IN JUNE OF 1982, IT WAS ALL OVER. THE LAST STEP OF THE peace with Egypt was immediately followed by the first step of a long war in Lebanon. This is how the war mentality annihilated the hopes for an expanding peace. Egypt first and the rest of the region right after. No sooner was the last stage of the agreement with Egypt—the painful evacuation of the settlements—completed than we embarked on the path of war. We will never know if Sharon—then a controversial “bully” and deceitful minister of defense—misled everyone, including PM Begin, or if Begin knew. Anyway, the end is known and very painful: Ariel Sharon kicked over Menachem Begin’s bucket and spilled both the water and Begin. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon.
Could it be that Begin and Sharon’s sense of having made a great concession over the expanses and settlements in Sinai required emotional and territorial compensation somewhere else? Did Begin understand, with his sharp political sense, that after the evacuation of Sinai it would be the turn of the West Bank mountain ridge and its settlements? Because if evacuation is possible in one place, it is possible elsewhere as well. Could it be that he thought that the only way to thwart the autonomy of “the Arabs of the Land of Israel”—his euphemism for the Palestinians—was an all-out war against them in their place of refuge in Lebanon? I think so. Begin no longer trusted the maneuvering ability of Dad and his team and instead decided to join Sharon, adding his own kick to the diplomatic bucket to make sure not a single drop of peace was left. Inside him there were at least two Menachem Begins, the statesman and the militarist. We witnessed with our own eyes what happened when the first weakened and the second grew stronger. At the decisive moment, the statesman in him, the democratic man of peace, surrendered to the man of challenge and war.
When that war was declared, I didn’t imagine that because of it I would eventually find myself a public figure, a member of parliament and filling high Israeli and Jewish public posts for decades. I was still a young student then, and we were a private and happy family: a father, mother, and two small children. Like many of my friends, my daily routine was essentially a kind of long hiatus between one stretch of reserve duty and another, from the distant Sinai to the heights of Mount Hermon. And in between we were called up for training and to brush up on our skills.
The only thing I liked about all these “soldier games” were the parachute jumps. I exploited every opportunity to do them. I liked to take to the skies, stand first at the door of the plane, gaze into the distance, control the fear, and jump into the enveloping silence. I parachuted dozens if not hundreds of times in my life, always with the same intoxicating enjoyment that swept me away. Until I was injured in training. A few meters before hitting the ground, the wind direction changed. And while my whole body was poised to roll forward, “calf, thigh, right shoulder,” to soften the impact of the hard ground, the wind carried me in a “reverse glide.” I was dragged along on my back for hundreds of meters, battered by the stones, until one of my fellow paratroopers grabbed the wind-filled parachute and stopped the drag. For many months, I walked around with back pain, refusing to give in, until the lower part of my body was almost completely paralyzed. The hospitalizations and operations became inevitable. In the spring of 1982, after two years of treatment and recovery, my body was still in a cast. I used a cane, and I was being treated in trauma, pain, and rehabilitation clinics. I was a disabled army veteran trying to resume the normal trajectory of life for a young man.
On the Sabbath before the Lebanon War, we—Yael, Itay, our firstborn, and little Roni, who was born only two months earlier, and I—were visiting friends up north. Without any warning a duel between artillery and Katyusha rockets began over our heads. An Israeli provocation meant to unravel the cease-fire agreement with the PLO in southern Lebanon. In the kibbutzes, people went down to bomb shelters. City streets were deserted, and we turned back and returned home, driving alone on the roads going south. In the opposite lane were long convoys of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery guns. Again war, again the old fears. And again, mobilization of all the relevant nationalist rhetoric. When we reached home, I called my parents to report, as always, that we had returned safely.
“Dad, do you know that there are army convoys heading north?” He didn’t know.
