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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Arik focused as always on the practical questions. What does Rita need, what about the funeral arrangements? Rita asked Arik to be among the eulogizers, representing the family of fighters.

  For a brief moment, Israelis united in grief. Motta represented the nobility of the old Israel, its readiness to take responsibility without seeking reward. Commentators recalled how Motta, appointed commander in chief of the IDF after the Yom Kippur War, restored the army’s faith in itself; how he commanded the astonishing rescue of Israeli hostages in Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976, after terrorists had hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv. An elderly woman told a journalist how, during a paratrooper raid against terrorists in Gaza in 1955, Motta had carried the dead body of her son for kilometers under fire. Motta had kept in regular touch with her, inviting her to family events. “Today I lost my second son,” she said.

  Journalists described Motta as a first-rate military man but a failed politician, ending his career as mere deputy defense minister. Yet Arik knew another story: Motta had confided that Rabin had offered him the defense ministry, but because of his illness Motta had to decline. Perhaps that was not only Motta’s tragedy but the nation’s: after serving as defense minister, Arik believed, Motta would have become Rabin’s successor as prime minister. And Motta, with his commitment to the peace process and his love of the settlers, could have been a healer.

  Thousands gathered in the military section of the Kiryat Shaul cemetery near Tel Aviv. The rows of identical flat white stones, generals buried beside privates, were a last repository of egalitarian Israel. It was a hot July day; pine trees provided patches of shade. The mourners were secular and religious, young paratroopers in red berets and veterans who had fought with Motta in Jerusalem. There were Yisrael Harel and Yoel Bin-Nun and Hanan Porat. Yitzhak Rabin, barely protected, walked among the crowds.

  “Motta was our Kotel,” our Wailing Wall, Hanan told a journalist, the one man in this government to whom settlers could confide their trauma. Hanan noted that it was the seventeenth of Tammuz, the fast day marking the Roman breach of the walls of Jerusalem and the countdown to the destruction of the Temple. What does it mean, he wondered aloud, that the commander who proclaimed “The Temple Mount is in our hands” has been taken from us on this day?

  The eulogies began with Arik. “Motta’s path in life was to be the first, as a fighter and a commander,” he said in his hoarse soldier’s voice, a permanent reminder of his time in Lebanon. “He was a statesman, a family man, a man of the book. And he was first in almost all those areas.” Motta entered politics without becoming a politician, said Arik, just as he had devoted his life to the military “without taking on military poses.”

  Arik recalled how, after the battle for Jerusalem, Motta had wept inconsolably as Arik told him the names of their fallen friends. “That was the real Motta,” he said.

  “His family and friends and all of Israel have lost a good and honest man, who loved and was loved. The heart weeps.”

  THE PARTNERSHIP

  THE RABIN GOVERNMENT was negotiating with the Palestinians over the next stage of withdrawal from the territories, and Yoel Bin-Nun was feeling desperate. The first withdrawal had included most of Gaza but only a symbolic concession in the West Bank, the town of Jericho. The next withdrawal, though, would be more substantive: the IDF would be pulled out of West Bank cities, leaving the settlers far more vulnerable.

  Inevitably, Yoel knew, there would be dozens of mistakes in the government map that would jeopardize settlers’ security and other Israeli interests and which a discerning settler eye could easily detect. But there was almost no communication between the Yesha Council and the government; Motta had been Yisrael Harel’s channel. And so, though he held no official position in the settlement movement and no one had appointed him intermediary, Yoel concluded that it was now up to him.

  Rabin had come to love Yoel. That was the impression of Rabin’s bureau chief, Eitan Haber. These days, when Yoel faxed Rabin his latest handwritten complaints, Haber would bring the letter directly to Rabin’s attention; Rabin would read carefully, writing notes in the margins. And when Yoel called for a meeting, he was quickly admitted. Now Yoel phoned Haber with a request that, even for Yoel, was impertinent. “I want one of our people to look at the government’s maps” for the next phase of withdrawal, he said. Haber balked: not even the Palestinians had seen the maps yet.

  Yoel pressed. “There are problems that can be quietly settled. We have enough disagreements between us as it is. I’m asking for one person from our side to look at the maps before they go to the Palestinians.”

  Haber phoned back. “Whom do you suggest?”

