ON THE JORDAN RIVER
THE HAPPY ENDING of Jewish history barely lasted the summer of 1967. Arab attacks resumed on all fronts. The Egyptian army shelled Israeli troops along the Suez Canal. The PLO sent terrorists across the Jordan River and placed bombs in Israeli markets. Abroad, Israeli planes were hijacked. Arik Achmon was wrong, after all. The Six-Day War hadn’t convinced the Arab world that Israel’s existence was permanent.
Reserve duty resumed, even more intensively than before the war. The new borders required greater effort to protect. The IDF built camps and bunkers along the Suez Canal, on the Golan Heights, in the Jordan Valley. Still, for the first time the coastal plain, where most Israelis lived, was no longer directly threatened. The paratroopers’ war in the streets of Jerusalem seemed to mark the end of the unbearable intimacy between the home front and the battlefront. A surprise attack could no longer sever the state in minutes; the IDF’s doctrine of preemption, of taking the war into enemy territory, was replaced by a defensive strategy. In protecting Israel, the IDF finally had a reasonable margin for error.
The 28th Battalion was assigned a month’s reserve duty in the Jordan Valley, the desert strip separating the West Bank and Jordan, Israel’s new eastern border, stretching from the southern edge of the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. The battalion set up headquarters in the former Jordanian police station in Jericho, a quiet town of palm trees and winter villas; just outside the town was a refugee camp of mud houses, dating from the 1948 war.
It was late winter. By day the reservists sat in huts abandoned by the Jordanian army, drinking coffee and arguing about the future of the newly won territories. In the freezing nights, they lay in ambush for terrorists wading across the Jordan River. It rained heavily, and the Jordan, in dry times a thin stream barely two meters wide, rushed with vigor. The limestone hills turned green.
Whatever divisions had once existed between the kibbutznik veterans of the paratroopers and the religious newcomers from Nahal disappeared. Now they were all veterans of the battle for Jerusalem. When religious soldiers needed a tenth man to complete a prayer quorum, Yoske Balagan volunteered. “At the Wall I discovered I’m a Jew,” he said.
One Shabbat, Yoel Bin-Nun’s officer announced a drill, a simulated terrorist attack from across the river. The officer called Yoel aside and said, “You don’t have to participate.” He intended to spare Yoel the choice between obeying orders and violating Shabbat. But Yoel was indignant. “No way,” he said. “An exercise is also potentially a matter of life and death”—and so superseded Shabbat observance.
Even as Yoel rejected religious privilege, he insisted on religious strictures in the army’s shared space. When soldiers caught a rabbit—a nonkosher animal—and cooked it in a pot in the field kitchen, Yoel complained to his commander. “Let them do whatever they want,” said Yoel, “but not with army property.” The IDF belongs to all of us, Yoel was saying; don’t exclude me from the collective kitchen.
With his knowing gaze and reassuring smile, Yoel was, for his fellow soldiers, the beautiful face of Judaism. He spoke in a deep soft voice, imparting Torah wisdom on the issues of the day. Yoel wasn’t trying to “convert” secularists but seeking a common language with them. In Yoel’s vocabulary, there were no “religious” or “secular” Jews, only those who observed more and those who observed less. Every soldier was in some sense religious: Was there any greater mitzvah than protecting the people of Israel in its land?
A secular young man with whom Yoel shared a hut posted a pinup of a naked woman over his bed. Yoel averted his eyes but said nothing. The pinup disappeared.
UDI ADIV’S FELLOW RESERVISTS in Company D wanted to like the basketball player from Gan Shmuel who knew how to make Turkish coffee with just the right balance between bitter and sweet. But they couldn’t bear Udi’s politics. He thinks everything is our fault, they complained, that the Arabs only want to throw flowers at us.
“What are we doing here?” Udi said over a game of backgammon to a young man from Kibbutz Ein Shemer. “This is occupied territory.”
“I agree,” said his friend. “But we have to protect the country.”
“You’re no socialist,” taunted Udi. “A real socialist, when he sees injustice—he doesn’t just talk, he acts.”
“If you mean protesting, by all means. But if you’re talking about taking the law into your hands, then that’s anarchy.”
