THE INVENTION OF YISRAEL HAREL
ARIK ACHMON MEETS AN ADMIRER
SEVERAL HUNDRED OFFICERS from the 55th Brigade were gathered in a Tel Aviv movie theater for a day of briefings about “the situation,” as Israelis called their permanent security crisis.
Though only a sergeant, Yisrael Harel, a newspaper editor in civilian life, sat among the officers. As the brigade’s “culture officer,” in charge of educational activities, he was invited to officers’ meetings, but didn’t quite belong among them. With his knitted kippah, Yisrael felt all the more an outsider. Religious Zionists were now thoroughly integrated into the brigade, but the officers’ corps remained overwhelmingly secular, still heavily kibbutznik. Yisrael wished he could represent the religious Zionist community as an equal among the fighters and heroes of the 55th.
All his life Yisrael Harel had wanted to be part of the elite of sacrifice. He regarded himself and the Jewish state as extensions of each other; he even carried its name, “Yisrael,” Israel.
Now Yisrael had a plan that could increase his scope of service among the paratroopers.
As culture officer charged with promoting the brigade’s values, Yisrael knew of the work that Arik and Moisheleh Stempel-Peles had begun with the widows. That work, he believed, needed to be revived in an organized framework. And the man who would help Yisrael do that, he concluded, was Arik. Yisrael, diligent journalist, had researched Arik’s past, learned that he had once been considered a promising young leader in the kibbutz movement, had raised the Israeli flag over the Dome of the Rock, was one of the brigade’s most respected officers—everything Yisrael Harel, a non-combat soldier, had wished he could be.
When the briefings ended, Yisrael approached Arik, accompanied by the brigade’s chief physician, Jackie King.
“Do you have a moment?” asked Yisrael.
Arik looked without curiosity at the young man in the kippah and the thick-framed glasses. The tarbutnik, the culture guy. Not one of us—
Jackie, though, was one of them. The religious doctor had performed heroically under fire in Jerusalem. And Jackie had done for medicine what Arik was trying to do for aviation: defying the socialist establishment, he had opened one of the country’s first private clinics.
The three men took seats in the back of the emptying theater. Yisrael explained that he and Jackie had been visiting widows from the brigade, just as Arik and Moisheleh had done. But many families weren’t being helped.
“We understand spirit,” Yisrael said, “and you understand organization. Why not join forces?”
Yisrael was offering Arik the chance to renew his commitment to their fallen friends, to Moisheleh.
”I’m with you,” Arik said.
REFUGEE BOY, NATIVE SON
YISRAEL HAREL WAS born Yisrael Hasenfratz, in the worst place and time for a Jew: Central Europe, fall 1939. Two years later, the Hasenfratzes, together with tens of thousands of other Romanian Jews, were deported by the fascist Iron Guard to an area of the Ukraine called Transnistria, beyond the Dniester River. Lacking the Final Solution’s thoroughness, the Romanians placed some Jews in camps, shot others, and allowed still others to die of hunger and cold. Yisrael’s father, a lumber merchant, was dispatched to a forced labor brigade; Yisrael’s mother bribed a Ukrainian peasant family and found shelter for herself and her two small sons. Yisrael’s younger brother died of hunger, but Yisrael and his parents survived.
After the war, they boarded a refugee ship running the British blockade of the land of Israel. Seven-year-old Yisrael would leave the hold, with its iron bunks from floor to ceiling laid so close together that survivors said it reminded them of the camps, and wander up to the deck, just to watch the kibbutznik sailors and listen to their songs.
Then two British speedboats appeared. Loudspeakers demanded the surrender of the crew. In the brief battle, refugees threw iron bars at the British soldiers boarding the ship. When the British took control of the ship, Yisrael stood with the grown-ups and sang “Hatikvah,” the Zionist anthem of hope.
The Hasenfratzes were sent to a detention camp on Cyprus for illegal immigrants, and eventually landed in Haifa, where they remained, collapsing into the first embrace of home.
Growing up in Haifa in the early 1950s, in a two-room apartment that his family shared with another family of survivors, Yisrael dreamed of becoming a kibbutznik—the ultimate Israeli. As an Orthodox boy and a member of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, he would join one of the handful of religious kibbutzim. Yisrael would be like the plowman in the photograph hanging in the Bnei Akiva clubhouse: shirtless and in khaki shorts but wearing a cap, honoring Jewish tradition.
Until then, Yisrael did all he could to uproot the traces of exile from his being. When his parents spoke to him in Yiddish or German, he answered in Hebrew. His father, Yaakov, a gentle man who walked about singing cantorial snippets, was nearly deaf, the result of a beating in Transnistria; and deafness wasn’t just a physical but a cultural condition. Every morning, Yaakov, who worked as a lumber inspector, set off for his office on the Haifa docks in jacket and tie—in a country where even the prime minister wore an open-necked shirt. Yisrael wore khaki shorts and sandals until the winter rains.