  Yoel offered the name of a settler leader who was an expert on topography. “Nothing will be leaked,” he promised.

  Through the summer of 1995, Yoel pressed Rabin to deal with the corrections Yoel’s colleague had suggested. The isolated settlement of Tekoa needed to be connected to the Etzion Bloc. And what about the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Hebron? And why wasn’t the Ofra bypass road being built more quickly?

  HANAN PORAT WAS INCONSOLABLE. How could Rabin be doing this to Mother Rachel? The mother of the Jewish people! Where was his Jewish soul?

  As part of the next phase of the Oslo process, the government of Israel was negotiating the transfer to Palestinian rule of Rachel’s Tomb, on the border between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Rachel’s Tomb was among the most beloved places of Jewish pilgrimage, especially for single young women seeking husbands. Jewish women marched in protest from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Right-wing politicians denounced Rabin’s insensitivity as a form of madness.

  Sensing a threat to the tomb, Hanan organized a group of Mercaz students to establish a yeshiva in the small domed building. The government body in charge of holy places forbade the group from bringing in books and furniture. But after each visit the yeshiva students “forgot” religious books and thereby created a small library. And then one night students brought in tables and chairs via a back entrance through the adjacent Muslim cemetery. Classic Hanan: create facts on the ground and force the government to live with it.

  The growing public protests forced the government to modify its plan: Rachel’s Tomb would remain under Israeli military protection, but Palestinian police would patrol the road leading to the tomb. That arrangement, said Hanan bitterly, was reminiscent of the time of exile, when Jews visited Mother Rachel under foreign rule.

  Hanan went to see Rabin. The two men had a complicated relationship. Rabin hadn’t forgiven Hanan for the mass squatting at Sebastia, which Rabin blamed for undermining the stability of his first government. But then, during the 1992 elections, when the Likud made a campaign issue of Rabin’s temporary breakdown on the eve of the Six-Day War, Hanan publicly defended the prime minister, and Rabin’s door was open to him.

  While waiting to enter the prime minister’s office, Hanan encountered Rabbi Menachem Porush, a venerable ultra-Orthodox politician with a long white beard. Hanan told Porush that he’d come to plead for Mother Rachel. Porush asked if he could join the meeting. By all means, said Hanan.

  Hanan opened by spreading out a large aerial photograph of the area around Rachel’s Tomb. Hanan sensed that the way to reach Rabin was through security rather than historical arguments. Hanan noted the close proximity between Rachel’s Tomb and the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. If Palestinian police controlled the road to the tomb, he argued, they would be within shooting distance of Gilo’s Jewish homes.

  Suddenly Porush approached Rabin, embraced him, and began weeping. “This is Mama Ruchel!” he cried out, using the Yiddish for Mother Rachel. “How can you give away her grave?”

  Rabin, embarrassed, asked Porush to calm himself. “How can I calm myself?” cried Porush. “The Jewish people won’t forgive you if you abandon our mother’s grave.”

  In the presence of the two men, Rabin phoned Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Renegotiate the arrangements for Rachel’s Tomb, said Rabin.
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  The road to the holy site remained under Israeli rule.

  OSLO II—THE WITHDRAWAL of the IDF from West Bank cities—passed in the Knesset, but just barely, 61–59. On this, the most sensitive Israeli issue, Rabin relied on a majority achieved by a political bribe: wooing a right-wing Knesset member, Alex Goldfarb (a former paratrooper, as it happened) with a government position. “Goldfarb’s Mitsubishi,” right-wingers contemptuously referred to the deal and its perks. They were especially outraged by Rabin’s reliance on anti-Zionist Arab parties for his bare majority. On an issue of such fateful importance to the Jewish people, how could Rabin violate the sensibilities of so many Israelis?

  Rabin retorted: I will make peace with whatever majority is available.

  It was Yoel Bin-Nun’s nightmare: the collapse of the most minimal Israeli cohesion. The passing of Oslo II without a Jewish majority in the Knesset, Yoel wrote Rabin, “is not morally and historically binding on the whole of the people of Israel and surely not on Jewish history.” Still, Yoel pledged to continue to oppose any attempt to undermine the rule of law and to prevent civil war.