Manning a roadblock, Udi allowed Arabs to pass through without a security check. One night, while waiting with his unit in an ambush for terrorists crossing the river, Udi fell asleep. (No terrorists appeared.) He did it on purpose, the others accused.
Udi insisted it had been a mistake; he’d just drifted into sleep. But word in the unit was that Udi Adiv had committed a paratrooper’s most unforgivable sin, turning his back on his friends.
AVITAL GEVA LIMPED into the Jericho police station. He wasn’t supposed to be here; he was still on medical leave. But he couldn’t keep away from the guys. He promised Ada he would be gone for a day, but he stayed a week.
The men of Company D told Avital about Udi’s behavior during the ambush. “He’s mocking us,” one said, “I heard him snoring.”
“Sleeping during an ambush?” said Avital, almost shouting. “Risking the lives of his friends?”
Avital pulled rank and summoned Udi to the police station. They met in the hallway.
“Look, Udi,” Avital began hesitantly. “The guys say you’re sabotaging things here. That you deliberately went to sleep on an ambush. What do you say?”
“I say it’s not true,” Udi replied.
“Look, Udi, politics is one thing, the army is another,” said Avital. “Whatever your politics are, you have to keep them out of the army. Otherwise we’ll tear each other apart.”
Udi thought, Who is this Avital Geva? One more idiot hero—
Avital thought, What am I supposed to do with this fanatic? I swear, this guy reminds me of a Stalinist—
“I can arrange for you to stay in the brigade as a truck driver,” Avital offered.
“I’m not interested in driving a truck,” said Udi.
AVITAL WENT TO SEE Haggai Erlichman, commander of Company D and a member of Ein Shemer. “What are you going to do about Udi Adiv?” demanded Avital.
Haggai was hesitant. Avital understood: bad blood had existed for decades between Ein Shemer and Udi’s kibbutz, Gan Shmuel. Only in the last years, with a new generation, had the enmity begun to ease. But what would happen if an Ein Shemer officer expelled a Gan Shmuel member from the paratroopers?
“There’s going to be trouble in the neighborhood,” warned Haggai.
“It’s him or me,” countered Avital.
Back home, Udi received a letter informing him that he was no longer a paratrooper.
TO THE FRINGE
THE TEL AVIV living room was crowded with long-haired young people arguing about how to hasten the imminent revolution. Arab and Jewish workers, someone said, were about to rise up together and destroy the Zionist state, along with reactionary Arab regimes. Revolution was spreading from Paris to Saigon; surely Tel Aviv wasn’t far behind.
Udi Adiv listened, fascinated. With his short hair and sideburns and sandals, he was a conspicuous kibbutznik among the bohemians. The anti-Zionist group Matzpen (Compass) was the most detested political movement in the country. In all of Israel there were barely fifty Matzpen activists. The whole Tel Aviv chapter fit comfortably into this salon. Founded by dissidents from the Israel Communist Party, Matzpen was an uneasy coalition of Maoists and Trotskyites and anarchists, united only by antipathy to Zionism. Though Matzpen considered itself an Arab-Jewish movement, almost all of its members were Jews.
Udi became an activist. He spray-painted antioccupation slogans on the apartment of a right-wing editor, visited Arab Israeli villages in a vain attempt to recruit members. When he tried to sell the Matzpen newspaper on the streets of Tel Aviv, he was spat upon, the papers knocked from his hands.
Fired from jobs, sometimes shunned by their families, Matzpen members prided themselves on being a kind of esoteric elite, the Jews who knew the truth about Zionism. Yet even in their contempt, Udi and his friends proved Zionism’s success. Only Zionist empowerment could have made young Jews feel safe enough, barely twenty-five years after the Holocaust, to despise Jewish power.
IN HER SILK scarf, heels, and beret, Sylvia Klingberg was incongruously elegant among the activists of Matzpen. Udi was drawn to Sylvia not only because of her dark beauty but because she was one of the most politically adept among the “Matzpen girls,” as the group’s young men called them. Sylvia was the only child of doting older parents. Her father was deputy director of Israel’s research institute for chemical and biological warfare; Sylvia called him a war criminal.