“Surely, it’s just skirmishes,” he reassured me. My eyes saw one thing, and my ears heard him saying something else. I wasn’t aware of the contradiction developing between my eyes and ears, my information from the ground and his government, which was deceived by Sharon and deceitful with the Israeli public. A few more days passed, and one evening a call-up order arrived at my house. I kissed Yael and the children and went off to war, disabled, limping, in a cast, and mobilized.
“You can go home, it’s a mistake, you’re injured,” the commander told me.
“Forget it,” I replied in typical Israeli fashion, “I’m with you.”
On June 6, 1982, we crossed the border into Lebanon. Soldiers equipped with ammunition belts, guns, and self-confidence, and me, with a cane and a cumbersome metal brace to stabilize my back. The first week of June is deeply symbolic—on June 6, 1944, the allied armies invaded Normandy; on June 5, 1967, the Six-Day War broke out; and here we were again in the week of wars. This symbolism likely did not escape the keenly aware Menachem Begin. He was a man of symbols and gestures, the greatest Israeli gestologist of all. He may have wanted to go to war on that date in order to erase the humiliation of the Yom Kippur War waged by the hated Labor Party with his own glorious campaign, which was supposed to evoke the victorious war of June 1967.
I was away from home for many days. We moved a bit and camped a bit. We fired a little and were fired on. We were shaken by thunderous artillery and saw the contrails of jets. We heard loads of rumors: about friendly fire by our planes on our forces, about comrades killed, about other forces at the gates of Beirut. Here and there civilians would give themselves up to us. I photographed children emerging from a pit in the ground with their hands raised.
“Like Warsaw,” someone said.
“Only the opposite,” someone else said, “this time it’s not us.” And everyone laughed. There was talk of a battle that went wrong on an adjacent route. Something didn’t work out. They—PM Begin and his Ahitophel, Sharon—said forty-eight hours and it’s been a few weeks already. They talked about forty kilometers, but who’s counting? The radio broadcast certain things, and in reality, other things happened. We excused it all as the “fog of war.” In the end, we were discharged. I remember only a few details: Fatima Gate near Metulla, the cold pizza in Kiryat Shmona in the middle of the night. But actually, it was all erased, because the minute I entered the house, my parents’ home, Mom’s scream pierced the air. She, who never lost control, who never got too angry or too happy, gave a full-throated yell. A great and liberating shout of a mother’s joy, the likes of nothing else. And my mother, who wasn’t with me when I was inducted into the army, and did not understand so many of the twists and turns of my life, was with me when I returned from the war. My heart goes out to her even now, when she is no longer alive, and to that special moment like no other. The moment in which a mother was born to me, and I was born again, differently, to her.
Later we met friends and friends of friends. Everyone told a bit of the story and a big picture started to form. A giant picture. The government of Israel knows nothing about the war it declared, and which Ariel Sharon is waging on its behalf. At home Dad is talking to me about forty kilometers and forty-eight hours, and we are already deep inside on the Beirut-Damascus road, with no departure on the horizon.
“We ordered the army to stop at the forty-kilometer limit,” he tells me authoritatively.
“The guys are many kilometers to the north of this imaginary line. We are already in West Beirut,” Alon tells me, the son of Yehiel Shemi, the sculptor from Kibbutz Kabri.
“IDF vehicles are moving on the Beirut-Damascus highway,” Nahum Karlinsky, the pilot, tells me.
“We were given a briefing with maps,” Dad tells me at night in a call from the government meeting room.
A great many contradictory reports move through our human network, which played an organizing and decisive role before the PC and Google, before WhatsApp groups, faxes, and speedy email. Despite all the fog and deception, the denials and deceit, everything became known and exposed. The government is lying, and my comrades are killing and being killed—just like that, as if it were nothing.
One by one I brought my friends to Dad, people the likes of which he had never met: secular, young, direct, and blunt. So different from Isi Eisner, Eugen Michaelis, and Yaakov Tzobel, his dignified and serious German immigrant friends. Secular Israel—which had never been in our house, and which we did not learn about in the yeshiva, and which we did not get to know in the youth movement—came in to stop that war, the first war of the Israeli right wing.