  But that was not the mood on the streets. On October 5, 1995, tens of thousands of protesters filled Zion Square in downtown Jerusalem. Young men in knitted kippot leaped up and down shouting, “Rabin traitor!” “Rabin Nazi!” One young man burned a poster of Rabin in a kaffiyeh. “Because of this man the state is going to be destroyed!” he shouted.

  Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, and other leaders of the Likud opposition stood on a balcony several stories above the crowds. A banner across the balcony’s facade read, “Death to the Arch-Murderer,” a reference to Arafat. But many in the crowd weren’t interested tonight in Arafat. “Death to Rabin!” hundreds chanted.

  A burning torch was propped up on the sidewalk. Beside the torch was a handwritten sign: “A memorial candle for Rabin.”

  YOEL WENT TO SEE RABIN.

  The rabbi challenged the prime minister over the impending withdrawal. “If this is what you’re giving away now,” demanded Yoel, “what will you have left to offer in a final-status agreement?”

  The two were alone.

  “Yoel,” said Rabin, looking at him steadily, “there will be no final-status agreement. It is impossible to reach an agreement on Jerusalem. We will continue to manage the interim agreement and to proceed in stages.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “To expand the Palestinian areas, give them more authority.”

  No withdrawal to the 1967 borders; no redivision of Jerusalem. Had Rabin come to regret legitimizing Arafat as a peace partner? Or had Rabin realized all along that only an interim agreement was possible?

  “You have unleashed forces you won’t be able to control,” said Yoel.

  “I can’t rule out that danger,” acknowledged Rabin. “But we’ll do our best.”

  If only the settlers could know that the man they reviled as a traitor was doing all he could to protect them, thought Yoel. But of course they couldn’t know. Yoel’s partnership with Rabin—for that is what it had become—depended on discretion. In the streets they were chanting, “Death to Rabin!” Death to the commander of the Six Days! Yoel’s inability to reveal the truth, to stop the campaign of hate, tormented him.

  The greatest threat, Yoel knew, came from within. Only the Jews could defeat the Jews. Yoel had learned, through repeated trauma, that the Jews needed to accommodate each other’s conflicting dreams and fears. Right, left, Orthodox, secular: all would have to live together again as a people in its land.

  Yoel got up to leave. “Thank you,” he said.

  Rabin tilted his head, as if puzzled by the gratitude. He didn’t need Yoel’s thanks, just as Yoel didn’t need his. They had a job to do together, and they were doing it. For all the differences between them, they belonged to the same elite: those who took responsibility for the fate of the Jewish return home.

  Rabin offered his perfunctory handshake. Yoel took leave of his prime minister, his commander. He faced yet another late night of worry for his people and exasperation at their failures, pacing his study until he collapsed into restless sleep.

  Chapter 29

  CAREENING TOWARD THE CENTER

  A BLOW TO THE HEART

  AS SOON AS YOEL heard the news, he knew: a Jewish hand had done this.

  It was Saturday night, November 4, 1995. Yitzhak Rabin had just left the stage of a peace rally in a Tel Aviv square when a young man waiting in the VIP parking lot rushed from behind and fired twice into his back. The news said only that Rabin was badly wounded. Yoel retreated to his study to pray. Inexplicably, he felt a great calm. Rabin will be okay, he thought. So bound did Yoel feel to Rabin that afterward, when he heard that Rabin had died even as he was praying for him, Yoel wondered whether the calm he’d felt then was the departure of Rabin’s soul.

  WHEN SHABBAT ENDED, Hanan Porat set out toward Bethlehem, to Rachel’s Tomb. According to tradition, this night was the anniversary of the death of Mother Rachel, and Hanan intended to join the thousands of pilgrims gathering at her grave.

  He turned on the radio and heard the news. Unable to continue, he pulled over to the side of the road. To keep from crying out, he bit his lip—so hard he drew blood. He thought of his last meeting with Rabin, how the prime minister of Israel couldn’t resist the grief of an elderly Jew for Mother Rachel. And now Mother Rachel is weeping for her son, Yitzhak—

  THE ASSASSIN, YIGAL AMIR, was an Orthodox Jew, a law student at Bar-Ilan University, one of the major institutions of religious Zionism. Though not a settler, Amir had been active in the pro-settlement movement.