On May Day, Udi and Sylvia joined the small Matzpen contingent tagging along on the Communist Party march through the streets of Tel Aviv. The Communists carried red flags as well as blue-and-white Israeli flags; Matzpen members carried only red flags. Party members chased them away: Matzpen’s presence embarrassed even fellow Communists. Matzpen members regrouped and marched in their own mini parade, carrying signs that read “Down with Zionism.” Outraged passersby surrounded them. Udi, punched and kicked, was extricated from the mob by a policeman.
EVENING IN THE Gan Shmuel dining room. Udi and a friend sat at one of the Formica tables and mocked the “bourgeois revolutionaries” of the kibbutz. Even among the hundreds of diners who filled the hall, Udi’s voice resonated. “Cherkas,” he said, referring to the destroyed Arab village near the kibbutz, “that’s Gan Shmuel’s idea of socialist fraternity!”
A kibbutznik named Gabi, who’d been wounded in the thigh in the battle for Jerusalem, limped over to Udi’s table. “Why don’t you learn some history before making big statements?” Gabi said. “You talk about the Palestinians, but not a word about the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries.”
Udi smiled.
“You know, Udi,” Gabi continued, “we don’t have firing squads in the state of Israel. But the way you’re heading, you’re going to end up before the equivalent of a firing squad.”
ANOTHER NEIGHBOR EAVESDROPPING on Udi’s table was Shimon Ilan, whose brother, Uri, was the martyr of Gan Shmuel. In 1955 the nineteen-year-old Uri Ilan had been sent with his unit on a mission into Syria, to replace a battery at an IDF listening post. The group of five soldiers was captured and imprisoned in Damascus. Isolated from his friends, fearing he wouldn’t keep silent under torture, Ilan tore a strip from his mattress, tied it to his cell window, and hanged himself. When his body was returned to Israel, a note was discovered in his clothes, punctured holes forming the words “I didn’t betray.” Uri’s family and that of Udi Adiv were neighbors and close friends. Before Uri went off on his final mission, he’d come to say good-bye to Udi’s parents.
Udi was nine when Uri Ilan’s body was returned to the kibbutz for burial. Moshe Dayan eulogized his “determined will,” poets extolled his sacrifice. Gan Shmuel became known as “the kibbutz that didn’t betray.” And Uri Ilan became a powerful symbol for Gan Shmuel’s young people.
But not for Udi Adiv. In his parents’ home, he’d heard criticism of Uri as a fantasist who committed suicide out of fear, not strength. “Moshe Dayan knows very well how to send boys to their deaths,” said Udi’s mother, Tova. She dismissed the paeans to Uri’s courage as “patriotic schmaltz.”
Listening now to Udi’s mockery of Zionism in the kibbutz dining room, Uri Ilan’s brother, Shimon, wondered how far Udi was ready to go. Would he confine his anti-Zionism to Matzpen protests? Or was he planning more drastic action?
Shimon contacted the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. Keep an eye on him, Shimon was told. And let us know what he’s up to.
MR. TAMBOURINE MAN
“MEIR, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Are you crazy?”
“I’m not moving dis car,” Meir said in accented English, “until everybody be quiet.”
Meir had been driving on the highway in his secondhand Chevy station wagon, teenagers piled on each other’s laps. And then he’d simply stopped in the middle of the lane. Honking cars speeded by, drivers shouting. But Meir refused to move until his passengers quieted. “Anything, Meir, just drive!” Calmly, as though starting the car from a driveway, Meir stepped on the gas.
The teenagers of the Detroit branch of Habonim, the socialist Zionist youth movement, entertained each other with stories about their beloved and wacky Israeli emissary. Like the time he was sitting in his car in a supermarket parking lot and an untended shopping cart began rolling toward him and Meir honked at it. Or how he infuriated the parents of his teenagers by driving them to picket lines in solidarity with migrant grape pickers at local businesses owned by members of the Jewish community.
In the windowless basement that was headquarters for Detroit Habonim, with torn couches and spray-painted graffiti denouncing the war in Vietnam and supporting Israel, Meir taught his young people Zionist history and Israeli music. He spoke about Israel as the place where Jews dared take responsibility for their fate, and the kibbutz as a society where idealists dared turn the vision of equality into messy reality. Meir was so successful that parents complained to the Habonim leadership that the new emissary was enticing their children with the dream of living on a kibbutz—which was, after all, the goal of Habonim.
