by Avraham Burg
The officers checked our helmets, ammo belts and weapons, and the water in our canteens. First aid bandages, identity cards, dog tags. They didn’t make their usual jokes, and they didn’t hassle us just for the sake of it. We could sense that this was real, more than just a routine exercise. “In five minutes, everyone’s on the military vehicles—we’re out of here.” No one knew where to. Silence hung in the air. Maybe another war? Maybe this was it? Fear and anticipation. Just before dawn we arrived at a place we had never been before. There was a lot of commotion all around us. They had us assemble in the far corner of a parking lot. We were ordered to leave our weapons and ammunition belts. One of us was appointed to guard the weapons and the equipment. The rest of us were given wooden clubs and a quick briefing: “We’re going up there by way of the mountain. When we get to the site, we will evacuate everyone who is there.” It was not clear to me who “everyone” was, and where “there” was, but we set off.
At sunrise, I found myself in an open field at the top of the hill, in the middle of a confused jumble of people. Cries, dust, and struggle. Soldiers and police officers dragging people who were clinging to boulders, hugging trees, lying beside one another and screaming. The dawn slowly dispelled the darkness and the picture became clearer. Those who were doing the evacuating were in uniforms—like me—and those being evacuated were wearing kippahs like me. We pulled, dragged, schlepped, and beat. One after another. And they kept returning, like an obstinate boomerang.
As the sun came up, there was a bit more light, and there was Yosef lying at my feet, his tefillin straps wrapped around his arm and head. Just a few months ago we had played volleyball together in the schoolyard. His cheeks were no longer smooth—they had started to sprout a wispy beard. The kippah on his head, too, was larger than usual.
He wailed bitterly, “Burgie, don’t beat me.” I didn’t beat him.
“Yosef, what are you doing here? What’s going on here?”
“We’re returning to Samaria, to our land. We’re renewing Jewish settlement here.” I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“Who told you to come here?” I asked.
“The rabbi,” he answered and pointed. On the other side of the site, students, police officers, and soldiers surrounded the venerable Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, son of the elderly Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. And then I understood.
“The rabbi,” in their circles, is always Rabbi Kook. I knew him—not personally, but I knew very well who he was. In the past I would sometimes go to his yeshiva in Jerusalem. Once, in order to witness the spiritual experience that had swept up so many of my friends, and sometimes to visit those same friends, and occasionally to sit and learn with one of my older cousins who studied there, I heard the rabbi teach. My friends and relatives who studied with him spoke of him and his teachings with the highest praise. Now the rabbi was on the other side of the huge courtyard, Yosef was lying on the ground, and I was standing over him. He was lying there in the dust, and I was the oppressor. He was the Jew, and I was the Israeli.
“Burg, why are you just standing there?” my junior officer shouted at me furiously. “Take that religious guy and throw him out of here, to hell with him. Clobber the kippah!” he went on, more explicitly. And I stood there torn between Yosef and the officer. Here was my friend, here was my officer, and me—where did that leave me? “Burg!” Together my officer and I took hold of Yosef and removed him. In that moment, my youth was over. The last thread that had connected me to the world of my childhood was severed. Between the rabbi and the sovereign, I chose the sovereign. Between man and land, I chose man. Since then, I’ve never changed my mind, though at that moment I was merely an enforcer for the majority, and today, often enough, I’m in the most remote corner of the minority.