  In all the years of war and terrorism, Israel had never experienced such open grief. Thousands of teenagers spontaneously gathered in the square where Rabin had been murdered, lighting candles and singing the old Zionist songs. The radio repeatedly played “Song for Peace,” anthem of the Israeli peace movement, which Rabin had sung with others on the stage just before his murder and whose bloodstained lyrics sheet had been found in his breast pocket. Trauma hotlines were overwhelmed with callers. A sticker appeared on Israeli cars, “Shalom, Haver”—Farewell, friend—quoting President Clinton.

  Yoel joined the seemingly endless line passing before Rabin’s casket outside the parliament building in Jerusalem. Some held handwritten signs that read, “Thank You.” A bearded man in a kippah held a sign: “I Am Ashamed.”

  Yoel paused before the flag-covered coffin and tore his shirt collar, like a mourner for a close family member.

  But he didn’t weep. Grief would come later. First must come the reckoning.

  Three young men from West Bank settlements appeared at Yoel’s door. They came separately, yet offered variations of the same story: each had heard a rabbi declare that, under Jewish law, Rabin deserved the death penalty. None of the young men knew Yoel personally, but they came to him because they didn’t know whom else to trust.

  Yoel knew that several rabbis had discussed whether, under Jewish law, Rabin deserved the death penalty as a moser, someone who hands over a fellow Jew for persecution or death, or even as a rodef, who actively seeks to kill a fellow Jew. A letter had circulated among rabbis inquiring about the halachic relationship to the Rabin government, and hinted at the possibility of moser. Had the assassin—Yoel refused to say his name, calling him only “the evil one”—received a rabbi’s blessing? And even if he hadn’t, would he have been wrong, given the prevailing atmosphere, to assume that his act would have religious legitimacy? And most terrifying of all: How many more potential assassins were wandering among them?

  THE RELIGIOUS ZIONIST COMMUNITY was under siege. Government ministers blamed the entire right, and especially religious Zionists, for creating an atmosphere of incitement that had led to the assassination, as if anyone who had opposed the Oslo process was an accomplice with Yigal Amir. A Tel Aviv bus driver called a young man in a kippah “murderer” and threw him off the bus. At army hitchhiking stations, religious soldiers returnin
g from frontline service in Lebanon were denied lifts. A new sticker appeared: “We Won’t Forgive, We Won’t Forget.”

  The emergency meeting of religious Zionist leaders—“Assembly of Self-Reckoning”—began with a minute of silence. Then, facing the packed Jerusalem hall, Rabbi Yehudah Amital of the Mount Etzion yeshiva declared: “We cannot say, ‘Our hands have not shed this blood.’ ” Another speaker, a professor of Jewish thought, wondered whether a return to exile might not be preferable to civil war among Jews.

  Others, though, were concerned less with self-reflection than with self-protection.

  Yisrael Harel confided to the audience that he had approached left-wing leaders and proposed a joint left-right rally against violence. But the left, he said bitterly, wouldn’t allow the right “to ruin [its] pleasure” in implicating its ideological rival. “Those sitting here—everyone, including Rabbi Amital . . . all sat together this week in the defendant’s dock.”

  Yes, he conceded, “we should beat our breasts in remorse.” Not for the murder, but for failing to have the courage to control the “fringe extremists.” But, he concluded, “not only has our way of life not failed, but it is the way. The royal road of Zionism and Judaism.”

  Yoel sat in the audience, seething. Even now, with the nation torn and bleeding, Yisrael’s impulse was to protect his camp.

  Yoel approached the podium and demanded the right to speak. “If there will be, God forbid, another political murder in the state of Israel, it may not continue to exist,” he said, voice shaking. “At this very moment, while we are sitting here, there are still people speaking about rodef against certain [political] figures. . . . I agree wholeheartedly with all that has been said here about the beauty of the religious community and of religious Zionism and of religious education. . . . But all this depends on one thing: that all those who spoke about rodef, who ruled rodef—and I know that there are, that there were those in the last half-year who spoke about rodef—not fools, not fringe characters, [but] Torah authorities— If they will not resign from all their rabbinic positions until the end of the shivah [the seven-day mourning period]—until the end of the shivah—this is an ultimatum—then I will fight them before the whole people of Israel.”