Tirza stayed at home with the children—there was now a baby boy as well as a girl—and watched America on television. TV had been introduced in Israel just as the Ariels were leaving for America. Having your own TV, said Tirza, felt like having a private helicopter.
America bewildered, dazzled. How was it possible, wondered Meir, to drive for days and still be in the same country? Tirza couldn’t grasp why no one seemed to understand her English. “Because,” said Meir, “you’re speaking in German,” the other language Tirza almost knew.
IT WAS THE late 1960s, and Detroit was burning and rocking. Racial riots had destroyed large parts of the city’s downtown. But at Motown headquarters you could walk in off the street and listen to a recording session of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Just a few years earlier, the Supremes had been playing local bar mitzvahs. Meir’s teenagers took him to hear the great rock bands and blues singers passing through. Meir was drawn to protest folk singers like Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary—though Pete Seeger’s sing-along earnestness, he said, reminded him of a revivalist meeting.
Most of all there was Dylan. Mr. Dylan, Meir called him with reverence.
Dylan seemed to catch every mood, break every boundary. And how he kept reinventing himself: from folk singer to rocker to country musician. It was worth struggling with English just for “Visions of Johanna.”
Listening to Dylan, Meir knew he had to write songs, ballads that told a story.
Though Meir’s voice was thin, Dylan’s was worse, and he’d become the voice of the generation. Go ahead, Dylan seemed to urge, your vulnerability is your strength.
MAGINOT LINE AT THE SUEZ CANAL
MOISHELEH STEMPEL-PELES, Motta’s deputy commander and Arik’s partner in tending to the brigade’s widows, was killed in a firefight with terrorists in the Jordan Valley. Just before he died, as the helicopter evacuated him, he smiled and waved to his men.
Tough, coarse, empathic, Moisheleh had taught Arik how to help the widows in practical ways. Arik maintained regular contact with the families he and Moisheleh had adopted—and those families now included Moisheleh’s wife, Daliah, and her two young sons. They had planned to reach many more war widows. But without his partner, Arik felt overwhelmed by study, work, family, reserve duty. Arik thought of the long list of widows waiting to be contacted, and guilt, an alien emotion, gave him no peace.
THE RUBBER DINGHIES crossing the Kishon River near Haifa Bay swayed in the fierce wind and rain. As the boats reached the opposite shore, men in helmets and drenched green coats rushed out and established the beachhead.
The 55th Brigade was conducting a three-day exercise, simulating a crossing of the Suez Canal. If Egyptian forces invaded the Israeli-held Sinai Desert, the paratroopers would cross the canal and take the battle into Egypt. That scenario was obviously far-fetched. How would the Egyptian army, whose soldiers had fled in the Six-Day War and left behind trails of boots in the desert, manage to cross the canal, let alone create a foothold on the Israeli side? Still, Israel needed to be prepared for any eventuality, however improbable.
In the evening, Motta summoned Arik and the officers from the scouts unit that had fought on the Kidron bridge in Jerusalem. The men laid their Uzis on the ground and sat around a table in the long tent that served as dining room. Rain hit hard against the undulating roof; a single lightbulb, illumined by a generator, flickered.
We are here, Motta explained, to discuss the scouts’ ill-fated mission during the battle for Jerusalem, when you missed the turnoff to the Mount of Olives and ended up, disastrously, under the Old City walls. According to the scouts’ version, repeated by the books beginning to appear about the war, the tank crews had been to blame for missing the turn. And then the scouts had tried to clean up the mistake, fighting against overwhelming odds.
Arik, who had participated in the rescue of the scouts and had later investigated the incident, knew the truth. There had been no battle against overwhelming odds. And the scouts had missed the turn, just like the tank crews before them.
Motta asked the men to recount that night’s events. After each had dutifully confirmed the unit’s official version, Motta said, “You know and I know that what you’ve said isn’t accurate. Hevreh, you made one mistake after another. I’m not blaming anyone. You fought bravely. I want you all to look me in the eye and tell me whether what I’ve said is true or not.”
“True,” said Kapusta, the unit commander, a squat man with a thick mustache whose body carried four battle wounds.
Motta asked each man in turn: “True?” “True,” each confirmed.