As I later learned, the place they had brought us was the old train station of Sebastia. Hanan Porat and his associates had dragged the members of our generation, my childhood friends who revered them, to the hills of Judea and Samaria, carried on the winds of that same rabbi, that prophet of the modern redemption. In loud voices and with shofar blasts they railed defiantly from every hilltop against the entire social order as we knew it. Within religious Zionism they proposed an alternative to the passivity of my father and the rest of their leaders. Their knitted kippot banished the diasporic black kippot of the movement’s strongholds of power and influence. The macho moustaches defeated the chubby cheeks, and their rough hands bested those that learned classical music in their youth. They took advantage of the emotional, political, and ethical weakness of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in order to topple the entire old Zionist structure. Instead of the “heavy black cloud” of Israeli despair, which covered the sky since the previous Yom Kippur, they proposed a “white sail on the horizon,” which signified a complete renewal of all ideas and symbols. They drew an imaginary, demonic line from Hanita, a kibbutz founded before the state, to the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, from the early “tower and stockade” settlements to Kfar Etzion. From the despair of the war that had just ended to the hope of conquest and fulfilling their vision of redemption in “our” Greater Israel. The first violins of religious Zionism took center stage for the first time and played their solo. The rest of the Zionist orchestra fell silent, muted almost entirely.
Dad had no more strength. The same door was also shut in his face. Only when he was near death, in his last words to me, he admitted, “Avraham, I’m worried, who will take care of the Jewish people?” On that last day, I hugged him with all my might until his end. But by then the hour was too late on our Jewish Israeli clock.
SOMETIME AT THE START OF MY MILITARY SERVICE, RIGHT after the cease-fire agreement with the Egyptians, we were taken to guard facilities and airfields on the other side of the Suez Canal, in “Africa.” I spent night after night in the foxhole I had dug for myself. The desert night was beautiful as always, very bright stars, endless skies, and I, alone in the world. Our orders were to stay on alert, awake all night, to guard against a planned infiltration by Egyptian commandos and to “report any development immediately.” I had not ever, and not since, known such fear. Surreptitiously, against all instructions and orders, I took a small transistor radio with me to the foxhole. I put in the scratchy earphone and tried to get through the night terrors, to listen to news from home and understand the reality spinning me like a leaf in the wind.
One night, a broadcast carried the deep voice of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat promising his people that he is prepared to sacrifice another million and a half Egyptian soldiers in order to redeem the occupied lands of Sinai. God, a million and a half Egyptian soldiers against me? Avraham Burg, the yeshiva boy from Jerusalem? What did I do wrong? What did I do to him? What’s going to happen? My fear only increased. The memory of friends killed just a few months before in the Yom Kippur War still hovered in the air. The army was beaten and hurt, and the commanders continuously reminded us of their painfully fresh experiences. Large cracks appeared in the Israeli structure and threatened to bring down the whole house.
In the end, the Egyptian commandos never came, disengagement agreements were signed, and my military service eventually came to an end. I began my life, and Israel went back to its new routine, the routine of post-trauma of the collective after battle and failure. In the years after my military service all my friendships were new. Friends from the army and other friends who all came from the social circles of my then-partner and later wife, studies, and service. The new friends brought other new friends. I experienced great joie de vivre. I got up in the morning with a smile and went to sleep happy. I was 100 percent “me.” In the yellowing pictures from that time I’m still thin, with flowing hair, a torn T-shirt, ragged jeans, a hand-woven belt from the Far East, and a strange hat that was part stylish, part replacing the kippah. I pursued African studies and dreamt of far-away countries. I sat in anthropology classes and gained a completely different understanding of the stories of Genesis. I took a tour guide course and hiked
, guided, and taught those who came after me. I had many dreams in my head, but none of them approached the realms of politics. I knew that I would not be a public figure, that I would not be well-known, that my children would have a full-time dad, not sharing his time with countless voters and other pesky nuisances.
Four years went by, and the same Sadat of my youthful fears came to town. The transition from war to peace, from existential fear to great hope, carried me away as it did everyone. We ran after his convoy and yelled at the top of our lungs, “No more war, no more bloodshed,” over and over.
The Jerusalem of this twenty-three-year-old Israeli never looked more beautiful and optimistic. I had already lived through three wars, two of which I could actually remember (the Sinai Campaign of 1956 was not engraved in my consciousness as an influential experience, because I was only a year old), and here was one peace in return.
