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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Of course Arik was an optimist. To be an Israeli meant knowing that, with enough determination, any obstacle, any trauma, could be overcome. He didn’t believe in God; Israel was a gift the Jews gave to themselves. Still—he felt a sense of awe at how much had been accomplished, in such short time, against such odds.

  He had grown up with the state, had been present, one way or another, at every major moment in its history. He had seen Israel evolve from agrarian backwater to world-class economy, from a country fighting for its life with imported carbines to the military power of the Middle East. How many times had he been saved from death, had he and his friends helped save the state? The impossible victories, the self-inflicted defeats: How much history had been compressed into a single generation! If Arik were a religious man, he would have called his life a miracle.

  WHO OWNS THE MEMORY?

  JULY 11, 2000. President Clinton, Israeli prime minister Barak, and Palestinian leader Arafat secluded themselves at Camp David to negotiate a peace agreement.

  Yisrael Harel initiated an ad in the newspaper Ha’aretz opposing the redevision of Jerusalem. The ad quoted a speech by Motta Gur to the veterans of the 55th Brigade: “And if someone will come who will try to take away Jerusalem, he will not, because you will not allow it. You will not allow it because it is ours by right. Because there is no justice in giving it away. . . . Jerusalem is ours—forever.” The ad was signed by dozens of veterans of the 55th Brigade, including Yoel Bin-Nun. “We, paratroopers who fought in the battle for the liberation of Jerusalem, are committed to Motta’s testament.”

  “By what right?” Arik Achmon demanded when a friend of Yisrael phoned, asking him to add his name to the ad. Motta, after all, had made that speech in 1995, shortly before his death; since then, nearly five years had passed, and the political situation had changed drastically. Who knew what Motta would say today?

  Arik thought: Yisrael has used us all along, annexed the paratroopers’ legacy to his settler agenda, to say nothing of advancing his own career. But this was one step too far.

  When Yisrael heard Arik’s reaction, he was unrepentant. He had used Motta’s own words; what more did Arik want?

  Yisrael thought: Arik presents his position as a matter of principle, but he’s really just bitter because his camp has lost its preeminence to my camp.

  Arik resigned from the board of the paratroopers’ association headed by Yisrael. And he kept relations with Yisrael to a formal minimum.

  A NEW CENTER

  THE CAMP DAVID negotiations failed. Israel had endorsed a Palestinian state and offered to withdraw from about 91 percent of the West Bank; the Palestinians rejected the proposal but made no counteroffer. In September Ariel Sharon, leader of the Likud opposition, walked on the Temple Mount, accompanied by a large security contingent, to protest the construction work of the Muslim Waqf, which was destroying ancient Jewish artifacts on the holy site. Palestinian riots broke out in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian leaders cited the Sharon visit as the trigger for the second intifada, as it came to be called. Mere pretext, countered Israel; the violence had been planned long before, to coincide with the scheduled conclusion of the Oslo process in September 2000.

  Two Israeli reservists who took a wrong turn on the way to their base and ended up in Ramallah were lynched by a mob—inside a Palestinian police station. The next day Israeli newspapers featured a large photograph of a young man holding his bloodied hands up in victory for the cameras. For the Israeli public, that was the moment when the peace process with Arafat died. A lynching inside a police station became the symbol, for Israelis, of Arafat’s real intentions toward peace.

  In December 2000 Clinton presented his vision of a final status agreement: almost all of the West Bank and all of Gaza would be Palestine, with land swaps between Israel and Palestine to compensate for “settlement blocs” that would remain under Israeli control; Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem would stay part of Israel, Arab neighborhoods would become part of Palestine. Prime Minister Barak said yes, Arafat effectively said no. President Clinton blamed Arafat.

  Then came the suicide bombings. It was the worst wave of terrorism in Israel’s history. The home front became the battlefield. The Palestinians, Israelis said bitterly, weren’t interested in undoing the occupation of 1967 but the “occupation” of 1948—that is, the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. The Palestinian insistence on the return of refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants not to a Palestinian state but to the state of Israel convinced even many Israelis on the left that the real obstacle to peace wasn’t West Bank settlements but Israel’s very being.