Minute by minute I was drawn in. I broke all my oaths in terrible anger. So many times, I had sworn to myself that I would never be like my father, that I would not get involved in politics. And now, facing the enemy—the government of Israel—I was sucked in by forces I could not resist. We began collecting signatures, we created a movement called “Soldiers Against Silence,” and in the process, we discovered that we were not alone: soldiers, in mandatory service and reserves, came without fear, added their signatures, and organized demonstrations and meetings. We traveled around the country and tried to persuade people. Unwittingly, my small cog meshed with the large machine of real national politics. Without noticing, I became an active, full-time politician.
After a few weeks of rallying support, we requested a meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin. We wanted to personally present him with the soldiers’ signatures. To our surprise, we received a positive answer. On the appointed day, three of us arrived at the prime minister’s office: Alon, a veteran of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, Nahum, a pilot, and me, a limping paratrooper with a cane. For the first time in my life I entered that office. The prime minister’s room is small and modest relative to the grand offices of important people and world leaders. Begin was lying on the couch. I seem to recall that a few days earlier he had slipped in his bathtub at home and broken his hip. His large glasses further magnified his vacant eyes. In some moments, I had the feeling that he was not with us. We gave him the signatures and explained to him what was happening on the ground, that he was losing the support of the soldiers on the battlefield.
Instead of answering us directly, the prime minister got up with difficulty and leaned on his cane, hobbling over to a wall with a map of the Land of Israel. We also rose, I with my cane. “I see that we have something in common,” he joked with me. He waved a limp hand and pontificated with a weak voice, the voice of the exhausted, a faint echo of his vanished demagogic powers and rhetoric about the Land of Israel. We had come to speak to him about Lebanon, but he was preoccupied with issues of Greater Israel. We talked about war and the senseless sacrifice, and he was busy with unrealistic dreams and fantasies about kingdoms of Israel, the one that was, and the one to come. While he was whipping himself up into a frenzy near the map, I went over to the adjacent bookcase and took out a Bible. I opened it and quoted the resounding verses from the book of Ezekiel (33:23–25):
The word of the Lord came to me: O mortal, those who lie in these ruins in the land of Israel argue, “Abraham was one man, yet he was granted possession of the land. We are many; surely, the land has been given as a possession to us.” Therefore say to them: “Thus said the Lord God: You eat with the blood, you raise your eyes to your fetishes, and you shed blood—yet you expect to possess the land! You have relied on your sword, you have committed abominations, you have all defiled other men’s wives—yet you expect to possess the land!”
Begin, with the remaining lucidity he could muster, said, “Well, if you’re going to the Bible, let’s return to the couch.” We returned.
As if on a director’s cue, the door opened and the prime minister’s shrewd media advisor entered and whispered something in his ear. “Of course! Of course! Bring them in,” Begin blurted out. Three women entered the room. Their dresses were long, severe head-scarves hid every hair on their heads, and they wore sickly sweet smiles. Three stereotypical settlers. The weakened Begin did not even get up to greet them, and they, in keeping with Jewish purity customs, did not shake his limp hand.
“We wanted to bring the prime minister signatures of thousands of Jews who support him, the government, and the war.” They concluded with a few words about the lands of the biblical tribes of Naftali and Asher, liberated in the north of the country as part of the “Peace for Galilee” war, and about the yeshivas and settlements they intend to establish there with their husbands, sons, and daughters.
“Did you see them?” Begin said with pleasure after they left. “So demure, so… chaste, so supportive. Well then, you are not alone,” he said, banishing us from his consciousness before dozing off for a moment. The media advisor, who was in the room, tried to hustle us out before there was further embarrassment. When we got up, Begin opened his eyes and said, “How can I stop now, when eighty-five saintly fighters have already been killed?” and ended the meeting.