“Arik, give me the protocols,” said Motta.
Arik handed over the notes he’d been taking. Motta put the papers in his pocket.
“I have no interest in destroying your myth,” he said. “What was discussed here stays here. But we needed to establish the truth for ourselves.”
THE 55TH BRIGADE was called up for reserve duty along the Suez Canal. It was June 1969, and a war of attrition had been going on along the canal for nearly a year. Hundreds of Israelis and Egyptians had been killed or wounded. Combatants burrowed in bunkers beneath sand embankments along the roughly two-hundred-meters-wide waterway. With the onset of summer, temperatures during the day went over a hundred degrees. Sandstorms choked the bunkers, but stepping outside meant risking sniper attack. Tanks and artillery exchanged fire, while commandos crossed and attacked each other’s fortifications.
The IDF divided the canal into two sectors. Motta’s deputy, who was to command the reservists in the southern sector, was abroad, so Motta asked Arik to take his place. “You’re volunteering, right?” said Motta. “Right,” said Arik.
An officer took Arik on a tour of the front. The bunkers reminded him of the Maginot Line, the French defense that had collapsed with the Nazi invasion. Where was the daring, the ingenuity of the IDF?
They came to an outpost known as the Pier. Wearing aviator sunglasses, hands on hips and legs spread on the sand, Arik surveyed the area and frowned. A five-meter-high sand embankment faced the canal; a trench surrounded the entrance to the underground bunker. Several hundred meters away, within easy reach of the enemy, three Israeli tanks were parked. Sitting ducks, thought Arik.
“Why are the tanks so close to enemy positions?” he asked.
“They see our tanks and they’re scared away.”
“So keep the tanks there during the day. But bring them back at night. And place paratroopers at the entrance to the outpost in case Egyptian commandos cross.”
“They won’t dare approach,” the officer said.
One night Arik was patrolling on a half-track. He heard shots coming from the direction of the Pier. By the time he got there, the Egyptians were gone. They’d left behind three dead Israelis and a burning tank.
RIDING A JEEP through artillery bombardments, Arik spent his days among the outposts. Nights, he led his men in shooting at Egyptian positions across the water. “Why should they sleep well when we don’t?” he said.
The enemy positions were so close that the paratroopers could fire within range without crossing the canal. Arik would target an Egyptian bunker, move his men to the edge of the water, and direct machine gun and mortar fire against the position. Arik calculated that it took the Egyptians inside the bunkers five minutes to emerge and return fire; in that time, his soldiers could easily sprint to another position, out of enemy range.
One night, as Arik’s men opened fire, Egyptian soldiers immediately shot back. The Israelis were pinned down on the sand without cover. A soldier lying beside Arik raised his head and fell backward, a bullet in his forehead. “Run!” Arik shouted. He lifted the body onto a stretcher and ran with it, boots struggling against the sand.
Another night Arik received an intelligence report that Egyptian commandos would be crossing at the point where the canal meets the Great Bitter Lake. Around 9:00 p.m., Arik and a half dozen men entered the marshes along the bank, hiding in the papyrus reeds. The paratroopers took turns napping, four men alert, three asleep. Arik didn’t sleep. Despite a cool wind, his shirt was damp with sweat.
A full moon rose. Voices from an Egyptian position just across merged with the slowly moving water.
No commandos appeared. Preparing to decamp as the first light broke, Arik looked up at the sky and suddenly remembered: Apollo 11 was approaching the moon. In the coming hours, a human being would take his first steps on its surface. The whole world was watching the future on television, and here he was, lying in the mud of the Middle East.
FORTY-FIVE DAYS AFTER arriving at the canal, Arik returned to Tel Aviv. He had refused to take leave. The fighting along the canal—a war without a name—had penetrated his being: he had arrived at the canal overweight, and left ten kilos lighter. He was edgier than he’d ever felt. How could the army that astonished the world only two years earlier be acting so stupidly now?
Arik went to see Motta. “The bunkers are a rat trap,” he said. “We’re thinking tactically, not strategically.” Motta promised to raise the issue, but he was about to assume command of the northern front, and Arik sensed that his mind was elsewhere.
