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

  Dedication

  For Moriah, Gavriel, and Shachar—

  the next chapter is yours.

  Epigraph

  A SONG OF ASCENTS

  When the Lord returned the exiles of Zion,

  we were like dreamers.

  Then our mouths filled with laughter,

  And our tongues with songs of joy.

  Then they said among the nations:

  “The Lord has done great things for them.”

  The Lord has done great things for us.

  —Psalm 126

  We are writing the next chapter of the Bible.

  —Hanan Porat, June 7, 1967

  Sky-diving without a parachute,

  Open to all directions,

  And the longing for each direction

  Is destroying me.

  —Meir Ariel, “The Snake’s Shed Skin,” 1988

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Who’s Who

  Introduction: June 6, 1967

  PART ONE: THE LIONS’ GATE (MAY–JUNE 1967)

  Chapter 1: May Day

  Chapter 2: The Center

  Chapter 3: Born to Serve

  Chapter 4: A Time of Waiting

  Chapter 5: No-Man’s-Land

  Chapter 6: “The Temple Mount Is in Our Hands”

  Chapter 7: “Jerusalem of Iron”

  PART TWO: THE SEVENTH DAY (1967–1973)

  Chapter 8: The Summer of Mercaz

  Chapter 9: The Kibbutzniks Come Home

  Chapter 10: The Children Return to Their Borders

  Chapter 11: Attrition

  Chapter 12: The Invention of Yisrael Harel

  Chapter 13: Utopias Lost and Found

  Chapter 14: Across The Border

  PART THREE: ATONEMENT (1973–1982)

  Chapter 15: Brave-Hearted Men

  Chapter 16: “Our Forces Passed a Quiet Night in Suez”

  Chapter 17: The Home Front

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 18: “End of the Orange Season”

  Chapter 19: A New Israel

  Chapter 20: Building Different Israels

  Chapter 21: Hurban

  PART FOUR: MIDDLE AGE (1982–1992)

  Chapter 22: The Forty-First Kilometer

  Chapter 23: Civil Wars

  Chapter 24: Idolatrous Fire

  Chapter 25: New Beginnings

  Chapter 26: Under Siege

  PART FIVE: END OF THE SIX-DAY WAR (1992–2004)

  Chapter 27: A New Israel, Again

  Chapter 28: Almost Normal

  Chapter 29: Careening Toward the Center

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Who’s Who

  THE KIBBUTZNIK PARATROOPERS

  ARIK ACHMON Born on Kibbutz Givat Brenner and moved to Kibbutz Netzer Sereni after the split over Stalinism. Served as the 55th Brigade’s chief intelligence officer in the Six-Day War and helped lead the crossing of the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. Went on to help establish Israel’s domestic aviation industry and shift the statist economy toward capitalism.

  UDI ADIV Born on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. In 1972 traveled to Damascus to help create an anti-Zionist terrorist underground. Served twelve years in an Israeli prison.

  MEIR ARIEL The greatest Hebrew poet-singer of his generation. First came to public attention after the Six-Day War, with his song “Jerusalem of Iron.” Member Kibbutz Mishmarot. Died in 1999.

  AVITAL GEVA Born on Kibbutz Ein Shemer. Wounded in the battle for Jerusalem, went on to become a leading conceptual artist. In 1977 founded an educational greenhouse to teach young people ecological principles and kibbutz values. Represented the state of Israel in the 1993 Venice Biennale. Active in the antioccupation movement Peace Now.

  THE RELIGIOUS ZIONIST PARATROOPERS

  YOEL BIN-NUN A founder of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) settlement movement. Led a generation of religious Zionists to study the Bible as a way of understanding contemporary Israel. Broke with the settlement movement following the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. A founder of the settlements of Alon Shvut and Ofra.

  YISRAEL HAREL (FORMERLY HASENFRATZ) A child survivor of the Holocaust, and a leader in the Bnei Akiva religious Zionist youth movement. Founded the West Bank settlements’ umbrella organization, the Yesha Council, and its magazine, Nekudah, and served for many years as settler spokesman. A veteran settler in Ofra.

