On a trip to London, while waiting in Heathrow Airport for a return flight to Israel, Udi was approached by a stranger. “Do you remember me?” the man asked. Udi didn’t. “I was one of your interrogators,” he said. “So where are you in life?”
Udi gave him a terse summary of life since prison.
“Listen, Udi,” the man said, “all of us are for an agreement with the Palestinians.” By “all of us” he meant the Shin Bet.
Udi took it as a kind of apology.
ARIK ACHMON REBUKES MEIR ARIEL
IN MAY 1997, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the Reunification of Jerusalem, Channel 1 TV filmed Meir Ariel returning to the scene of the 1967 battle. Meir was accompanied by an army buddy, Yechiel Cohen, a cameraman for Channel 1 who had since become bitterly anti-military. The two men turned the segment into a cynical critique of the consequences of the Six-Day War and of the Israeli ethos.
Channel 1 invited Yisrael Harel to respond. Yisrael was head of the Association of Paratroopers Who Liberated Jerusalem and Crossed the Canal, custodian of the legacy of the 55th Brigade, charged with organizing the annual commemoration of the battle for Jerusalem and ensuring that the brigade’s ethos was taught to a new generation of soldiers. But Channel 1 intended to screen the segment on a Friday evening, and Yisrael, an observant Jew, couldn’t come to the studio. And so he asked his friend Arik Achmon to appear in his place.
Sitting in the Jerusalem studio of Channel 1, Arik watched the film segment with growing outrage. In one scene Meir and Yechiel wander the Arab market of the Old City. Meir says: “We returned and reunited and liberated. It’s all a lie. For a lie of words people are dying.”
Referring to the waiting period in the orchards before the Six-Day War, Yechiel says, “They brainwashed us. ‘Jerusalem, the Wall—Hevreh, three thousand years, the land of our fathers! In another two weeks, hevreh, you’re going to bring salvation to the people of Israel.’ What salvation?”
Meir demurs. “There was a feeling of a war of survival, no?”
In another scene Meir sits under an olive tree, plays the guitar, and sings, “Jerusalem of iron, of lead and of blackness.” Yechiel, overcome, covers his eyes.
The interviewer asks Meir if he ever brought his children to the Old City. “Never,” Meir says emphatically. “To educate my children that I was part of the battle and to force Jerusalem on them when I myself didn’t know what to do with this? . . . I didn’t liberate anything.”
Arik loved Meir, felt himself at least partly responsible for Meir having become a paratrooper in the first place. But this time, Meir had gone too far. He and Yechiel are desecrating the memory of our fallen friends—
Mustering his self-control, Arik said in a measured voice: “I’m not sure that they represent what they thought then. . . . Meir’s song expresses totally different feelings. . . . They don’t, at least, represent me.
“What the fighters of Jerusalem all share in common is pain. We had many, many casualties; the price was very high. Ninety-seven dead . . . four hundred wounded. Some are still severely handicapped. [But] I also feel deep satisfaction. Under nearly impossible conditions . . . we fulfilled a mission—a mission of rescue. . . . We didn’t set out to restore the sacred sites of the nation. Central command didn’t order us to liberate the land of our fathers.” Instead, the paratroopers had been sent to Jerusalem to stop the Jordanian attack on West Jerusalem. Quoting a famous Hebrew phrase, Arik said, “‘If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.’”
Arik concluded: “Maybe it’s not popular, but I feel honored to be part of a group—in which Meir and Yechiel are also very respected members—that is the true elite of the people of Israel.”
“I GIVE THANKS”
ON SUKKOTH, MEIR ARIEL built a big wood shack in his yard near the Tel Aviv beach. He covered the roof with palm branches, from which hung tinsel and colored glass balls. Musicians, kibbutzniks, religious penitents, dropped in at all hours, singing around long, white-cloth-covered tables to Meir’s accordion. Meir offered each guest a pomegranate that, in his chivalrous way, he peeled himself. One Sukkoth he sat through the night arguing with a friend about the words in Ecclesiastes, “vanity of vanities.”