Outside the office, still stunned by the weakness of the most powerful man in Israel, we agreed with the media advisor that the meeting would remain undisclosed. I was not yet familiar then with the power-plays and deceit of that office. In those days, it was very difficult for a young citizen to be cynical about his government. We believed in the wisdom of the government and its integrity. Though we were blunt, we didn’t doubt. And government offices, as they have always done, invested much of their energy in deception. Sometimes the deception is meant to camouflage big moves, and sometimes it was meant to cover up small mistakes. But at that time, the whole government of Israel was mobilized to hide from the people the fact that there was no leader at the helm. Who knows if Begin was manic-depressive or just depressive. Who knows whether it was the medications he took or the burden which had become too much for him. Maybe the truth had struck this honest man and stunned him. We will never know. One thing is clear: In those days Israel had no prime minister, and everyone did what they liked. Ariel Sharon did many things, and it is doubtful if even one of them was honest.
We, as young patriots, people whose belief in the state and its institutions and love for the place and its fate were stronger than any other public feeling, kept our meeting with Begin secret—as we had promised. But it didn’t last long—the next day the meeting was disclosed in a headline in one of the morning papers. Overnight I went from being an anonymous Jerusalem youngster to something between a media ploy and a new political prospect. Even though I was supposedly born into politics, I wasn’t ready for it. Actually, my life until then had flowed in the opposite direction. I lived in the deep anonymity and privacy that were made possible by the walls my parents had built between the public and the private. All the strings I had tried to cut between the trajectory of Dad’s life and the life I planned for myself came together, as if on their own. As soon as the lights went on, I was on center stage. The media and the public could not ignore the strange combination of someone wearing a kippah being a leftist, an injured paratrooper being a pacifist, and especially an activist in a protest movement against a war waged by a government in which his father served.
It was now my turn to negotiate the space between public and family life. I did this with caution, searching for a way to be true to myself and to the mission I had partly pursued and which had partly been thrust on me, while maintaining the warm ties with my parents’ home, with my small children, with the wonderful friendship between my wife and my mother. Those days marked the start of atonement for all the pain between us during previous years. Dad said almost nothing, and whatever was important for him to convey he conveyed through Mom. “They’re using you,” she said, meaning the sudden interest of cynical politicians and the media, and she was right. But I also used them, and I was also right. Standing one day on the long and narrow porch at the entrance to my childhood home, Mom told me, “I don’t know why you need all this ‘Peace Now.’”
“Mom, I want to leave my children a better country than the one you left us,” I told her, and her reply surprised me very much: “This country is not the country we founded.” They really lived in the classical Jewish world of two Jerusalems, heavenly and terrestrial. They loved the utopian, idyllic, and perfect Israel of their imagination, and lived in it within their protected and insulated environment. They hardly knew the reality outside. They knew of its existence, but they never got near it or rubbed shoulders with it. I, for my part, repeatedly hurled terrestrial Israel at them, which they refused to see or get to know. Our disagreement was a familial microcosm of the Zionist rebellion against mother Judaism. Between those two entities, theirs and mine, one the object of dreams, the other embattled, is where the Israeli struggle is playing out to this very day and will continue for many days to come.
I was very careful to maintain respect for Dad just as I was making every effort to damage the standing of his government. The forty-eight-hour war we were promised had been going on for three months. On Rosh Hashanah of that year, 1982, the year of Sharon and Lebanon, a terrible massacre occurred in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. On the morning of our holy day, when Dad and I were standing beside each other in our small synagogue, the Christian Phalangist fighters, Sharon’s allies, completed two days of slaughter and bloodshed in the helpless and defenseless Palestinian refugee camps. The Phalangist fighters left the camps, and that’s when the horrific news began to arrive.