  HANAN PORAT Founder of the first West Bank settlement, Kfar Etzion. Wounded in the Yom Kippur War, then helped found Gush Emunim. First settler elected to the Israeli parliament. Died in 2011.

  FAMILY MEMBERS

  YEHUDIT ACHMON Psychologist, married to Arik Achmon. Grew up on Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Emek. Daughter of Yaakov Hazan, leader of the socialist Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair.

  TOVA AND URI ADIV Udi’s parents. Led campaign for his release from prison.

  TIRZA ARIEL Businesswoman, married to Meir Ariel. Grew up on Kibbutz Kfar Szold, moved to Kibbutz Mishmarot after marrying Meir.

  ESTHER BIN-NUN Dietitian, married to Yoel Bin-Nun. A member of the Ofra settlement before leaving with Yoel after the Rabin assassination.

  ADA GEVA Bible teacher and high school principal, married to Avital Geva. Member of Kibbutz Ein Shemer. Daughter of Ein Shemer’s fallen hero, Anatole Shtarkman.

  KUBA GEVA Avital’s father. Kibbutz Ein Shemer’s architect.

  SARAH HAREL Social worker, married to Yisrael Harel. Grew up in an ultra-Orthodox family. Member of the Ofra settlement. Died in 2006.

  SYLVIA KLINGBERG Far-left Matzpen activist, Udi Adiv’s first wife. Daughter of Soviet spy Marcus Klingberg.

  LEAH LESHEM Led campaign to free Udi Adiv. Married Udi when he was released from prison.

  OTHER PARATROOPERS

  YISRAEL ARIEL (FORMERLY SHTIGLITZ) Rabbi of the Sinai settlement of Yamit, helped lead the struggle to prevent Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Desert in 1982.

  EMIL GRUENSWEIG Peace Now activist killed by a grenade in an attack on a demonstration against Ariel Sharon in 1983.

  MOTTA GUR Commander of the 55th Brigade in the battle for Jerusalem, later chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Died in 1995.

  AMNON HARODI Member of Kibbutz Ein Shemer, killed in the battle for Jerusalem.

  YOSEF “YOSKE BALAGAN” SCHWARTZ Arik Achmon’s ex-brother-in-law and paratrooper jester.

  MOSHE “MOISHELEH” STEMPEL-PELES Deputy commander of the 55th Brigade in June 1967. Killed in action in 1968.

  OTHER RELIGIOUS ZIONISTS

  YEHUDAH AMITAL Rabbi of the Mount Etzion yeshiva. A Holocaust survivor and leading opponent of religious extremism.

  AVINOAM “ABU” AMICHAI A founder of Kfar Etzion; killed in the Yom Kippur War.

  SANDY AMICHAI Kfar Etzion’s first American; married Avinoam “Abu” Amichai.

  YEHUDAH ETZION Student and study partner of Yoel Bin-Nun. Imprisoned for leading a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.

  SHLOMO GOREN Longtime chief rabbi of the IDF. Became chief rabbi of Israel in 1973.

  ABRAHAM ISAAC KOOK First chief rabbi of the pre-state Jewish community in the land of Israel. One of the great Jewish mystics and thinkers of the modern era. Died in
1935.

  ZVI YEHUDAH KOOK Son of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, rabbinic head of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and spiritual father of the Gush Emunim settlement movement. Died in 1982.

  MOSHE LEVINGER Founder of the Jewish community in the West Bank city of Hebron, and of the adjacent Jewish town, Kiryat Arba. Helped found the Gush Emunim settlement movement.

  OTHERS

  MOTTI ASHKENAZI Commanded the only Israeli outpost along the Suez Canal that didn’t fall to the Egyptians during the Yom Kippur War. Initiated the protest movement that toppled the government of prime minister Golda Meir in 1974.

  SHALOM HANOCH A founding father of Israeli rock music. Grew up on Kibbutz Mishmarot. Childhood friend of Meir Ariel.

  URI ILAN Israeli soldier from Kibbutz Gan Shmuel who committed suicide in a Syrian prison.

  ENZO SERENI Italian-born Zionist pioneer, a founder of Kibbutz Givat Brenner. Killed on a parachuting mission to Nazi-occupied Europe. Kibbutz Netzer Sereni is named in his memory.