From the time when he’d served as runner in the trenches of Givat Brenner during the War of Independence, Arik had taken for granted the entwinement of the battlefront and the home front. But the victory of the Six-Day War had separated the two. Now, walking the oblivious streets of Tel Aviv, watching the young men with sideburns and flowered shirts and the young women in miniskirts laughing in cafés, he felt estranged. How can they be sitting here like this while we’re going through hell?
REJOICING IN THE HILLS OF JUDEA
HANAN PORAT FELT a mystical relationship with Mother Rachel, whom the prophet Jeremiah had imagined weeping for the exiles of Israel. In leading the return to Kfar Etzion, he felt that he had comforted Mother Rachel.
And so when Hanan announced his forthcoming marriage to Rachel Hovav, one of the young women of Kfar Etzion, his friends jokingly told each other, Of course he would marry a woman named Rachel.
Two weeks after the children had first returned to Kfar Etzion in 1967, Rachel showed up alone and declared her intention to remain. Rachel’s parents had been members of one of the fallen kibbutzim in the Etzion Bloc; her father had been a prisoner of war in Jordan during the 1948 war. And so even though she hadn’t been one of the children of Kfar Etzion, she felt she belonged among them. The commune decided that she was suited to run the office, and though she found the work stifling, she agreed without complaint.
Hanan spoke of “ascents and descents” in the redemption process, and that is how Rachel described their courtship. Sometimes they did late-night guard duty together, and Hanan would recite poems written by the poet of the pioneers, the young woman known simply as Rachel. But those were rare and precious moments of being alone together; mostly they found themselves absorbed by the commune. And then Hanan would disappear for days at a time, traveling the country on some important mission. Worse, Hanan was wavering in his commitment to her. Many young women were in love with Hanan, the prince of religious Zionism; was Rachel really the one?
Despairing, Rachel considered leaving the kibbutz. Finally he asked her, matter-of-factly, to marry him. Hanan was a romantic, but also shy; his romance was most easily expressed about the land of Israel.
They married two days after Yom Kippur 1969. Hundreds of celebrants came from all over the country. The modest wedding was held outdoors. Under the canopy one of the rabbis summoned to bless the couple lamented that Hanan himself could have been a great rabbi—implying that he was wasting his time as a mere activist.
The newlyweds spent the coming days visiting relatives and touring in Jerusalem. And then Hanan returned to work. He didn’t have time for a proper honeymoon.
KFAR ETZION’S YESHIVA for soldiers had outgrown its quarters and needed a new home. From an enrollment of some thirty students, the yeshiva was now attracting hundreds. The plan called for building a study hall and dormitory on a hill not far from Kfar Etzion. And around the yeshiva would form a new settlement, attracting those not interested in life on the kibbutz—like Yoel Bin-Nun, who intended to move in as soon as the first houses were ready.
Through the spring of 1970, tractors cleared land for the yeshiva. Prefabs were erected, along with a row of small one-family houses intended for the yeshiva staff and married students. Yoel was hoping the yeshiva would move to its new quarters before the holiday of Shavuot, Pentecost, which celebrates the giving of the Torah to Israel. What more appropriate way to dedicate a place of Torah study than on Shavuot?
But the work was going far too slowly. Impatient, Yoel organized a group of students and friends to complete the infrastructure, installing electricity and plumbing.
They completed the work just after Shavuot. On their first night on the hill, they nailed a mezuzah to the study hall. Then Yoel organized the students into shifts for night patrol. There were rumors of terrorists in the area, and Yoel feared an attack.
The students moved into the dormitory, and Yoel and Esther became the first couple to move into one of the houses, in effect the community’s first permanent residents. There were no paved roads yet, but the settlement had a name: Alon Shvut—return to the oak tree, the lone oak that had been the marker of longing for the children of Kfar Etzion during their years of exile. To be a founding father of a new community in the land of Israel: What more could Yoel Bin-Nun have hoped for?
Toward the end of the week the IDF appeared, and distributed Uzis and bullet clips to the students.
THE KIBBUTZ BECKONS
ARIK COMPLETED HIS degree in economics. Yehudit was working as a psychologist. The decision to take up permanent residency in the city could no longer be deferred.