When my friends came into the synagogue to tell me about the massacre, I whispered to Dad, “I can’t go on, I’m going home,” and in my heart, I literally shouted for a response to the day’s prayer to “remove the wicked government from the earth.” Yael was sitting in the synagogue’s women’s section with our little Roni; our firstborn, Itay, was with me. We met outside the synagogue and went home. In the square between the synagogue and my parents’ home, the police were already trying to disperse demonstrators with tear gas, and we all breathed some of it. Those were really Days of Awe. At home, we didn’t talk much about politics, and in public we didn’t talk at all—my father and I—about one another or with each other. We never planned our joint moves, or more precisely our non-moves. But our deep and intimate knowledge of one another produced, seemingly spontaneously, a deliberate decision never to be on the same public stage, not on radio or television, not in the press or in any political encounters.
In those days someone, probably one of my friends, spray-painted a huge graffiti message on the wall of my parents’ home: “Burg, learn from your son.” Time and again the municipality asked my parents if they wanted the writing erased. “No!” Dad said. The large inscription stayed there, gradually fading, until a few years after his death, when it disappeared entirely. Until his last day, Dad was very attentive. Not always understanding, not necessarily agreeing, but wanting to be updated and very curious. His personal example, his open-mindedness and readiness to learn from anyone, which he always accompanied with the old Jewish saying, “A person is jealous of everyone except his son,” was a motto that enabled me to be a partner, pupil, and friend of all my children.
During those months after the Rosh Hashanah of Sabra and Shatila, the pattern of relations between me and my family, as well as between me and the Israeli public, was set. Until the massacre in the refugee camps, the Israeli political system treated us—the protest leaders—with expedient hypocrisy. Everyone benefited from our public work, and few were willing to really pitch in and help. There were a few thousand soldiers who had been in actual combat in Lebanon, and who came back home and said, “No more,” and “The emperor is a liar.” The right needed us in order to sic its mob against someone. And who better than the “well poisoners,” “traitors,” and “backstabbers of the nation,” who are all satanic leftists? Begin and his followers had a long tradition of double-talk. Lofty declarations about the unity of the people and despicable acts of goading and incitement. And the opposition to Begin, the Alignment Party, didn’t exactly know what it wanted. Some of them refused to meet us, others met us and then issued denials. And the rest simply didn’t care, because they were going about their business. We were killing and being killed, protesting and struggling, and they were in the Histadrut labor federation, in the party or party branch or municipality. Only the massacre in the refugee camps managed to unsettle them and force the entire political system to take a stand. Completely against their will, even the smooth and evasive operators among them were compelled to become retroactively courageous.
On Saturday night, September 25, 1982, retroactive activists like them streamed to Malchei Yisrael Square with hundreds of thousands of people. People shocked by the massacre and opponents of the war, veteran peaceniks along with the begrudging presence of opposition members. Leaders were swept along, led by the masses who were much more honest and ethical than they were. The square was packed with people. It was hard to believe that sight, unbelievable that a few young men in Jerusalem—honest, yet simple soldiers coming back from the battlefield—had generated this tremendous human movement, or more accurately, were active partners in extracting the cork from the bottle in which the spirit of all these people was trapped. For the first time in my life I was on the stage, any stage. All the bigwigs spoke, Rabin and Peres and many more. I was the eleventh speaker. I stood off to one side. I didn’t know any of them. They appealed to the crowd with rousing, impassioned calls that set off waves of applause, trying to compete with their rhetoric against the hypnotizing oratory of PM Menachem Begin, the king of city squares.
I went up to the stage, hobbling with my cane. I had the feeling that utter silence had descended on the world. Before me were notebook pages on which I had written the first speech of my life. Hiding under the stage, where the traditional theater prompter would be, was Haim Bar-Lev, the general secretary of the Alignment. In his slow cadence, he whispered, “Two minutes and fifty seconds left, two and a half minutes…” How in heaven did we get to a situation in which the acclaimed former army chief of staff, who had avoided any affiliation with us and our argument, became a hidden whisperer in this defining demonstration? And what the heck was I doing up there, in the three minutes allotted to me? I said what I said, ending with the words, “We believe in a Judaism whose ways are pleasant and all of whose paths are peaceful.” I think there was applause. I’m not sure. My stomach was knotted with excitement and I couldn’t stand up straight because of the momentousness of the event. I didn’t know that this was history, but my body apparently understood that something was changing at that moment in our existence. The demonstration dispersed, and I walked, bent over, leaning on the shoulders of my dear father-in-law Lucien, who never wavered in his opinions, and with whom I attended many more demonstrations, gatherings, and memorial days.