I believed that the cliché every parent recites here to his or her child, “Son, when you grow up there will already be peace,” was coming true for me and my friends. I sensed the potential of changing the Israeli vocabulary, replacing words of siege and war—“the whole world is against us, and it’s us against the whole world”—with a completely different lexicon. I sensed how a new conversation, beautiful like a butterfly, was emerging from the cumbersome chrysalis. One whose syntax was established by Anwar Sadat—the Pharaonic visitor whose car I ran after, rushing like a serf of old behind the chariot of a venerable king—and Menachem Begin, who was at my bar mitzvah, and in half a year would be invited to my wedding with Yael.
“Begin will bring us the most beautiful gift,” we said dreamily to each other, “peace.” Though I had never voted for him, I very much wanted him to succeed; how naïve I was. I believed Begin, and I didn’t listen to completely different voices that did everything they could to divert the course of Israeli policy from the path Begin wanted to pursue. Four years, that was the entire extent of the chapter that could have been the most important in the annals of Israel. For four years Israel moved forward toward peace and normalcy. Away from the siege mentality, from the sense of a tightening ghetto, from endless combativeness with no purpose. We did not know then that the day in which it would end was so close.
When Begin and Sadat made their heaven-sent peace in 1978, Yael and I decided to make our connection official and get married. It was the perfect time to create a new family—we would raise our children in a world in which all would be well. The wars started to grow more distant, terrorism was muffled and far away. The leadership turned failure on the battlefield into a peace with “our biggest neighbor.” Years of considerable and heedless optimism lay ahead. Dad and Mom invited all their friends—and there were loads of them—to the wedding. My parents, with their eminent friends, and us, surrounded by the circle of our friends, dancing to distraction, to the heights of optimism. Like all Jewish weddings, this one ended with the breaking of a glass.
A year later, Prime Minister Menachem Begin appointed Dad to head the negotiating team on autonomy for “the Arabs of the Land of Israel.” I understood that literally, and understood nothing. I had no doubt, as I was taught in the army, that Dad had been given a mission—to solve the troublesome problem of the occupied territories, which he had mentioned to Mom when we came back from the big trip after the Six-Day War—and that he would carry it out successfully. I was convinced that this talented, peace-loving man, whom I loved and respected so much, would finally bring us the longed-for chapter of our existence—peace for Israel. I believed that his clever statement he used so often that “history is the politics of the past, and politics is the history of the future” was guiding him to his proper place in the history of the Jewish people.
I knew nothing of the schemes and plots hatched by the pair of brothers-in-law, Ezer Weizman and Moshe Dayan, against him and Begin. The “deceased,” as Weizman would call Begin in crude jest. I hadn’t noticed the micro-politics that members of Dad’s party wielded against him. And above all, like many others, I didn’t understand Begin’s malign and masterful maneuver. Dad was the “queen” in his chess game. And Begin, in a brilliant gambit, sacrificed the queen in order to save something entirely different. Begin was ready to sacrifice the Sinai Peninsula, with its flourishing Israeli settlements, bountiful oil wells, and huge security hinterland in order to save the apple of his eye—the historic core of the Land of Israel, the mountains of Judea and hills of Samaria. Begin appointed Dad to this post so that he would fail. I don’t know if they had discussed the move, but Dad effectively carried out the mission with significant lack of success. The fact is that there is no peace for his children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren.
For most of his life, Dad was not a diplomat, but an uncynical politician and scrupulously observant. Begin could be sure that my father would do everything to avoid giving up the Promised Land and at the same time would not be easily broken, while Hanan Porat, the young charismatic settler leader, and his colleagues were dancing and jumping in defiance of him on the West Bank hills and in the central committee of the party. And Begin was right—my father failed.
I remember his stories about the foolish ideological debates he would have with his foreign partners in the negotiations, who came from Egypt and the US: President Carter, the Baptist Christian, Foreign Minister Boutros-Ghali, the Copt, and General Gamasi, the Muslim. In those moments, he was at his best, in his element. The Talmudic polemicist, protector of Jewish sacred sites against the representatives of other faiths. I always listened to him carefully, and I tried to imagine the meeting, the atmosphere, the details. As a byproduct of the surprising mission he was charged with, I also became a momentary student, tutored in the advanced Israeli school of diplomacy and politics. I first understood then what today I know so well—that in politics and diplomacy you usually have to put up with a lot to obtain a kernel of something nourishing.