  DAOUD TURKI Arab Israeli leader of an anti-Israel terrorist underground. Charged with treason along with Udi Adiv and sentenced to seventeen years.

  Introduction: June 6, 1967

  THE LONG LINES of silent young men moved single-file through the blacked-out streets, illumined only by flashes exploding in the approaching distance. Not even the outlines of houses were visible, as if the city of white stone had been reabsorbed by the hills. It was a cool June night in Jerusalem, but many of the men were sweating. Their uniforms were olive green or camouflage-patterned, US Army surplus more suitable for the jungles of Vietnam than for urban warfare. Most of the men were in their twenties, reservists abruptly extracted from university or from farms. For most this would be their first war. They were entering battle already exhausted: many had stayed awake through the night before, too anxious for sleep.

  It was just past midnight, and the men of the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade were heading toward no-man’s-land, the swath of barbed wire and minefields and trenches dividing Jordanian-held East Jerusalem from Israeli-held West Jerusalem. That morning the Israeli air force had launched a preemptive strike against Egypt, whose leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had moved his army to the Israeli border, blockaded Israel’s southern shipping route, and threatened the imminent destruction of the Jewish state. The Jordanian army had opened a second front in Jerusalem, shelling Jewish neighborhoods and hitting hundreds of apartments. Most residents were in shelters, all lights extinguished. Every so often a jeep or ambulance raced, without headlights, through the empty streets.

  Lieutenant Avital Geva, twenty-six-year-old deputy commander of Company D, 28th Battalion, walked at the head of his men. He squinted into the darkness and saw nothing, not even shadows. Avital left the front of the line and walked alongside the men. “Spread out, guys,” he urged quietly, “spread out.”

  Nearby, on a fourth-floor rooftop, Major Arik Achmon, chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, was on the radio with the central front command near Tel Aviv, seeking information on the Jordanian troops barely a kilometer away. Headquarters didn’t seem to know much more than he did. Until the night before, the brigade’s battle plans had focused on a parachute jump into the Sinai Desert, and Arik had organized the necessary intelligence. But then, when the Jordanians began shelling Israel’s capital, the men of the 55th were hastily dispatched onto requisitioned tourist buses and driven to Jerusalem.

  A shell crashed into the facade of the building. Arik was covered with the dust of shattered bricks. “Helmets!” shouted Colonel Motta Gur, commander of the 55th Brigade. Arik checked himself: steady, as always.

  The paratroopers filled the side streets that ended in no-man’s-land. Sandbags were piled before little stone houses with corrugated roofs. Flares formed red-and-white arcs, exposing the paratroopers, flashes of silhouettes.

  Pavement erupted.

  “Medic!” Dozens lay bleeding. Avital Geva rushed through the darkness, shouting people’s names.

  A flash. Avital fell. “My face!” he screamed. “My face!” Someone laid him on a car, pointed a flashlight at his face. Covered with blood. Gasping, conscious, he was carried into a jeep, which sped through the exploding streets.

  Corporal Yoel Bin-Nun, bearing on his back his unit’s communications box, ran through the blacked-out streets. In civilian life he was a yeshiva student and knew these Orthodox streets; now, though, he was totally disoriented. He was trying to find the men of the 71st Battalion, who were scheduled to be the first of the brigade’s three battalions to cross into no-man’s-land. They would be followed by the men of Yoel’s battalion, the 28th. And it was Yoel’s assignment to follow the 71st to the crossing area, radio his battalion, and then point a flashlight, guiding his fellow soldiers into East Jerusalem. But where was the 71st?

  02:15. Israeli sappers cut an opening in the first line of barbed wire. Bangalores—long metal tubes filled with explosives—were extended through the opening and detonated, creating a narrow scorched path in the minefield.

  Yoel Bin-Nun found the crossing point. Crouching, he aimed his flashlight toward the men behind him and repeated, “Pirtza pirtza pirtza”—breach breach breach.

  THE PARATROOPERS WHO reunited Jerusalem in 1967 and restored Jewish sovereignty to the Holy City fulfilled a dream of two millennia. They changed the history of Israel and of the Middle East. They also changed my life.