When I got home I called my parents, as I always did until their last day. I hadn’t told them that I was going to that demonstration, but they likely already knew. We talked about how the Sabbath had gone, how the children were doing, who had visited whom. As if it were weekend business as usual. At the end, a minute before we hung up, at that moment, in his first and only reference to my political activity, Dad paid me the highest compliment, correcting the pronunciation of the biblical quotation I used in my speech. I’m not entirely sure that I mispronounced it, but if there was such a mistake, in a verse that I had chanted and sung so many times since childhood, then it was the best mistake I had ever made. So much was folded into that sentence of his. All the mannerisms of the German immigrant, all the politics, all the appreciation, and all my upbringing at home. He basically told me without spelling it out: I know you were at the demonstration, I know you took care not to use the stage to harm me. I know that your words were well received and different than the words of others. I’m glad you used Jewish tradition as a basis for your political argument. But you have more to learn, because it’s important to be as precise as possible in citations and quotes, and not to fall into the abyss of ignorance threatening many pundits in Israel. So meticulous was this comment, so European in its understatement, and so him. Only time taught me the meaning of his pithiness. In his conciseness, he was saying to me: I know how to recognize your inner truth among your layers of verbiage and rhetoric. He knew, because he was like that too.
It took me many years to understand the secret of his conciseness. On the day of my marriage to Yael he called me into the kitchen. “Sit down,” he said. I sat down with great embarrassment. He chattered in a roundabout way and finally told me, “Look, according to Jewish tradition, I have to prepare you now for the wedding and marriage. But I fear that regarding some of the subjects, about which our Jewish forefathers would talk with their sons at this moment, you know more than me. I’ll make do with one word: Gently.” It’s hard to describe the degree of my astonishment, my sense of insult, the feeling of emptiness. Finally, for the first and perhaps last time in our lives that we’re sitting down to talk, this is all he has to say to me? Today I’m leaving his house and establishing my home, and that’s it? For a long time, I carried this searing pain in my heart; so little, almost miserly.
Over the years that anger gave way to a wonderful insight. And when my children were married, this is how I blessed them: “Between today and tomorrow, with the rays of the sunset, we will send you off on your way, as is customary in our home, with the blessing of Grandpa, of blessed memory: ‘Delicately.’ Continue your enchanted beginnings delicately, set the pace delicately, take flight to the sky delicately, and with the same delicacy go deep into hearts. With the delicacy that typifies only you continue the legend so that it will never stop.”
Because that lesson of gentleness was the essence of my parents’ lives and the basis of all the relationships between me and all my loved ones, the members of my household. Sometimes one word is etched in memory more than an entire speech. That’s how it was when I was sent on my way in life on the day of my wedding, which was his day of happiness, and that was his summary of my first experience on the public stage, the correction of the verse which in “his language” was an absolute recognition. I cherish and fondly remember all these words of his with longing and in a renewed search for meaning. Lucky, in fact, that he didn’t say more, because then I would have enjoyed it at the time without retaining anything for all the moments in the future that await me.
THAT MASS DEMONSTRATION, WHICH WAS KNOWN LATER as the four-hundred-thousand-people protest, was a defining moment for me. It cemented my place in the public consciousness and reorganized, for the better, the whole fabric of relations between me and my parents. Our political differences improved and our relationship deepened. On the one hand, we understood each other much better. Contrary to the past, we now started to talk in the very same language. We loved and appreciated the same people, and the list of people we didn’t particularly respect was almost the same. I thought that one was a liar, and my father sarcastically commented, “Not at all. He lies only to stay in shape.” About another he claimed that “he lies even when he’s silent.” And about one of our common adversaries he had this to say with feigned affection, “He’s a man of principle. Principle number one: opportunism.” On the other hand, the deep differences between us on issues of religion and state, policy and political alliances were so significant that we didn’t have to confront each other about them. It was obvious what our positions were, and we saved ourselves a great deal of time.