  Newspapers ran interviews with leading figures of the left who confessed to having been deceived by Palestinian leaders. Our world has collapsed, said journalist Amnon Dankner; the despair among my friends, he added, is similar to the shattering among Communists after Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech in 1956. Yankeleh Rotblit, the lyricist who wrote “Song for Peace,” which Rabin had sung onstage just before he was killed, told an interviewer that he was no longer sure peace was possible.

  Yet even as they turned away in disillusionment from the peace camp, most Israelis didn’t turn to the settlers’ agenda. After three decades of vehement schism between left and right, a majority of Israelis now found themselves in an amorphous center. In principle, most Israelis accepted a two-state solution and were prepared to make almost any territorial compromise that would bring peace; in practice few believed that any territorial compromise could achieve that.

  ARIK ACHMON HATED to be taken for a fool. And Arafat, Arik conceded, played us for fools. Maddeningly, the settlers had been right, at least about that. The choice, Arik concluded, had never been between land or peace. Israel’s dilemma was far more cruel: it would have to abandon the territories—save itself from the occupation for its own long-term survival—but without getting peace in return.

  Arik had a plan. If Israel couldn’t occupy the Palestinians and also couldn’t make peace with them, that left only one option. Israel needed to build a security barrier that would separate most of the West Bank and Gaza from Israel proper, prevent the unbearable ease with which suicide bombers simply walked across an open border into Israeli cities. And then Israel would unilaterally withdraw behind that barrier, and evacuate—forcibly if necessary—all settlers on the other side. Israel needed to stop waiting for the illusion of a negotiated agreement and determine its own security borders.

  A Zionist had to believe in a way out, even if the solution was no solution at all.

  A DOZEN SOMBER men and women, some of them leaders of the kibbutz movement, some former high-ranking army officers, gathered in the Ein Shemer greenhouse. Avital Geva had been holding weekly meetings among his friends—“the greenhouse parliament,” they called it—to discuss Israel’s future, and today Arik Achmon had been invited to address them about unilateral withdrawal.

  The unilateralist idea, hardly Arik’s alone, was gaining ground among desperate Israelis. Arik had helped found a group called Hetz (Arrow) to lobby politicians for unilateralism, and Labor Party leaders were debating it too. Avital had reached the same conclusion as Arik: the left had been correct about the dangers of occupation, but the right had been correct about the chances for peace.

  On the plastic walls of the greenhouse were stickers from the left’s old battles. One read: “The Seventh Day: Time to End the Six-Day War.”

  Avital, in dark blue work clothes, served chicken soup. “No one should speak,” he said, “before the soup soothes your throats and warms your hearts.”

  The members of the greenhouse parliament sat in a circle on armchairs made of rough wood logs. Arik presented them with a map proposing the route of a security fence in the West Bank and Gaza, in effect an interim border. The implications of Arik’s map were clear to these veterans of the left: the fence would be a marker ending the utopian dreams of both greater Israel and of Peace Now.

  “Why not build the fence on the green
line?”—the old 1967 border—one man demanded.

  “That’s a solution for a negotiated agreement,” replied Arik. “The goal for now is to uproot the least number of settlers while keeping out of Israel’s borders the maximum number of Palestinians.”

  Avital watched Arik with concern. Arik was red-faced, agitated. Avital had never seen him like this.

  “We spent our entire lives defending the state,” concluded Arik. “The danger now is coming from within. We have to separate ending the occupation from making peace.”

  Afterward Avital put his arm around Arik’s shoulder and said, “Listen, man, you’re not so young anymore, you have to watch your health. Don’t take this so much to heart.”

  “There’s no time for that,” Arik replied. “We have to save the state.”

  PILGRIMAGE

  IN A CLEARING in a pine grove on Ammunition Hill, near the trenches where paratroopers fought Jordanian soldiers in the toughest battle in Jerusalem, Yoel Bin-Nun, wearing a black suit and sandals, stood in the center of a circle of young people. It was close to midnight on the eve of Jerusalem Day 2004, the holiday celebrating Israel’s reunification of the Holy City in 1967, and Yoel was leading his students, as he did every year on this anniversary, on an all-night walking tour of the battleground. In the footsteps of fighters, he called it.