Arik assured Yehudit that her father would accept her decision to quit the kibbutz and remain with her husband. Yaakov Hazan was the beloved leader of Hashomer Hatzair—the admor, or Hasidic master, they called him only half jokingly, as much a spiritual as a political authority. Comrades consulted him about their personal problems; thousands of kibbutzniks, like Avital Geva’s parents, considered him a friend. He never let himself forget, he said, that he represented the men and women who rose every morning before sunrise to work in the fields and the communal kitchens. While he criticized his rivals in the fiercest ideological terms, accusing them of distorting and subverting and destroying, he never gossiped about them. He was kind, passionate, self-righteous. Once, after an argument with Yehudit, he told her, “I was thinking all night about what you said, and I came to the conclusion that I was right.”
Hazan’s great love was his kibbutz, Mishmar Ha’Emek, “Guardian of the Valley.” Photographs of the kibbutz from its early years in the 1920s showed a row of tents in a valley surrounded by bare hills; from one of those tents young Hazan had run the world movement of Hashomer Hatzair. During the War of Independence Mishmar Ha’Emek had withstood siege and blocked Arab forces advancing toward Haifa. Now it was one of the most prosperous kibbutzim.
Though he spent weekdays in Tel Aviv, where the movement’s headquarters was based, Hazan insisted on returning every weekend to Mishmar Ha’Emek. Yehudit’s two sisters had left Mishmar Ha’Emek and settled on their husbands’ kibbutzim. That left Yehudit to maintain the family connection to the kibbutz. Every Friday she would prepare her parents’ little apartment for their arrival. Before setting out to study in Tel Aviv, she had assured her father she would return when her studies ended.
“If I don’t go back,” she told Arik now, “it will destroy him.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” Arik said.
ARIK WENT TO SEE Hazan in his Tel Aviv apartment and was struck once again by the modest lifestyle of one of Israel’s most powerful men: two rooms, bed, couch, bookcase, a kibbutz apartment in the city. The only indulgence was a profusion of works by kibbutz artists, including a bust of Hazan as a young man.
There was respect—love—between Hazan and Arik. Hazan was proud of his son-in-law and shared with him the government’s security deliberations. And though Arik insisted he didn’t care about proximity to power, he enjoyed his proximity to Hazan.
Impatient with small talk, Arik got to the point. ”Yehudit and I are staying in Tel Aviv,” he said.
For the first time Arik heard contempt in Hazan’s voice. “A person with your background, your values—you betrayed the kibbutz. But we won’t allow Yehudit to betray it too.”
Returning home, Arik said to Yehudit, “If you leave now, he won’t survive it.”
Arik would have to gradually wean Hazan’s daughter away. He offered a compromise: Yehudit would move back to Mishmar Ha’Emek, while Arik continued living and working in Tel Aviv but spent weekends on the kibbutz. Not as a member, he emphasized. And sometime within the next few years, he added, this arrangement would end, and they would build their home in Tel Aviv.
THE SIX-DAY WAR incited dreams. Yoel Bin-Nun and Hanan Porat envisioned an expanded Israel with Jewish towns and villages in the hills of Judea and Samaria. And for Arik Achmon, the vision was a prosperous and efficient Israel centered on Tel Aviv. Not that Arik was drawn to the city. In his preference for simple food, in his routine of rising with the first light of day, in his ethic of service, he remained a kibbutznik.
Arik was proud of the kibbutz movement for setting the borders of Israel and creating a class of selfless servers. But his economic studies had confirmed what he knew from experience: that a centralized economy stifles initiative and rewards laziness. It was absurd. In the Middle East’s military superpower there was a two-year waiting list for a telephone—unless, of course, you had the right connections.
Why was Israel so efficient during war and so incompetent in peacetime? A modern nation was waiting to be born here, freed of the outmoded fantasy of an agrarian collectivist utopia. Yes, Arik readily agreed, the old ideology had been necessary to create a state from nothing. But now utopian nostalgia was preventing Israel from becoming the great nation Arik believed it could be.
CHIMAVIR WAS A small aviation company of light planes that specialized in crop dusting. Owned by the same kibbutz federation to which Arik’s former kibbutz, Netzer Sereni, belonged, ChimAvir intended to create a division of Piper Cubs for domestic travel. The director-general happened to be a friend of Arik’s from Netzer, and he offered Arik a job. “Come help run the company,” he said. “We’ll create a revolution in domestic aviation.”