Still, my point of entry to the political atmosphere was not easy for him at all. Two weeks after that demonstration I received an invitation from Shimon Peres’s office. He was then the leader of the opposition, who had already lost a few elections to Menachem Begin. We met in the ornate lobby of a hotel in Jerusalem. “I heard you speak at Malchei Yisrael Square two weeks ago and I was very impressed,” he said. “I would like to offer you to join the Labor Party.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked, surprised.
“Just join the party, and I’ll see to it that you will become a member of the central committee.”
I didn’t know precisely what the central committee was, but this institution still radiated great power at the time, the source of energy of the historic Labor Party.
“And what will I do there?” I wondered.
“What would you like to do in public life?”
“I want peace, and I want the separation of religion and state,” I said, reciting the two pillars of the doctrine of my teacher and guide, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
“Excellent. So you will be the chairman of the platform committee for issues of religion and state,” he said, concluding his offer.
Despite my surprise, I responded, “Thank you. I accept, but I ask that you give me a few days before making it public, so I have a chance to discuss it with my parents and tell them. So they won’t hear it elsewhere first.”
“Of course, of course. Give my regards to your parents, especially to your special mother.”
“Thank you. I will call you after the Sabbath, after I speak with them.”
The next day, very early in the morning, even before the hour that people from Germany thought was the polite time to call, the phone rang. On the line was my dad, literally crying, sobbing and swallowing his words. It turned out that immediately after the meeting with me, Peres went to the Labor Party branch in Jerusalem and publicly announced that I was joining the party. His announcement was reported in one of the back pages of the mythic labor movement Davar newspaper. It is doubtful if anyone saw it aside from my father, who was very hurt, not by the political decision but by the way he had found out about it. And he was right.
A few months later, the committee I was promised to chair convened. I arrived in the room, twenty years younger than the youngest member there. I had gotten ready for this meeting over many days. I had prepared my remarks and the committee agenda. I had intended to propose a process for adopting new and fundamental decisions on an issue that had not been dealt with much until then. I wanted to sit in the chairman’s seat, “mine,” and discovered it was already taken. Shimon Peres had already promised it to someone else, older, more aggressive, and far more experienced. He had arrived a half hour earlier and had taken the seat. That’s how you create facts in the Labor Party. Needless to say, Peres was not there to resolve the complication created by his empty promises. The committee room was filled with people who had received promises from Peres that he had forgotten to keep.
Within the space of a few months I had met personally with two of the most significant figures in Israel, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. Begin was an honest but weak man, surrounded by a coterie of admirers who protected him in every way possible, and who were not averse to deceiving the public for that purpose for many years, up until he resigned, worn out and feeble, in September 1983 with the painfully truthful statement of an honest man: “I can’t go on.” Peres was neither one nor the other, neither weak nor honest. There was only one thing they had in common: the need, the unquenchable thirst for popularity. Begin flirted endlessly with his audiences, and Peres, who was rejected as different, an “other,” and was unloved for most of his career, bore his cross through all the stations of the Via Dolorosa until his popular redemption in the presidential residence in the twilight of his life. I still preferred Peres and his path over Begin—because of his path. At the time, I still believed that Peres was indeed a man of peace, and the rest was less important to me.
In the mass demonstration I described previously, a process began that culminated in the establishment of the state commission of inquiry into the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The committee submitted its conclusions in the winter of 1983, the grimmest of winters. The government of Israel was very hesitant: to accept or not accept the report? To adopt or not adopt its conclusions? The report recommended dismissing Ariel Sharon from the post of defense minister, undoubtedly a great achievement for our unequivocal public demand. But Sharon, in true Sharon fashion, refused to resign.