  This year, though, the group included participants from a pre-army leadership program for secular recruits who, like Yoel’s students, were on a track for combat units and perhaps officer training. The young men had ponytails and shaved heads and earrings, and there were a few young women, too, in Indian skirts and kaffiyehs. One young man wore a sweatshirt with the words Tikva LeYisrael, hope for Israel. By bringing together Orthodox and secular, Yoel was honoring what was for him the spiritual essence of Jerusalem Day: the memory of Jewish unity in May 1967, which made the June victory possible.

  Yet no date on the official Israeli calendar emphasized the divisions among Israelis as did Jerusalem Day, which was celebrated almost exclusively by religious Zionists. Most Israelis ignored the festivities, many skeptical of celebrating the unification of a city so deeply divided emotionally between its Arabs and Jews.

  Hands on hips, as if leading a military briefing, Yoel described the vulnerable Israel of May 1967. “There was widespread unemployment,” he said. “More people were emigrating than immigrating. The joke Israelis told was, ‘Last one out of the airport, shut the lights.’”

  Since then, Israel had changed almost beyond recognition. From a country of barely 3 million, Israel was now over 7 million strong, and growing. But in one way Israel had scarcely changed: its people still felt almost entirely alone in a hostile world. Israelis didn’t merely debate the country’s future but its chances for long-term survival. The Six-Day War had created a country caught in paradox: Goliath to the Palestinians but David to the Arab and Muslim worlds; the only democracy that was a long-term occupier, and the only country marked by neighbors for disappearance.

  Yoel led his group toward the old 1967 border that had cut through Jerusalem. They came to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of graying stone apartment buildings and half-built yeshivas named for destroyed Jewish communities in Europe. Posters advertised pilgrimages to Hebron and to Rachel’s Tomb and promised “protected buses,” with bulletproof windows. A few men in black rushed through the quiet streets, avoiding eye contact with Yoel’s group.

  Yoel told of walking these streets on the night of the breakthrough into East Jerusalem. “I was twenty-one years old in 1967,” he said. “I had just been released from the army, and this was my first reserve duty. I was given the assignment of finding the battalion that was going to break through the lines, and our battalion was to follow them. It was frightening to be running through empty streets and everything is totally black. And then the Jordanians began shelling us.”

  Wordlessly Yoel pointed to two stone markers, each with the name of a paratrooper killed on this spot.

  “Why is Jerusalem important?” asked a young woman.

  Yoel explained that Jerusalem had been chosen as the capital of ancient Israel because it was outside tribal borders. Each tribe was allotted its own territory, and Jerusalem united them all. “What unites the Jewish people isn’t any holy place in Jerusalem but Jerusalem itself.”

  They came to an empty lot and a scattering of old red-roofed houses: the ’67 border. They stood on the edge of a slope; below them was Road One, built where no-man’s-land had been. Road One connected Jerusalem’s northern and southern neighborhoods. But it also divided: on one side were Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, on the other side, Jewish neighborhoods of West Jerusalem.

  Yoel said, “It was a good idea to build a road in no-man’s-land, where there were minefields and barbed-wire fences. To make this a living area. But you can look at this road in two ways. It depends on your point of view.”

  They crossed the road, into the silent streets of Sheikh Jarrah, a middle-class Palestinian neighborhood. From the garden of the American Colony Hotel came the scent of jasmine. “Be mindful that we’re passing through a neighborhood,” Yoel admonished. “We’re not a conquering army. Please don’t raise your voices.”

  They came to a fork in the road. “My battalion was supposed to go left, onto Salah a Din Street and from there to the Rockefeller Museum. If the battalion had gone that way, it would have encountered very little resistance. Instead our commander turned onto Nablus Road, which faced no-man’s-land, and that is where the Jordanian fortifications were. The result of that mistake was very costly.”

