburg mosque intended to be off-limits to the press, Arafat argued that his peace overtures were merely tactical. He recalled that the prophet Muhammad declared a cease-fire with an Arabian Jewish tribe and then, when he became strong enough, broke the cease-fire and destroyed the tribe. A reporter smuggled out a tape recording, and the speech made headlines in Israel. Even many Israelis who had supported the Oslo process concluded, We’re being played for fools.

  Yoel Bin-Nun’s articles in Nekudah were increasingly anguished. Two approaches divided Zionism, he wrote. The first was total: “Everything! . . . This approach swept us all up after the Six Days to the peaks of euphoria—the ‘complete’ land of Israel in our hands—and from there, with prophetic urgency, to sounding the great shofar of total redemption.” The second approach, he added, was that of classical Labor Zionism—gradually building the land and accepting the limits of reality.

  “In the storms of my heart I am close to the first approach. . . . And so my criticism and my feelings of pain and rage are directed at myself. But since Camp David and Yamit, I have understood that we need to return in penitence to classical Zionism. That approach, partial and pragmatic, aspires for all [of the land] but builds in small steps. Another settlement, another house and another road. The building of the people of Israel in its land—not as a means of ruling over the Arabs, not as a basis for sovereignty [over Judea and Samaria] and the prevention of withdrawal . . . but as a liberating act of the resurrection of the nation returning to its land.”

  As usual, Nekudah was inundated with outraged letters against Yoel. In the magazine’s satirical section appeared this notice: “We regret to inform readers that we can no longer publish any more responses to Yoel Bin-Nun’s article from issue #23”—which had appeared over a decade earlier and was still presumably aggravating Nekudah readers.

  Yoel’s own bitter response revealed his sensitivity. “There are some who sit in the safety of Tel Aviv and cancel their subscriptions to Nekudah because of the ‘hostile’ ideas of the man from Ofra,” he wrote. “And they preach . . . love of the land of Israel to those who are sitting in Judea and Samaria for 25 years.”

  ILLICIT ENCOUNTERS

  FOR A MAN violating one of the deepest taboos of his community, Yisrael Harel seemed surprisingly at ease. Gracious, even smiling, he sat in the garden of a suburban home near Tel Aviv and exchanged small talk with Yezid Sayigh, an Oxford political scientist with a trim beard and a slight English accent who also happened to be part of the PLO’s negotiating team with Israel.

  They were meeting to test the possibility of a dialogue between the Yesha Council and the PLO. No less. Not that either man recognized the legitimacy of the other’s political movement. But the Oslo process had forced the PLO and the settlements into a new proximity. Was it now possible to get to know the demonic other as neighbor?

  The idea had come from Yossi Alpher, a former senior official of the Mossad who headed a think tank for strategic studies. Until Oslo your Palestinian neighbors were “locals,” without political power, Alpher had said to Yisrael. But now they were represented by the Palestinian Authority. “Since you wish to remain in the territories, you should be interested in seeking some sort of common language with your new neighbor,” said Alpher.

  Alpher noted that Yisrael didn’t seem disturbed by the proposal. Though Yisrael wrote editorials in Nekudah insisting that Oslo could be defeated, he sensed that the dream of a complete land of Israel from the river to the sea was over. Perhaps it was easier for him to reach that conclusion because he had never been a messianic determinist. Based on Jewish history, he knew that destruction was as possible as redemption.

  Alpher proposed, as a first step, a meeting with a Palestinian academic from abroad. Not a good idea, thought Alpher, to begin with a Palestinian leader from the West Bank whose son may have thrown rocks at Yisrael’s car. Meeting a PLO academic rather than someone with Jewish blood on his hands, as Israelis put it, might also ease settler cr
iticism of Yisrael should the encounter be prematurely exposed. For now Yisrael needed to keep the meeting from his colleagues at the Yesha Council, who would almost certainly respond with outrage, perhaps even demand Yisrael’s resignation. In meeting with a member of the PLO—even a soft-spoken professor from Oxford—Yisrael would be labeled a defeatist, precisely the accusation he routinely raised against Rabin and the left.

  “I’m thinking of meeting someone from the PLO,” Yisrael told his wife, Sarah. “I feel responsibility as a leader to deal with the new situation.”

  “Is it responsibility or curosity?” asked Sarah.

  “You’re right,” said Yisrael, “I am curious.”

  Now here he was, on this warm June afternoon, under a lemon tree in Yossi Alpher’s garden, with a gentleman from the PLO.

  Yisrael had intended to open with a lecture, asserting that the return to Judea and Samaria was an inevitable consequence of Jewish history. Instead, he found himself talking with Sayigh about their families and professional lives. Sayigh told him that he’d been born in Lebanon, to a Palestinian family that had fled the town of Tiberias in the Galilee during the 1948 war. It was hard to identify the professor with the murder of Israeli civilians.

  Alpher suggested that each man present his vision of a final status agreement. Sayigh proposed a confederation of two states without borders between them. Yisrael proposed Jordan as a Palestinian state—after all, a majority of its people were Palestinians, and Jordan was historically part of the land of Israel—with West Bank Palestinians voting in Jordanian elections.

  Their differences were unbridgeable. Still, when the meeting ended two hours later, both men said they wanted to meet again.