In February 1983, masses of protestors took to the streets again. This time we asked to receive the report and its recommendations. A demonstration left from Zion Square in Jerusalem to the government complex. It passed for a few kilometers downtown, in my childhood neighborhood, all the places I knew and loved in the city when it still had some remnants of intimacy: Atara Café; the Hatik leather store; the Maoz HMO; Badihi’s Falafel King stand, where I asked Yael to be my girlfriend and was rejected; Benny’s Fish restaurant. This time the walk had no romance. It was one long, violent scene. Incited supporters of the government, rightist street thugs, repeatedly broke through the thin line of police that was supposed to protect us. In the moments of truth, during the event, I had the constant impression that the police were part of the rioters, and not a defense deployment against them. Spitting, tearing of clothes, shouts, curses, pushing, and actual blows. In the end, we arrived at a place across from the prime minister’s office.
Upstairs, the government was meeting to discuss the commission report. They were up and we were down below, they in power and we in the street. We raised our voices, hoping to penetrate the sealed windows and deaf ears. I thought then that Begin, who for so many years had been in the opposition, would understand the meaning of the street protest more than his colleagues in the cabinet. We raised placards, speeches were given, and we sang the national anthem. There’s always a very special pause between the end of such an activity and the return to private routine. A minute of transition from the adrenaline high to everyday ordinariness. A moment when everything stops. This is the time of calm between all kinds of storms. Into this special moment, right at the end of the last strains of the hoarse “Hatikva” that crackled from the makeshift loudspeakers, burst an unmistakable sound—the explosion of the detonator cap of a hand grenade. My soldiering instinct, still imprinted in me, counted off in my head by itself: “Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Boom.” Grenade! Somewhere on my left a deadly hand grenade had been thrown out of the darkness, and like all my colleagues who were there we became participatory witnesses to the first political assassination of our lives, in which Emil Grunzweig, a friend and a devoted peace activist, was murdered by Yona Avrushmi, a right-wing zealot.
The large crowd began running in all directions. Someone fell next to me. And another. I bent down and began giving first aid. I don’t remember any thoughts going through my head as I hunched over the wounded person at my feet, just lots of legs, shoes, socks, and cuffed jeans in the style of that time. Nothing aside from the silent vacuum that always prevails in pressure situations. Thoughts disappear, leaving only the operating system in automatic mode. Tourniquet, calming down, tearing a shirt, and dressing the wound. A large vehicle, a Volkswagen van, arrived out of nowhere. I carried someone in my hands, and then another person, and we hurried together to the nearest hospital, Shaare Zedek. When it was all over, someone said, “Avrum, you have a hole in your coat and blood on your back.” I took the coat off, and I discovered that I had been hit by a fragment from the grenade and hadn’t even felt it.
In seconds, everything took on an entirely new dimension. From being a responder I became a casualty. I was laid down on a bed in the emergency room. They stripped me, then cleaned and dressed the wound. And all around there was a big commotion of doctors, police officers, photographers, peace activists, noisy rightist thugs, and ordinary busybodies who always gather in emergency rooms. I felt a great weariness. The entire load of the recent months and the changes in my situation landed on me at once. Unable to sleep, I asked to call Yael, who was at home with the kids. A short time later I sensed movement on the other side of the curtain that separated patients from the large space of the emergency room. The curtain was pulled aside, and my father stood there. He had left the fateful cabinet meeting, gone through a transformation, and was again my father.
Something between horrible worry and liberating relief was etched on his face. I was so happy to see him. I loved him so much at that moment. The whole world went quiet around us. Searching for the picture that would frame the event, a quote, a gesture, or an expressive face. And we felt as if it were just the two of us in the world. I drowned myself in his kind eyes. And he too leaped through my eyes directly into the depths of my soul, and I immediately knew that all the bad years between the two of us were behind us. But I didn’t know that all the bad years for Israel still lay ahead.