Ally

by Michael B. Oren

Most recruits no doubt feel jittery while first putting on a uniform. Buttoning the epauletted shirt with Tzahal—the Hebrew acronym for the IDF—stitched on the breast pocket, I, too, felt nervous. Yet, along with anxiety was the pride of becoming part of the first Jewish army in two thousand years. This was the answer to exile, to the Holocaust. The fact that here, too, Jews were given numbers only underscored the contrast—and the justice. Excitedly, I became Personal Number 3335335.

  That elation ended when I tried to fulfill my goal of joining the paratroopers. I never forgot the image of those airborne troops dancing in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War and was determined to be one of them. No other unit would do. Unfortunately, the army had other ideas and assigned me to the artillery corps. I refused to board the bus to basic training, even under threat of court-martial. “Go ahead, arrest me,” I dared the officers, who promptly confined me to my tent. Days passed before they relented. Perhaps they understood what I never imagined, that the tryouts would prove so grueling that they hospitalized me for a week. But in the end, I made it into the paratroopers.

  Or at least into the paratrooper course. No amount of rowing and marathon running could have prepared me for the next seventeen months. There were nightlong marches that flayed our feet, and daylong drills crawling through brambles or laying our bodies across barbed wire while others used our backs as springboards. The drinking water was rationed, sleep denied, and showers virtually unavailable—I once went six weeks without one. Less than a third of the unit finished the course, and often I questioned whether I could. Such as the wintry night we finished maneuvers at 5 A.M. with reveille set for forty-five minutes later, and a twenty-minute guard duty in between. While lacing up my boots, my eyes involuntarily welled with tears. I forced myself to remember the Jews of 1948, who held off Arab armies with handguns, the pioneers who gave their youth, and often their lives, to cultivate a patch of our homeland. It worked. I sleeve-dried my eyes and knotted my laces.

  All that was agonizing enough, yet not all of the army’s challenges were physical. My knowledge of Hebrew, while sufficient to order falafels, fell short of understanding rapid-fire orders or instructions for dissembling a gun. I was a “lone soldier,” without a family to feed me and clean my fatigues when I came home famished and filthy. The IDF of the seventies was poor and I was poorer still, unable to afford the expensive woolen socks the army did not furnish. But my Hebrew improved and I grew accustomed to caring for myself. Each time our bivouac moved, I collected the socks that invariably remained behind, brought them home, and boiled them until I amassed some forty pairs. Lacking sufficient hot water to take a bath and wash my uniforms, I did both, simultaneously.

  Despite the exhaustion and the loneliness, I still felt indebted—for the camaraderie, the maturity, and the chance to protect my country. Never would I light the Hanukkah candles without remembering the soldiers who huddled with me over a tin military-issue menorah and shielded its flames from the rain. Never would I come in from the biting cold and not recall the cup of oversweet tea that my sergeant handed me after completing an eight-hour, open-jeep patrol. No one could take away the silver wings and the paratroopers’ red beret and boots I won. By the same token, I never got over my fear of jumping out of an airplane, at night, while lugging my 7.62 mm machine gun, five hundred rounds of ammo, and C-rations. Rather, two hefty men, positioned on either side of the open hatch, pushed me out.

  —

  The day I completed my compulsory service, March 16, 1981, Sally Edelstein arrived in Israel. A native San Franciscan, she had hung out with Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane in the sixties, traveled through Europe at age seventeen, studied at Berkeley, and performed modern dance in New York. Like Israel, she was cool, and bewilderingly alluring. I could hardly bear to glance at her. She was also worldly, crisp-witted, effortlessly warm, and real. And, like me, she felt secure in her American and Israeli identities, a harmonious amalgam of the two.

  After chancing to meet Sally on Jerusalem’s Street of the Prophets, I rushed to call my parents and inform them that I had just met my future wife. That was obvious from our first date. We rendezvoused on a rocky field that separated our neighborhoods, in front of a Jordanian tank knocked out in the 1948 war, and climbed up to my moonlit roof. There we sang every moon song we knew.