These rituals repeated themselves over and over again. Dad traveled, Dad returned, he traveled again and returned again. At home, he amused me with jokes and riveting anecdotes from behind closed doors, and outside the papers reported the growing impasse. The gap between the stories I heard at home and the diplomatic, political, and media reality widened and deepened. And in my heart, I already predicted the missed opportunity. At one point I instinctively felt that everything was going to be lost. That Israel, through my father as the public servant of Menachem Begin, was missing the great opportunity offered by Sadat: to replace the talk of war, which flared time and again in 1956, 1967, and 1973, with a conversation about peace and reconciliation.
“How can you travel to Egypt and have all these silly debates?” I asked him.
It was a direct question that was not customary in our home. It came after a long and detailed description of what he had told “them,” the Americans and Egyptians, Christians and Muslims. And what they told him, and what he told them. And over again, right up to the polemical knockout he dealt them: “I told them that Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in the Koran, while it is mentioned in the Bible 656 times.”
And I was angry. “You don’t understand what war is! One bullet from a machine gun whizzing near your ear and you would have already forgotten all these hair-splitting arguments. And they’re also stupid. They should have told you that Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in the Torah. Are you traveling there to hold an international Bible contest?” I ridiculed him, the man who during his life was most identified with the national trivia game as its head judge for thirty years. We didn’t continue the conversation because I had crossed the line between intellectual debate and respecting one’s parents. But I knew that he had heard me; he felt the sting but kept it to himself.
THE ISRAEL OF THOSE DAYS WAS AMBIVALENT ABOUT THE sudden and unwanted peace thrust upon it. Just two days before Sadat’s visit, the army’s chief of staff at the time, Mordechai Gur, warned against another Egyptian conspiracy. Because “Sadat, in his youth, was a member of a pro-Nazi youth movement.” Begin�
�s right-wing camp and the right flank of religious Zionism tried furiously to destroy the prospects of this auspicious turn of events. The Peace Now movement was founded during the 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, at a time when the talks looked like they were close to collapsing.
Three-hundred forty-eight reserve officers and soldiers from Israeli army combat units published an open letter to the prime minister of Israel in which they called for the Israeli government not to squander the historic opportunity for peace between the two nations.
How strange that it was established to support Menachem Begin, the quintessential rightist, in his readiness to evacuate the Sinai Peninsula, though in short political order it would aim all its arrows at the same Begin himself and everything he represented.
From the first moment, I felt that this new movement is my true political expression. I didn’t have the privilege of being one of the founders of the movement and signers of the letter appealing to Begin, but I was so happy about the new political home being built before our very eyes. A movement and not a party, a message and not interests. I went with my friends to Peace Now meetings in a studio apartment behind the Smadar theater. I felt like I was in a youth movement, but one that fit me much better, both politically and socially. I went out with my new friends to demonstrations and gave out leaflets and stickers on the streets. Because of my intimate knowledge of the country and its landscapes, and my love for the tangible aspects of the homeland, I literally felt physical pain every time I put up the sticker “Peace is better than Greater Israel.” Precisely because of that love, I reached the full-blown understanding that in this space there are only two possibilities—either to live in partnership or to die together in war. Propelled by that understanding, I broke my remaining ties with relatives and friends who had become either complacent right-wingers or gluttonous settlers. Often the windshield of my car would be smashed because of the stickers, but it was worth it, because in the clear-cut choice between the Land of Israel of my former friends—the land of the hikes of my youth, the domain of identity, the land of awakening religious Zionism, of Joseph on the soil of Sebastia—and the peace of Sadat, reached between him and the young soldier from the foxhole in Sinai, I preferred peace.