Meir stopped performing on Friday nights. His Torah learning deepened. He kept a detailed journal of his daily studies—mostly Talmud but interspersed with Zionist history and Greek philosophy and Israeli literature—written in tiny script, two sentences squeezed into a single line. Meir often dedicated the day’s learning to a friend who needed healing or the uplift of a departed soul. “To the loving memory of Hussein ibn Abdallah, King of Jordan, who went to the world of his fathers today.” “For the souls of the three IDF soldiers killed yesterday.” “For the success of the children of Israel in the European soccer championship.” He argued with the rabbis: Why shouldn’t a non-Jew be allowed to become a nazir, an ascetic? He compared Jewish thought, which he called time-dynamic, to spatial thought: the latter, he wrote, fears death and so battles the concept of time. But Jewish thought accepts death as natural.
The wild years were ending. Meir craved home, stability. He was writing some of his most beautiful love songs, and they were about Tirza. Every morning he woke her with coffee and cake in bed. Afternoons they took beach chairs and went to the sea. Fridays, he brought her flowers.
Still, hurts lingered. Meir wrote a song called “Get Into the Car Already,” which depicts a weeping Tirza and an impatient Meir, who has exhausted his capacity for apology.
In an interview, Meir admitted a psychological addiction to drugs. “I need hashish to exist and be a pleasant person,” he said.
Meir earned his first gold album: a collection of greatest hits. A poster of the album hung, along with strips of Indian cloth, in his living room. Life was better than he ever could have imagined. He was beloved by almost everyone who knew him, from the country’s leading singers, for whom he wrote hits, to Zion the owner of the fast food place across the street from Meir’s house and whom he celebrated in a song. Meir, said a friend, was the happiest sad person he knew.
AND THEN CAME THE INTERVIEW.
Meir hated giving interviews to the media. He hated the simplistic questions and even more his answers, which seemed to him either too glib or too emphatic. Still, interviews were part of the music business. And now that he had his own independent label, as Tirza reminded him, he couldn’t afford to pass on the publicity.
“Meir Ariel Goes Wild,” read the headline of the interview that appeared in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot on August 12, 1998. Russian immigrants, declared Meir, should be denied the vote until they’ve learned Israeli reality. The host of the Israeli version of the Candid Camera TV show was a “human monster.” West Bank settlers were the “Chippendales” of Zionist pioneering. And homosexuality was deviant, and gays responsible for spreading AIDS.
Most of those barbs went unnoticed. But the outrage—and hurt—among gays was profound. Meir Ariel, of all people? The humane kibbutznik, troubadour of bohemian Israel? Columnists denounced him as a bigot; passersby spat at him on the street. Gay activists poured water on him as he emerged from a concert. “Meir Kahane, Meir Ariel!” they chanted, comparing him to the far-right rabbi.
A friend from the paratroopers said, “Meirkeh, let’s get the hevreh together and we’ll stop the harassment.”
“God forbid,” said Meir.
Meir and Tirza fled Tel Aviv. They moved to Pardes Hanna, the village bordering Kibbutz Mishmarot. They rented a stucco house with a red roof and a dirt yard, a larger version of a kibbutz house.
Meir stopped performing. I’ve been silenced, he told a reporter.
Shalom Hanoch, Meir’s childhood friend and musical collaborator, pleaded with him to apologize. You’re a poet, not a man of proclamations, Shalom argued. They should apologize to me, Meir countered, with unusual vehemence.
But then, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Meir wrote a letter to the gay newspaper in Tel Aviv, Hazman Havarod (Th
e Pink Time), apologizing for what he called his ignorance, and affirming his abhorrence of stereotypes. He asked forgiveness “for hurting you, dear homosexuals and lesbians.” He added: “Don’t be surprised if I call you ‘dear,’ because you are dear to me as human beings.” The association of gays and lesbians accepted the apology.
But when Meir began appearing again in clubs, few came. One night Tirza drove him to a performance in a pub in Jerusalem; four people were inside. Tirza forbade Meir to play.
Meir’s smile turned sad, weary. One friend detected in him an exhaustion with life. Mornings, Meir sat in prayer shawl and phylacteries, praying and writing songs. Sometimes he spent a whole morning that way, bound in devotion.