  Indifferent to material goods and willing to haul jerry cans of kerosene to fuel the stoves that heated our spartanly furnished apartments, Sally was the resilient partner I needed as I pursued this often rugged Israeli path. Here was a person who shared my dreams and commitments. That bond, welded with love, would enable us to weather any trials, I thought—perhaps too heedlessly. A few months later, I was underground in a hostile country, subjected to gruff interrogations, and wondering if I would ever see Sally again.

  A Free People in Our Land

  Though difficult to fathom today, the empire then known as the Soviet Bloc denied the right of three million Jews to freely practice their religion, learn Hebrew, or make aliya. For committing such “crimes,” the refuseniks, as they called themselves, were fired from their jobs and relentlessly hounded. Others labored in the infamous Siberian camps known as gulags, or, like the math and chess master Natan Sharansky, languished in solitary confinement. The Soviets also backed Israel’s Arab enemies and spurned all relations with the Jewish State.

  Israel took responsibility for the Jews behind the Iron Curtain. It dispatched teams to make contact with members of the Zionist underground, to smuggle in Jewish books as well as the blue jeans that could be traded for food. Most crucially, Israel assured them they were never forgotten. Israelis who served in combat units and who held two passports were especially sought after for these missions. Meeting those criteria and having demonstrated throughout my youth to free Soviet Jewry, how could I decline? The training was cursory, the warning blunt: if you get caught, you’re on your own. You could be sent to a gulag or simply disappear.

  Before departing, I proposed to Sally. I got down on one knee, a position too traditional for this former flower child, which only made her chuckle. Still, she accepted, but then suggested that my motives might be mixed. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said as she helped me to my feet. “You’re thinking, ‘If I get arrested, I want a wife like Avital Sharansky who’ll send me food packages and campaign to get me out.’ ”

  Sally had a point, I admitted to myself after landing in Moscow. Except for my partner, Yitzhak Sokoloff, a spirited Columbia College friend and fellow IDF veteran, I was utterly alone in a dangerous land thousands of miles from home. Our cover story as American photojournalists was thin. Stiffly, we approached the border guards, who eyed us coldly before stamping our U.S. passports. Then we entered the city.

  The Soviet Union in the late winter of 1982 was in its death throes and looked it. Behind mounds of garbage and open ditches of sludge sagged immense gray buildings that appeared on the verge of collapse. Food lines stretched endlessly. Everywhere, we assumed, lurked agents of the secret police—the ruthless KGB—and their local informers.

  Fearing they might fall into the KGB’s hands, we carried none of the refuseniks’ names, phone numbers, or addresses. Rather, we had spent weeks memorizing them. The easiest for me to recall was Yuli Edelstein, who shared Sally’s last name. He answered the phone immediately and, within minutes, met us on a darkened subway platform. The handsome and self-confident twenty-three-year-old had been arrested for his Zionist activities and expelled from the university. Now he was cleaning streets and would soon be sent to Siberia. Yet Yuli was anything but broken. Instead, he intrepidly introduced us to other activists and sneered at our KGB tails.

  Several days later, Yitzak Sokoloff and I boarded a train that bore us over the snow-packed Trans-Carpathian Mountains and into the Soviet Ukraine. There we linked up with underground cells composed of people from incongruous backgrounds—scientists, factory workers, teenagers, retirees—whose only tie was their insistence on being Jews and living in Israel. Secretly
listening to radio broadcasts from Jerusalem, these Prisoners of Zion taught themselves fluent Hebrew and followed the Israeli news as closely as if they were living there. They sang Israeli commercials as if they were prayers. All of them knew that the authorities would eventually arrest them, set them before a kangaroo Soviet court, and sentence them to years in the gulag. They were ordinary people of superhuman courage.

  Such was Yehudit Nepunyache, the leader of the Odessa underground, sixteen years old and barely five feet tall. Once, while crossing a courtyard for a meeting with her cell, I was accosted by several clubwielding KGB thugs. Knowing that I was about to be beaten, she threw herself into the arms of the largest brute and began shouting “Rape! Rape!”—so loudly that all the windows in the courtyard flew open. The agent dropped his bat, clutched her throat, and lifted her off the ground, but Yehudit did not flinch. Instead she looked him in the eye and said, “So, you’re going to hit me, too?” The goon released his grip, cursed, and led his gang out of the courtyard.