  In late June 1967, a few weeks after the end of the Six-Day War, I flew to Israel with my father. I was a fourteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn, and my father, a Holocaust survivor, had decided that he couldn’t keep away any longer.

  Every evening, in the weeks leading up to the war, we would watch the news together. As Arab armies massed along Israel’s borders, demonstrators in the streets of Cairo and Damascus chanted “Death to Israel.” Yet the international community seemed indifferent. Even the United States, caught in an increasingly hopeless war in Vietnam, offered little more than sympathy. My father and I shared the same unspoken thought: again. Barely two decades after the Holocaust, the Jews were facing destruction again. Once again, we were alone.

  And then, in six days, Israel reversed threat into unimagined victory. The Israeli army destroyed the Egyptian army and conquered the Sinai Desert, three times the size of the state of Israel, seized the Golan Heights from Syria, and routed the Jordanian army in the West Bank—the biblical Judea and Samaria, birthplace of the Jewish people. And the paratroopers reunited a divided Jerusalem.

  A photograph taken of paratroopers at the Western Wall became the instant symbol of the war. In the photograph three young men stand, with the wall behind them, gazing into the distance. One holds his helmet in his hands. Their expressions are a combination of exhaustion, tenderness, and awe. At their moment of triumph they seem not like conquerors but like pilgrims at the end of a long journey.

  The Israel I encountered that summer belonged to the paratroopers. The photograph of the three paratroopers at the wall was everywhere. The radio played a song sung by a paratrooper named Meir Ariel, about “Jerusalem of iron, of lead and of blackness,” an attempt to remind a euphoric nation of the price of victory.

  At the Wall I watched my father become a believing Jew. He had lost his faith in the Holocaust; but now, he said, he forgave God. The Protector of Israel had regained His will. It was possible for Jews to pray again.

  I met my father’s two brothers who had survived the Holocaust, along with distant relatives whose relationship to us was too complicated to follow, post-Holocaust approximations of family. That summer everyone in Israel felt like family. Cars would stop and offer lifts to hikers who weren’t hitching. In a farming community on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, which had suffered for years under Syrian guns and whose children had grown up in air raid shelters, my father hugged and kissed a teenage girl walking by, and no one thought it untoward.

  Israel celebrated its existence, life itself. We had done it: survived the twentieth century. Not merely survived but rever
sed annihilation into a kind of redemption, awakened from our worst nightmare into our most extravagant dream.

  That summer Israel was possessed by messianic dreams of wholeness. There were those who believed that peace had finally come, and with it the end of the Jews’ exile from humanity. (Perhaps only Jews could conceive of a normal national life in messianic terms.) There were those whose longing for wholeness was soothed by the reunification of the divided land and the divided city, which some saw as precursor of the imminence of the messianic era, ending the fragmentation of humanity itself.

  For my father the dream of wholeness was fulfilled by Jewish unity. Perhaps not since the revelation at Mount Sinai—when the people of Israel were camped “as one body with one heart,” as a famous rabbinic commentary put it—had the Jews been as united as we were in those terrible, exhilarating weeks of late spring 1967. The great weakness of the Jews, my father believed, was the temptation of schism, even in the face of catastrophe. But when we were united, he reassured me, no enemy could destroy us.

  The ultimate expression of the Israeli dream of wholeness was the kibbutz, or agrarian commune. Several hundred were spread throughout the country, especially along the old borders. The kibbutz was an attempt to transcend human nature, replace selfishness with cooperation. Decisions were voted on by members, positions of authority rotated. Children were raised in communal homes away from parents and encouraged to run their own affairs. Many of Israel’s political leaders, and many of its leading soldiers, had been kibbutzniks. The Jewish state was the first democratic country to have been founded in large part by egalitarian collectives, and whose key institutions—trade unions, health clinics, bus cooperatives, even the army—were created by radical socialists.

  Though the secular kibbutzim had no use for religion, they claimed its messianic vision of restoring the Jews to the land and creating a just society, a light to the nations. The kibbutz was the symbol of Israel in the world, and that seemed natural. The very existence of a sovereign Jewish state after two thousand years of homelessness defied the natural order, and so did the kibbutz. One utopian dream symbolized the other.