The songs he was writing were now openly, unapologetically, spiritual. One song was based on the prayer Modeh Ani (I Give Thanks), with which a traditional Jew begins the day. Meir’s version is a modern Israeli’s attempt to claim the tradition on his own terms. “I give thanks before Thee,” he wrote, quoting the prayer, and then added his own words, “and to You.” Even as he respected the formal language of the prayer, Meir needed to speak to God the way he spoke to everyone: intimately, as a friend.
Meir further expanded the prayer, giving thanks for “all the good and the bad and the good” that God has done for him, his family, his people, his land, and all of humanity—a circle of blessing that emanated from the particular to the universal.
Welcoming a new day also brought an awareness of mortality: “Slowly, silently / the future creeps toward us.” But anxiety gave way to gratitude as he noticed Tirza beside him in bed. “It will be good, better than good, very good / It’s starting this morning, this morning / You laugh toward me / from your sleep.”
Meir had always seen the skull behind the face; now he was also glimpsing the soul.
IT BEGAN WITH what seemed like the flu. Take aspirin, said the doctor. But Meir’s fever only rose.
When rashes appeared on his back and stomach, Tirza took him, against his will, to the hospital. After examining Meir, the doctor asked Tirza, Do you have children? They’re abroad, she said. Tell them to come home, he said.
The illness was called Mediterranean spotted fever, caused by a tick and easily cured with antibiotics. But Meir had been diagnosed too late.
Tirza, dazed, accompanied Meir into intensive care. Meir smiled at her and said, “I’m under hashgaha,” a Hebrew word that could imply medical care or divine protection.
Meir was connected to a respirator, a dialysis machine, a catheter, three IVs, four monitors. He lost consciousness.
Meir died shortly before dawn. It was July 18, 1999. He was fifty-seven years old.
Tirza held his face, swollen and blackened from cortisone. What have they done to you, Meirkeh, she repeated over and over, what have they done to my beautiful boy.
MEIR WAS BURIED in the little cemetery of Kibbutz Mishmarot, shaded by pine trees, near the cotton fields where he had spent much of his life. The greats of Israeli music gathered; Shalom Hanoch appeared stunned.
A kibbutznik eulogized: “Meir lived, suffered, and sang his loves. . . . One was Tirza, the one and only . . . to whom he dedicated his songs, whom he longed for and returned to from his wanderings. . . . She was the source of inspiration, the model for all the women he loved—and he loved all the women in the world. . . . His second love was . . . Mishmarot . . . whose lawns were planted by his father . . . Meir lived for many years outside of Mishmarot, but he never left the kibbutz and the kibbutz never left him. On holidays and on days of mourning a place of honor was reserved for him, the place of the tribe’s storyteller.”
Then everyone sang: “There’s a pile of hevreh on the grass . . .”
A newspaper eulogy celebrated Meir as the greatest Hebrew poet since Alterman. A leading entertainer said that Meir’s largely ignored album, Charcoal Sketches, should be included among the books of the Prophets. A gay music producer who had bitterly attacked Meir now urged Israelis to remember his “wonderful writing,” rather than “a few words in the newspaper.” Meir, wrote one critic, was the link between the rock music of Shalom Hanoch and the poignant songs of old Israel.
In death Meir became something more. Many young Israelis saw in his spiritual path a role model for a new Israeli Judaism, rooted in tradition but open to change. The kibbutznik bohemian turned religious Jew became a beloved and unifying figure, embraced by secular and religious alike, as if Meir had intuited a future healing of Israel’s cultural divide.
TIRZA CHOSE a large, rough stone for Meir’s grave, unique among the flat white stones that surround it. The epitaph is a line from one of Meir’s songs: “I stepped out to breathe some wind.” Meir inhaled not merely air but wind. Like so much of his work, the line is also a wordplay: the Hebrew word ruah means both “wind” and “spirit.”
THE OPTIMIST
FOR ARIK ACHMON, life had never been better. He was doing what he loved best, advising leading companies and government ministries on strategy and reoganization, helping Israel become more efficient, more rational.
