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

  That summer I resolved to return one day and become an Israeli. Perhaps I would move to a kibbutz. The great Jewish adventure was happening in my lifetime; how could I keep away?

  IN THE SUMMER of 1982, at age twenty-nine, I moved to Israel as an immigrant. Israel had just invaded Lebanon, to end the threat of terrorist attacks on the Galilee (and, more grandiosely, to create a “new Middle East”). Instead of uniting Israelis, as it had in 1967, war now divided them. For the first time there were antigovernment demonstrations, even as soldiers were fighting at the front. The euphoria of the summer of ’67, the delusion of a happy ending to Jewish history, had been replaced by an awareness of the agonizing complexity of Israel’s dilemmas.

  I was now a journalist, writing for American publications, including the New York City newspaper the Village Voice, and so I set about trying to understand my new home. Most urgently, that meant understanding Israel’s schisms. On the streets people were shouting at each other about Lebanon. I covered the founding of West Bank settlements and followed the antisettlement movement Peace Now. I tried to listen to the conflicting certainties that divided those who saw the results of 1967 as blessing from those who saw them as curse. Israel was losing the feeling of family that had drawn me there in the first place. Much of my career became focused on explaining the unraveling of the Israeli consensus.

  From time to time I thought about interviewing veterans of the battle of Jerusalem. In a sense they were responsible for bringing me to Israel. How had the war changed their lives? What role did they play in trying to influence the political outcome of their military victory?

  Those questions were partly answered in a newspaper article I came across about a reunion of the paratroopers, which noted that some of the most prominent leaders of the settlement movement, as well as prominent activists in the peace movement, had emerged from the 55th Brigade. The men who as civilians were dividing Israel would meet every year on reserve duty, sharing tents and periodically going to war together. Did their ideological antipathies undermine their cohesion as soldiers? Or did their shared army experience temper the ferocity of their political differences? Perhaps someday, I thought, I’ll write an article about them.

  IN THE FALL of 2002, I began to seek them out. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s had collapsed, and suicide bombers were blowing up buses and cafés in my city, Jerusalem. The Israeli home front was now the battlefield. How, Israelis wondered, could it have come to this? Most Israelis believed that their country had tried to make peace, only to be rejected by the Palestinian leadership. Yet Israel was widely faulted around the world. Even many Israelis on the left were now wondering whether any amount of territorial concessions would gain Israel peace and legitimacy, whether the Jewish state would ever find its place in the Middle East and be accepted by the international community as a normal nation.

  At that low point in Israel’s history, I turned to the men who had brought Israel its most transcendent moment. In recounting their lives, I intended to tell the story of how we had gone from the hope of those days to the shattering now, and how we might reclaim something of the optimism on which Israel had been built.

  By the time I encountered them in 2002, the veterans of the 55th Brigade were middle-aged and older, no longer part of the reserves. I learned that in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, they had led the nighttime crossing of the Suez Canal onto the Egyptian mainland that turned the war in Israel’s favor, one of the most daring military initiatives in the country’s history. (They called their veterans’ group the Association of Paratroopers Who Liberated Jerusalem and Crossed the Canal.) The 55th, then, had been in those years the Israeli army’s elite combat force. I decided to write a narrative history of the post-’67 left-right schism, as experienced by leading personalities who had been paratroopers.

  Probing deeper, I discovered an even more compelling aspect to this story. In 1967 perhaps half the soldiers of the 55th Brigade, and up to 70 percent of its officers, had been kibbutzniks. There was a second, if much smaller and militarily marginal, group within the brigade: religious Zionists, Orthodox Jews who celebrated the secular Jewish state as a divine miracle. After the Six-Day War religious Zionists, many of them convinced that redemption was imminent, initiated the West Bank settlement movement. In response, kibbutzniks helped found the peace movement that opposed the settlements.