  Yehudit saved me, but only for a while. My partner Yitzhak Sokoloff and I were repeatedly arrested and interrogated at length. Sometimes the KGB subjected us to full-body searches, other times to endless harangues about the “hoodlums” we contacted. They implied that we could face beatings and imprisonment. Our response was to insist that we were merely American photojournalists. We waved our blue passports and demanded to see the U.S. ambassador.

  Released, we went right back to work. This often meant rising before dawn and going out for a jog in the arctic air because, we discovered, the KGB kept regular hours. Before daybreak, we could reach the refuseniks unimpeded. But one time, in a grim industrial town, we failed to shake the agents trailing us and, in frustration, finally jumped into a cab. Our destination was a workers’ dormitory and the Zionist activist Isaac Skolnik. His wife and daughter had been allowed to leave for Israel years before—the communists delighted in separating families—and he had not seen them since. Our mission: to send Skolnik their love.

  In the cab’s rearview mirror, I saw five government cars following us and felt sick to my stomach. As we headed into the bleak countryside, the convoy doubled, including military vehicles. We arrived just ahead of the KGB and dashed across frozen mud to the prisonlike dormitory. But the babushka at the desk told us that Skolnik was not there. Devastated, we turned around to face a throng of angry KGB goons. “If you get out of this alive,” I muttered to Yitzhak, “tell Sally I loved her.” In the lobby, they set up a blinding lamp and two chairs and ordered us to sit.

  Hours of furious interrogation passed before the KGB brutes brought in another suspect, a young man, slight, dark, balding—and beaten, with huge welts across his face. They sat him next to us and continued to pummel us with questions.

  “Who sent you here? What is your real identity?”

  “We’re American journalists photographing the scenic Ukraine,” we responded as innocently as possible. “We demand to see the U.S. ambassador.”

  The interrogators ignored our story and began shouting at us. I began to wonder whether my face would soon resemble that of the young man seated next to me. Just then, he leaned over and whispered to me in English, “Keep it up. You’re doing very well.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked him. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  I shrugged. “And just who are you?”

  “Don’t you know?” He smiled. “I’m Skolnik.”

  Eventually, they let us go, but then Yitzhak refused to leave the dormitory without giving Skolnik a box of Passover matzah. The thugs started screaming at us again, and I hissed at Yitzhak, “Enough, let’s get out of here.” But he would not concede and finally the KGB gave in. Yitzhak handed Skolnik the matzah. We hugged him and said, “Shalom, we’ll all be reunited soon in Israel.” Our interrogators laughed.

  Passover came early that year and we celebrated it like Spanish Jews during the Inquisition—in a locked room with the shades drawn. Despite the risks, our hosts, ranging in age from fifteen to sixty, were determined to celebrate the festival of freedom. Then the pounding started, nearly unhinging the door. Jackbooted KGB agents burst in, apprehended Yitzhak and me, and hustled us down the stairs toward yet another interrogation. I trembled uncontrollably, but then suddenly I heard the refuseniks gathering on the landing above us. Together they sang “Hatikvah,” Israel’s anthem: “To be a free people in our land, the Land of Zion.”

  Our mission completed, Yitzhak and I prepared to depart for London. Waiting for our plane to take off, I feared the KGB would come on board and arrest us. The relief, seeing Moscow fading below, was overwhelming. I returned to Israel gaunt and pallid. Sally met me at the airport, where I asked her to drive me directly to the Western Wall. There I conveyed the prayers of all those who were denied that sacred right.

  I was free in my own land, but that “Hatikvah” sung in captivity kept reverberating in my mind. Walking the streets in Jerusalem, working as a night editor on Israel Radio, I could not escape that sound. Nor had I recovered from the clash of the courage and the cruelty I witnessed when, three weeks later—on June 6, 1982—Israel again went to war.

  Peace for the Galilee?

  Earlier that week, Shlomo Argov, Israel’s venerable ambassador to Great Britain, walked out of a reception at London’s Dorchester hotel and into the sights of three Arab gunmen. They shot him in the head, leaving him crippled for life. The attack followed years in which Palestinian terrorists loyal to Yasser Arafat fired rockets from South Lebanon into the Galilee. Life in dozens of Israeli villages and farms became intolerable. Though perpetrated by Arabs opposed to Arafat, Argov’s shooting served as a pretext for eliminating those PLO strongholds. Three days later, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, ordered an invasion of Lebanon.