Israel’s new expansive borders offered opportunities. ChimAvir could thrive just by transporting soldiers back and forth to the Suez Canal. Still, Arik hesitated: What did he know about airplanes besides jumping out of them? But when he visited the company’s hangar, inhaled the gasoline fumes, and watched the planes taking off, he said yes.
Arik wanted to adapt the management principles he’d learned at university to ChimAvir. But he quickly discovered that the company was run like a kibbutz. Initiative wasn’t rewarded, and incompetence wasn’t penalized. It was almost impossible to fire anyone. No longer a kibbutznik, Arik would never be appointed CEO, no matter how good he was.
He had thought he’d escaped the kibbutz, but here he was, being pulled back in. Weekdays he worked with the kibbutzniks of ChimAvir, weekends he spent with Yehudit on Mishmar Ha’Emek. He even agreed to occasionally work in its cowshed, in exchange for room and board. It was familiar, comforting, and smothering.
Arik tried to convince Hazan that the kibbutz needed to grow. Like the children’s house: maybe it made sense to raise children collectively during a period of austerity. But why raise children away from their parents now?
“Did you or Yehudit suffer in the children’s house?” demanded Hazan.
“No,” Arik conceded, “but those were different times.”
Hazan laughed dismissively. “There is no kibbutz without the children’s house,” he said. And there could be no Israel, of course, without the kibbutz.
THE HEAD OF ChimAvir was replaced, and the new director-general wasn’t interested in domestic travel. “Our purpose is to provide service to farmers,” he said.
“So keep doing that,” Arik said, and quit.
Though he didn’t know it then, a far better job was waiting. A group of entrepreneurs was forming a private domestic airline, and Arik was offered the position of CEO, along with 7 percent of the company’s stock. “We’ll take on the government and open Israel’s skies,” an investor said. For Arik, it was like receiving a battle order.
The company, Kanaf, had four light planes; its leading competitor had seven. Kanaf was headquartered in a Tel Aviv apartment. Every available space, including the porch, was turned into an office. Files were stored in the bathroom. No one wore ties, and everyone called each other by their first names and felt free to criticize Arik’s decisions. Arik’s salary was scarcely higher than those of the company’s technicians.
Arik planned to set up a line between Tel Aviv and the Suez Canal, create a flight school, and teach skydiving. But every initiative required government approval. When Arik wanted to buy a plane, he needed the finance ministry’s permission first to buy foreign currency. And to get that permission he had to explain to a skeptical bureaucrat how another plane for Kanaf would benefit the state of Israel.
Arik let slip to a ministry official that one of his partners happened to be the finance minister’s son-in-law. (He’d been given 5 percent ownership of the company for precisely that connection.) Arik got permission to purchase dollars.
But even Kanaf’s connections weren’t enough when it came up against its competitor, Ya’af, one of whose owners was a close friend of transportation minister Shimon Peres. Arik was bidding against Ya’af for a franchise to test navigational aids for flight paths. Though Kanaf offered a more attractive bid, Ya’af won.
Arik appealed to the Supreme Court. Arik’s partners were astonished. No one could recall a private company challenging the government’s decision on a bid. Arik’s lawyer phoned Peres and said, You’re going to lose. Peres, more perplexed than indignant, responded, But it’s a government decision!
The hearing was scheduled for just after Passover.
On Passover Eve, Arik put on a white shirt and khakis and attended the seder in the dining room of Mishmar Ha’Emek. There weren’t enough chairs to go around for the hundreds of participants, so Arik and Yehudit, along with the other young people, sat on benches on one side of the long table while Yehudit’s parents and the other veterans sat on chairs across from them. As the kibbutzniks sang songs about the season’s final rain and the coming harvest, Arik’s mind was on the impending court case, his challenge to socialist Israel.
Kanaf won. Buoyed, Arik decided to launch a skydiving school. But he needed the approval of the IDF. The army replied: The only parachuting in the skies of Israel will be under our supervision.
This wasn’t working. Kanaf could, at great cost, win isolated battles, but government control would continue to thwart initiative. There had to be a better approach, some way to manipulate the system against itself.