For all his efforts, sabra children still regarded him as not quite one of them. They delighted in devising new ways to mispronounce the name Hasenfratz. Yisrael persisted in the reinvention of himself, partly stoic, partly obtuse. Each time he was invited to a sabra classmate’s home—one family in an apartment!—he marked another small victory of homecoming.
Yisrael was not only a refugee among sabras but a religious boy in “Red Haifa.” Sometimes the kids from the secular youth movement affiliated with the ruling social democratic party, Mapai, and whose headquarters was located on the hill above the Bnei Akiva clubhouse—how symbolic, thought Yisrael—threw rocks at the religious kids below.
Yisrael detested Mapai. Entrenched in bureaucratic power, arrogant with entitlement, Mapai was particularly corrupt in Haifa, whose mayor even maintained his own private militia. When demonstrators to the right or left of Mapai took to the streets, members of Plugot Hapoel—longshoremen and sportsmen affiliated with the Histadrut union’s soccer and boxing clubs—violently dispersed them.
IN HIGH SCHOOL Yisrael became a counselor in Bnei Akiva, assigned a group of children to mold into future kibbutzniks.
Every Shabbat afternoon, he walked hundreds of steps up to the Bnei Akiva branch in the Carmel, the middle-class neighborhood at the top of the mountain. Few Orthodox Jews lived there, and its tiny Bnei Akiva branch was confined to a room in a synagogue. Yisrael led a group of ten-year-olds, teaching them songs and playing games that served his real purpose: imbuing them with a love for kibbutz.
One especially mischievous member of Yisrael’s group was the young Yoel Bin-Nun. Yoel had little patience for organized singing and dancing, and hovered outside the circle. He seemed to disdain as mere child’s play the games that Yisrael organized, like Find the Flag, and refused to commit himself to regular attendance.
Still, Yisrael sensed that this clever boy, articulate beyond his years, could with proper guidance become a true Bnei Akivanik. It was hard work transforming a Yoel Bin-Nun from individualist into productive member of the shevet—the tribe, as a Bnei Akiva age group was called. But no one was better suited to meet that challenge than Yisrael, who submerged his own personality into the collective.
MEANWHILE SCHOOL WAS becoming a distraction from Yisrael’s real life. There were hikes and campfires to plan, new children to recruit. Yisrael and his friends debated the merits of starting their own kibbutz or joining an already existing one. They had no intention of completing their matriculation exams; of what use was a high school diploma for a pioneer? One of Yisrael’s friends broke up with his girlfriend because she refused to commit to life on kibbutz.
In his junior year, Yisrael dropped out of high school and apprenticed himself to a metalworker.
His school guidance counselor cautioned: “You’re a smart boy, don’t throw your life away.”
“But who will build the land?” said Yisrael.
ON A SHABBAT morning in spring 1956, thousands of religious Jews began leaving their synagogues in the middle of prayers and walked together through the streets of Haifa. Many men still wore their black-striped prayer shawls. Yisrael and other members of Bnei Akiva were up front, singing songs extolling the day of rest.
They were protesting the municipality’s decision to open an industrial trade exhibit on Shabbat. Though they carried no protest signs—this was, after all, Shabbat—there was anger and determination in the crowd. Even for Haifa, felt Yisrael and his friends, this public violation of Shabbat went too far.
Secular youth shouted taunts at the demonstrators. Some threw stones. From an apartment above, someone poured out a bucket of water.
The marchers turned a corner. Straight into an ambush.
Men with clubs rushed the crowd. They wore dark blue work shirts and khaki shorts. The mayor’s militia.
Yisrael fell, bleeding from his head.
When the police finally intervened, it was to disperse the demonstrators. Yisrael was dragged into a police car. He was taken to be stitched—not to a hospital, where doctors would have filed a report, but to a first aid station affiliated with Mapai’s labor union, whose doctors could be trusted to cooperate.
Afterward Yisrael was shoved back into the car and, despite his objections to violating the Sabbath, driven to a police station and charged with disorderly conduct. When Shabbat ended, an Orthodox politician intervened and Yisrael was released, charges dropped.
The wound that lingered was betrayal. To be beaten on Shabbat by Jewish thugs protected by Jewish police in a sovereign Jewish state—this was a violation of the most basic requirements of peoplehood. Some of Yisrael’s friends were taking off their kippot, and Yisrael too had considered that possibility. But not now. He had seen the true face of secular enlightened Israel. He would remain loyal to his tribe.
LEADER, OUTCAST
IN NOVEMBER 1956, just after the war in Sinai ended, Yisrael was drafted. He and his friends from Bnei Akiva went to Nahal, the unit combining military training with agricultural work. They formed a garin, a pioneering group bound for kibbutz—eighty members strong, including women, drawn from Bnei Akiva branches around the country.
Following basic training, the group was dispatched to a religious kibbutz called Sde Eliyahu (Field of Elijah), in the Jordan Valley. In summer the Jordan Valley was virtually uninhabitable; even in the scant shade, temperatures were routinely 110 degrees. Just beyond the kibbutz’s wheat fields and date palm groves rose the hills of Jordan and Syria.