  Secular kibbutzniks and religious Zionists disagreed about God and faith and the place of religion in Jewish identity and in the life of the state. Yet for all their differences, religious Zionism and the secular kibbutz movement agreed that the goal of Jewish statehood must be more than the mere creation of a safe refuge for the Jewish people. Both movements saw the Jewish return home as an event of such shattering force that something grand—world transformative—must result. The founders of the kibbutz movement in the early years of the twentieth century envisioned the future Jewish state as a laboratory for democratic egalitarianism. Many religious Zionists believed that the creation of a Jewish state would be the catalyst for the messianic era.

  Here, then, was a much bigger story about Israel than merely its left-right divide. It was a story about the fate of Israel’s utopian dreams, the vast hopes imposed on this besieged, embattled strip of land crowded with traumatized Jewish refugees.

  The meeting between religious Zionists and secular kibbutzniks in the 55th Brigade occurred at the most mythic moment in Israel’s history. The return to the Wall, to the Old City of Jerusalem and the biblical lands just beyond, brought Judaism to the center of Israeli identity, from which it had been largely marginalized by Israel’s secular founders.

  THIS IS NOT a book about the Israeli paratroopers, though that is a story well worth telling.

  Instead, this book tells the story, through the lives of seven paratroopers, of Israel’s competing utopian dreams—and how the Israel symbolized by the kibbutz became the Israel symbolized by the settlement.

  Even though about half of Israel’s Jewish population is of Middle Eastern origin, the main characters here are all Ashkenazim, of European Jewish descent. That is because the great ideological struggles that defined Israel in its formative years were fought primarily among the state’s founders and their children, most of whom were Ashkenazim. Israeli elites, especially in politics and the military, have in recent years become more reflective of the country’s Jewish diversity. But that was not the case for most of the decades covered by this book.

  Among the religious Zionists portrayed here, one founded the first West Bank settlement, while another became the settlement movement’s great heretic. Among the kibbutzniks, one helped found Peace Now and then abandoned the movement, convinced that peace with the Palestinians was impossible anytime soon.

  These men not only helped define the political debate of post-’67 Israel but also its social and cultural transformations. Improbably, one former kibbutznik became a pioneer in the transition from a state-run economy to free-enterprise Israel. Another emerged as Israel’s leading poet-singer, a bohemian symbol who then became an observant Jew.

  Born and raised with the reborn Jewish state, they were the first sovereign Jews in two thousand years. Their lives were the fulfillment of Jewish longing to return to Zion. Their burden was to carry those expectations.

  The paratrooper ethos demands initiative and responsibility, and as soldiers and as civilians, they internalized that code. To a large extent, Israel today lives in the partial fulfillment and partial failure of their contradictory dreams.

  Often these seven men argued vehemently within me. At times I have agreed with each of them—and passionately disagreed with each of them. But even then—perhaps especially then—I remained moved by their courage, their faith in human initiative and contempt for self-pity, their dauntless quest for solutions to unbearable dilemmas that would intimidate others into paralysis. In the ten years I spent among the veterans of the 55th Brigade, I was often reminded why I decided, in the summer of 1967, to tie my future with
theirs.

  PART ONE

  THE LIONS’ GATE

  (MAY–JUNE 1967)

  Chapter 1

  MAY DAY

  THE SOCIALISM OF “THE GANG”

  IN THE ORANGE orchards of Kibbutz Ein Shemer, Avital Geva, barefoot and shirtless in the early-morning sun, was frying eggs in a blackened pan. Turkish coffee was boiling in the aluminum pot, and his friends were laying out plates of tomatoes and cucumbers and olives, white cheese and jam. “Ya Allah, what a feast!” exclaimed Avital, as if encountering for the first time the food he had eaten for breakfast every day since childhood.

  It was mid-May 1967. Avital and his crew had been working since dawn, to outwit the heat of the day. Rather than return to the communal dining room for breakfast, the young men allowed themselves the privilege of eating together beneath the corrugated roof they’d erected for just that purpose. Could there be greater joy, thought Avital, than working the fields with one’s closest friends and sharing food grown by their kibbutz?

  One could almost forget about the crisis on the Egyptian border.