  Suddenly the sidewalks teemed with husbands and sons, fathers and brothers, toting olive green duffle bags and going off to war. And I would shortly join them. Like most former IDF soldiers, I now served in the reserves for as many as sixty days a year, and my unit, a forward recon team, was swiftly mobilized. Sally drove me to the base only to learn that the last of our jeeps had already been helicoptered to the front. But instead of returning home with my fiancée, I signed out on combat gear and hitchhiked across the Lebanese border. From there I joined various outfits battling up the coast.

  Together with my adopted battalions, I made my way through the Lebanese cities of Tyre and Sidon, often fighting house-to-house, occasionally stumbling into enemy ambushes. I eventually caught up with my unit, only to discover that my direct commander, the cupid-faced Aryeh Zukerman, the father of a newborn baby girl, had been killed. Everybody else in the vehicle—the one I had just missed—was wounded.

  While listening to my father’s war stories growing up, I often wondered how I would conduct myself under fire. Now I knew. My Zionist bravado shrank before the reality of whizzing scraps of white-hot metal. But the courage of others astonished me. There was the officer who calmly directed our column while bullets smacked near his feet. Yitzhak Sokoloff, my college friend who accompanied me to the Soviet Union, volunteered for combat duty and fearlessly evacuated wounded under fire. Much time in warfare would pass before I grew indifferent to the hiss of projectiles overhead or the sight of scattered body parts. Once, while being strafed by a Syrian jet, I eyed a beetle creeping in the dirt in front of my face and thought, “How I envy your obliviousness.”

  The war, originally named Operation Peace for the Galilee, ostensibly aimed at driving the terrorists beyond rocket range of Israel. But then orders arrived to press northward. The new objective was to liberate Lebanon from its Syrian occupiers as well as Palestinian terrorists, replacing them with a pro-Western government. These were laudable goals in theory, but in practice they were unattainable—and increasingly controversial overseas and even back in Israel.

  While antiwar protests mounted in Jerusalem, m
y column fought fiercely through the Shouf Mountains. Later remembered as Israel’s Vietnam, the Lebanon War had a brutally surreal quality rare in Israel’s earlier conflicts. There was the Druze family, who invited my squad to join them for lunch on a veranda stacked with food and bullet-ridden bodies. And there was the enemy officer—a blue-eyed man with a trimmed mustache—who kept me company in the drainage ditch where I cowered from sniper fire and with whom I kept up a one-way conversation because he was dead. There were the Syrian troops who waved a white flag to our assistant battalion commander and then shot him in the face, and the Israel Radio announcement of a cease-fire that sent us all laughing because we just then were under intense fire. Especially bizarre was the time when, clearing out a hostile village, I ran smack into a hard-baked U.S. Marine colonel.

  “ ’Day to you, son,” he said in a gritty Texas accent as he picked his way through the rubble.

  “ ’Day to you, too, Colonel. What are you doing here?”

  He pointed to the blue UN patch on his shoulder. “Observin’.”

  “See anything around?”

  “Nah. You’re good to go.”

  I shook his hand, hoisted my rifle, and pressed on.

  Yet no sight seemed stranger than the one that sprawled below me, suddenly, as my jeep turned a hairpin bend. Sooty-brown, half-shrouded in smoke: Beirut. Cheering Lebanese showered us with rice and hailed us as liberators. But such receptions are common in Middle Eastern wars, I knew, and fleeting. “We’ll never get out of here,” I thought. Little did I imagine that Israel would remain stuck in Lebanon’s mire for the next eighteen years.

  But that summer I did manage to extract myself for a few days’ leave in order to get married. In the age before cellphones, Sally had not heard from me for weeks and wept when I returned, blackened and feverish, from the front. We wed under a canopy composed of four broomsticks and my prayer shawl, on a Jerusalem hillside overlooking a sunset-gilded Old City. And then we danced debkas to the single-stringed fiddle of a Bedouin friend. But the next morning, while opening gifts, Sally broke out crying again when my leave was abruptly canceled.