He was still stubborn, insulting on occasion, maddeningly self-confident. (Was it his fault if his opinions were almost always right?) But Yehudit knew how much he had grown. Arik learned how to say, “I love you,” and came close to tears when he spoke of her. They took trips abroad together. On a cruise in Russia, a band played Soviet songs from World War II—“Cossack horsemen galloping to battle!”—and Arik and Yehudit happily sang along in the Hebrew translations of the Red Army anthems on which they’d been raised. (When they came upon a statue of Stalin in a village square, Yehudit felt an involuntary warmth, then immediate horror. How, she mentally berated her father, could you have taught us to venerate a monster?)
Yehudit’s own career was thriving: she was recognized as one of Israel’s leading experts on ethics in psychology. Between Yehudit and Arik there were five children, eight grandchildren.
The wounds of the past, though, remained. Arkia Airlines had become a major company, thanks in large part to the changes Arik had brought as CEO, for which he had gotten no credit. And he could have been a millionaire. When he’d left Arkia, he’d sold back his stocks—7 percent of the company. Now those stocks were worth millions.
“I have only myself to blame,” he told Yehudit.
“Losing Arkia was the best thing that ever happened to you, Arik,” she said. “You were so arrogant.”
“I thought I could do anything,”Arik agreed.
“And then you came down to earth. You learned to tolerate weakness.”
“I wouldn’t have forfeited that experience for anything. True, I lost millions of dollars.”
“It’s only money,” said Yehudit.
“And what I got in return was priceless.”
IT WAS EARLY JULY 2000, and President Bill Clinton had just invited Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat to negotiate a peace agreement at Camp David. According to Israeli press reports, Barak intended to offer a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. For the first time, an Israeli prime minister was committing to Palestinian statehood. Perhaps for the first time in history, a nation was voluntarily offering to share sovereignty over its capital city.
And Arik Achmon, a liberator of Jerusalem, was ready for the deal. He would celebrate the peace of Jerusalem, not mourn its redivision. He of all people wouldn’t allow emotion to confound Israel’s good. Israel would do what it had to do, in peace as in war. That, for Arik, was the meaning of Zionism: to take responsibility for one’s fate in the circumstances that fate presented.
No, Arik knew, it would not be an easy or a happy peace, but a Middle East peace. Israel of course would have to remain vigilant. Arafat had disappointed, hadn’t stopped the terrorism and the hate. Still, Barak was about to offer the Palestinians a state, just as they had demanded. Surely Arafat would agree. In exchange he would have to abandon the dream of destroying the Jewish sta
te demographically by overwhelming it with the descendants of refugees from 1948. But what choice did he have? To go to war against Israel? That was laughable. Even Arafat no doubt realized that the Palestinians couldn’t afford to reject another offer of statehood, as they had in 1947 to disastrous results. Say what you wanted about Arafat; he wouldn’t subject his people to another catastrophe when the alternative was a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Arik’s greatest anxiety for the future of Israel was focused not on external threats—Israel, he was convinced, could defend itself against any enemy—but on what Israel was doing to itself by building settlements in the West Bank. In his systematic fashion, Arik listed the ways in which settlements threatened Israel. Rather than contributing to Israeli security, as settlers claimed, their communities were a burden on the IDF. Economically, the settlements were a black hole, devouring billions in government subsidies that should have gone to education and infrastructure. Socially, settlements were dividing Israeli society into two warring camps. Politically, settlements were undermining a two-state solution, which alone could save Israel from the demographic threat and an impossible choice between the two essential elements of its identity, as a Jewish and a democratic state. Diplomatically, settlements threatened to turn Israel into a pariah. And the occupation, which settlement building would make irreversible, was morally corrupting young Israelis, who were drafted into a system that gave them power over helpless civilians. If historian Barbara Tuchman were to add a chapter to her book The March of Folly, concluded Arik, it would focus on the settlements.
The depth of Israel’s dilemma: for one part of the nation, remaining in the territories was an existential threat; for another part, the existential threat was withdrawing. How could Israel determine its relationship with the territories won in the Six-Day War without tearing itself apart?
But if the Palestinians accepted the historic compromise that Ehud Barak was about to offer, Israel, Arik was certain, would confront the settlers, uproot dozens of Jewish communities, and end the threat to itself.
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