  Late spring was Avital’s favorite time in the orchards. The air was heavy with trees in flower. The last of the Valencia oranges had just been harvested, and the first swellings appeared of what would be the autumn harvest. Meanwhile the orchards had to be prepared for the long, dry summer. Every morning the crew dragged two dozen irrigation pipes, each six meters long, from row to row. Though only twenty-six years old, Avital had been appointed head of the orchards, one of the kibbutz’s main sources of income. Ein Shemer’s orchards were among the country’s most productive. Avital experimented with new machinery that would increase the harvest without entirely mechanizing the process, preserving a tactile encounter with the fruit. If you don’t say good morning to the tree, he had learned from the old-timers, the tree won’t say happy new year to you. Avital could spend an entire morning pruning a single tree, satisfying his artistic longings. “Michelangelo,” his friends called him, and half meant it.

  Work in the orchards, Avital insisted, should be fun. When the kibbutz’s high school students were sent to help with the harvest, Avital dispatched tractors to retrieve them from their dormitories and gave them the wheel. Awaiting them in the orchards were bins of biscuits; during breaks, he made French fries, an extravagance in a kibbutz whose diet was determined by austere Polish cooks. He divided the young people into teams, and the one that filled the most bins won chocolate.

  Avital’s close-cropped hair exposed an expression at once tender and resolute. The lower lip protruded, and a sturdy chin rose to uphold it. His blue eyes seemed translucent.

  “Hevreh?” he called out. “The eggs are ready!” Avital turned ordinary words into superlatives. And for Avital no word was more urgently joyful than hevreh—the gang—which he sang and elongated with new syllables. For Avital, hevreh was a kind of miracle, transforming separated beings into a single organism bound by common purpose, by love. The essence of kibbutz: a society of hevreh, in which no one was extraneous. Like poor Meir, heavy and sluggish, an Egyptian Jew lost among the Polish Jews of Ein Shemer, who’d been shunted from one part of the kibbutz workforce to the other until Avital insisted he join the hevreh in the orchards. And when they went on a bicycle trip up the steep hills to Nazareth, they brought Meir along, installing him like a peasant king on a couch mounted on a tractor-drawn wagon.

  Banter around the breakfast table turned to the situation in the south. The crisis had begun a few days earlier, on Israel’s Independence Day, when Egyptian president Nasser announced that he was dispatching troops toward the Egyptian-Israeli border. Then he ordered UN peacekeeping forces to quit the border, and incredibly, the UN complied. Now Egyptian troops and tanks were taking their place. Radio Cairo and Radio Damascus were broadcasting speeches by Arab leaders promising the imminent destruction of Israel.

  “Why aren’t they calling us up?” demanded Avital, a lieutenant in the 55th Brigade, the reservist unit of the elite paratroopers. How could he be sitting here while the country faced a threat to its life?

  “Maybe there will be a diplomatic solution,” someone suggested.

  “Not with the Russians pushing the Arabs to war,” someone else added. “When my two friends were killed by the Syrians, the Russian ambassador in the UN said that Israelis killed Israelis to blame the Syrians. That’s when I finished with Mother Russia.”

  “Mother Russia,” Avital repeated with contempt.

  AS A CHILD, Avital had been confused about Marxism and the Soviet Union, and on Kibbutz Ein Shemer, that was a pedagogical problem. Ein Shemer belonged to the Marxist Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair (the Young Watchman). Avital and his friends had been raised to revere the Soviet Union as the “second homeland,” as movement leader Yaakov Hazan once put it. Beginning in second grade they were taught Marxist principles by rote. “An avant-garde alone cannot create a revolution!” they chanted. But what exactly was an avant-garde, wondered Avital, and what was its relationship to the children of Ein Shemer? The words seemed too big for him; he could hardly pronounce them. Other children seemed to readily grasp the difference between deceptive socialism and true communism; why couldn’t he?

  He was twelve years old in 1953 when Stalin died. Ein Shemer went into mourning. The annual satirical play performed on the spring holiday of Purim was canceled. The movement’s newspaper, Al Hamishmar (On Vigilant Watch)—whose logo read, “For Zionism—For Socialism—For the Fraternity of Nations”—spread across the front page a heroic image of Stalin, his stern gaze focused on a distant vision. “The Progressive World Mourns the Death of J. V. Stalin,” read the banner headline.