  “How could he make such a mistake?” a young woman asked.

  Yoel smiled. “I see some of you have trouble accepting human error. We had twelve hours to prepare for war. We were supposed to parachute into Sinai. At the last minute we were sent to Jerusalem. We went in without adequate maps. We didn’t have guides who knew these streets. Mistakes happen all the time in war.”

  And what of the mistakes that followed the war? Yoel had come to regard both the peace movement and the movement for greater Israel—the two camps that had tried to determine the results of the Six-Day War—as utopian fantasists. Who more than Yoel had struggled with the illusions and failures of his own camp? And yet each camp had expressed something essential about Jewish aspirations.

  Yoel paused before the entrance to an alley. The paratroopers, he explained, called this the Alley of Death. A Jordanian machine gun had been positioned at the opposite end, toward which the paratroopers charged. “Over and over. When one fell, another charged. For paratroopers there is no such thing as not fulfilling a mission.”

  They approached the hexagonal tower of the Rockefeller Museum, and entered the courtyard. Yoel pointed to a plaque commemorating three Israeli soldiers killed here by friendly fire.

  The group walked toward the Old City walls.

  They came to a sculpture of basalt stone, shaped like a massive uprooted tree trunk, a memorial for the Israeli scouts killed on the night before the breakthrough into the Old City. Yoel told the story of how the scouts, veterans of Unit 101 and the most elite commandos of the IDF, had missed the turn toward the Mount of Olives and found themselves exposed beneath the Old City walls. “It was one of the worst mistakes of the battle for Jerusalem,” he said.

  But, he continued, the disaster may well have saved hundreds of lives. The plan had been to block the escape route to Jericho; had the scouts succeeded, the Jordanian soldiers would have been trapped in the Old City and forced to fight. “The liberation of Jerusalem could have been a trauma for the people of Israel and for the world. Instead we entered the Old City with hardly a shot being fired.”

  Yoel had been careful all night not to preach faith, but now he couldn’t resist. “This is how the Master of History arranges events,” he said.

  Rows of dancing teenage boys approached. They wore knitted kippot and white shirts and held each other by the shoulders. Some waved large Israeli flags. “May the Temple be rebuilt quickly i
n our time!” they sang. They were followed by police cars, army jeeps, and two ambulances. “I’m not so sure they understand what happened here,” Yoel said of the dancing teenagers. “They take united Jerusalem for granted. It’s not so simple.”

  Yoel watched them with unease, sadness. Suddenly he seemed aged. Once his place would have been among them. Everything had seemed so clear then, in the summer of ’67, when Israel had abruptly emerged from the nightmare of annihilation into the dream of redemption. And when the settlers’ opponents had raised moral and practical questions—What about the Arabs in the territories? What kind of Israel are you bequeathing us?—Yoel and his friends had responded with faith. Of course it would work out in the end; what choice did we have? Reject God’s gift of wholeness? Return to the terrible vulnerability of May 1967?

  They came to the so-called Dung Gate, the entrance leading to the Western Wall. Above them was the Temple Mount.

  “When I reached the Temple Mount that morning,” Yoel told his group, “my commander said to me, ‘Nu, Yoel, what do you say?’ I said to him, ‘Two thousand years of exile are over.’ That’s what I felt at that moment. If the Israel Defense Forces are standing on the Temple Mount, it is the end of exile. I admit I was naive. Redemption is a process; it’s complicated.”

  One day, he believed, Jews would celebrate the story of modern Israel as they now celebrated the exodus from Egypt. Perhaps with even greater awe: in the ancient Exodus, after all, Jews had left a single country, while in the modern exodus they’d returned home from a hundred countries. A people keeping faith with its lost homeland and returning after two thousand years: impossible. The farther away we moved from the founding of Israel, the more extraordinary the story would appear.

  One day, Yoel knew, Jews would look back at this time and wonder: How had they done it? Reclaimed land, language, sovereignty, power? Reversed the destruction of the Jews back to their origin, their vigorous youth? Replaced skeleton heaps in death camps with paratroopers at the Wall as the enduring Jewish image of the century?