  Of course Stalin’s death saddened Avital, but however terrible to admit, it seemed abstract to him. What did he really have to do with this man with the big mustache and row of medals on his chest? At Ein Shemer’s memorial, they played a recording of Stalin’s speech marking the victory over Nazism, but it was in Russian, and Avital couldn’t understand the words.

  A few years later, when a new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, came to power and repudiated Stalinism, Hashomer Hatzair acknowledged that Stalin had made mistakes, even committed crimes. But lest we forget, insisted the ideological guides of the movement, it was not easy transforming a country of peasants into a communal society. The kibbutz and the Soviet Union were different aspects of the same historical march: the kibbutz an experiment in pure communism, the Soviet Union an experiment in mass communism. Both were necessary to prove the practicality of radical equality. And lest we forget: Stalin defeated Hitler, and the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. And in 1948 the Soviets had supported Jewish statehood and shipped Czech weapons to the IDF.

  Avital was not indifferent to the Soviet romance: just as Europe had produced the ultimate evil, how right that it should produce the ultimate good. The weekly films screened on the kibbutz included Soviet-made features about the Red Army’s struggle against Nazism. Though the Hebrew subtitles were often out of sync with the images, watching those films was thrilling. In one, a Soviet soldier threw himself against a German machine-gun post, allowing his comrades to conquer the position.

  Sometimes Hazan—as everyone in the movement called Yaakov Hazan, revered leader of Hashomer Hatzair—would visit Avital’s parents, old friends from Warsaw. Avital would eavesdrop on their conversation about the latest “important and fateful matter,” as Hazan put it, before slipping away in boredom. Afterward, what he’d recall wasn’t Hazan’s analysis but the warmth with which Hazan and his parents interacted, without any sense of distance. Just like the two Ein Shemer comrades who happened to be members of the Knesset but who took their turn like everyone else serving in the dining room.

  Avital loved Ein Shemer, with its modest members riding rusty bicycles in their work clothes and kova tembel, the brimless, floppy “fools’ hat” whose very name was self-deprecating. Almost everything here had been planted or built by their own hands. Everyone was valued for who they were, not only for
what they did.

  For the founders of Ein Shemer, physical labor was an act of devotion, virtually a religious ritual. Working the land of Israel became a substitute faith for the Jewish tradition they abandoned; the socialist Zionist poet Avraham Shlonsky compared the roads being built by pioneers to straps of phylacteries, and the houses to its black boxes. The kibbutz transformed holidays from religious events into celebrations of the agricultural cycle, just as they were in ancient Israel, except without God. Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year but which lacked agricultural symbolism, was just another workday on Ein Shemer.

  SONG OF THE FOREST

  WITH SEVERAL HUNDRED members and no industry, Ein Shemer, located near the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa, wasn’t one of the larger or more prosperous kibbutzim. But nothing here felt provincial to Avital. Big issues informed daily conversation. Ein Shemer’s members included high-ranking officers, pilots, paratroopers. No kibbutz, they boasted here, produced more writers.

  And none, thought Avital, was more beautiful. The entrance to Ein Shemer was lined on either side with ficus trees whose branches reached toward each other and formed a canopy. Nearby was the old courtyard, a remnant of the kibbutz’s early years, a long stone house protected by a stone wall. No one lived there anymore, but it was preserved as a memory of Ein Shemer’s heroic origins, when the kibbutz was condensed to a single building surrounded by parched fields, a place so forlorn the comrades joked that their clocks lagged behind real time but no one noticed. The kibbutz had since evolved into rows of red-roofed houses, some with verandas; tomato and cotton fields, orange orchards, cowshed and chicken coops. The smell of cow dung mingled with orange blossoms and fresh-cut hay. A contiguous lawn spread across the sloping terrain, linking the parents’ area and the children’s area in a single public space.