Bnei Akiva had other plans for Yisrael. The army permitted each garin to exempt several of its most promising members from agricultural work and appoint them to the position of kommunar, a leader of one of the movement’s branches, instilling pioneering values among urban youth. Yisrael was chosen. That meant missing those crucial formative months when the garin would be transformed into a collective. But like the young Arik Achmon, Yisrael wouldn’t have imagined defying his movement’s decision. He was appointed kommunar in Haifa, back where he began.
Yisrael worked eighteen-hour days, sleeping on the floor of the Bnei Akiva clubhouse. On Shabbat afternoons, he stood like a drill sergeant, surveying the lines of young scouts in their white shirts and blue scarves. Yisrael loved his community, its idealism and social solidarity and charitable instincts. But he was frustrated by its limitations. So long as religious Zionists continued to produce more lawyers and accountants than pioneers and commandos, they would remain an appendage to the Zionist saga.
There was something hard in Yisrael that both commanded respect and repelled. He could be hectoring, even abusive, responding to flagging ideological fervor as though to a personal affront: You don’t deserve to call yourself a member of Bnei Akiva, you aren’t worthy to be one of us. When he was merely Yisrael Hasenfratz, he’d felt diminished by irritations, unworthy ambitions. But as Yisrael the kommunar he was Israel itself.
ON KIBBUTZ SDE ELIYAHU, the garin was fraying.
Sde Eliyahu was founded in the 1930s by refugees from Germany, barely out of their teens. Yekkes: diligent, thrifty, stiff. The garin members, who had come expecting a familial embrace, were treated as outsiders. While other kibbutzim routinely sent visitors and food packages to their Nahal groups when they left for military exercises, the secretariat of Sde Eliyahu had to be embarrassed into those gestures. In other kibbutzim, Nahal soldiers were allowed to drive tractors, the most fun job on kibbutz; but Sde Eliyahu didn’t trust the garin members behind the wheel.
Whenever he could take a break from his duties in Haifa, Yisrael hitched to Sde Eliyahu. He was appalled to discover that some of his friends wanted to dismantle the garin when their military service ended.
What about our ideology? Yisrael demanded. What about settling the land?
Forget those big words, friends advised. It’s every man for himself.
Yisrael keenly felt his distance from the group. In an article for the page in Sde Eliyahu’s mimeographed newsletter devoted to the garin, he sulked about its failure to maintain contact with its members outside the kibbutz. His aggrieved and sarcastic tone grated on his friends. “You think you’re such a big shot,” one said to him in the presence of other garin members, “but you’re just a refugee from Halisa,” the poor neighborhood near the Haifa docks where Yisrael grew up. “You were never one of us.”
No one defended him.
YISRAEL HASENFRATZ CHANGED his name to Yisrael Harel.
He chose the name Harel after the legendary Harel Brigade, the Palmach commando force commanded by Yitzhak Rabin during the 1948 war. Yisrael Harel: curt, to the point. A name with which to make one’s mark.
THE GARIN’S MEMBERS voted to disband. The childhood dreams, the teenage plans, the endless hours of argument and song—how had they abandoned it all so effortlessly?
Many of the garin’s members were now studying for the matriculation exams they had once dismissed, planning to attend university. Yisrael’s parents were pressuring him to do the same.
In summer 1959 Yisrael moved to Sde Eliyahu for the last phase of the garin’s kibbutz service. By then, most garin members were already gone. Yisrael left just before the High Holidays. He walked out the gate and stood on the side of the road. Behind him the mountains of Jordan and Syria faded into mist. He extended his hand and pointed to the ground, to summon a ride from a passing car, and realized he was crying.
HUNT FOR THE HIDDEN PRINCESS
WITH THE END of his dream of life on kibbutz, Yisrael Harel was studying political science at Bar-Ilan University. It was at the wedding of a fellow student, Yosifa, in early winter 1962, that he met Sarah Weisfish.
Yisrael noticed Sarah, who was Yosifa’s cousin, sitting at a table with her ultra-Orthodox family. Skirt to ankles, sleeves to wrist. The message: Keep away.
Yisrael was intrigued. Sarah’s modesty only seemed to deepen her beauty—long, dark hair, alert dark eyes. Yisrael did what he had never done before: he walked over to a strange young woman and introduced himself. “My name is Yisrael,” he began. “I’m a friend of Yosifa’s.”
“That’s fine,” said Sarah, and turned away.
Yisrael ignored the rebuke and the stares around the table and continued making small talk. Sarah looked straight ahead.
During a break in the dancing, Yisrael told Yosifa about his encounter with Sarah. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” Yosifa said. “She comes from the heart of that world. Eleven generations in Jerusalem.”
“Tell her I want to escort her to the bus stop after the wedding,” Yisrael persisted.
“In her world there are no escorts,” Yosifa replied.
Yisrael couldn’t stop thinking of Sarah Weisfish. Yosifa tried to discourage him. Invite her to your home, Yisrael insisted; I’ll just happen to be there.
If Sarah was surprised to see Yisrael, she didn’t let on. He did his best to impress her with his propriety. Though he usually wore khaki shorts, he appeared in long pants. “He dressed up for you,” Yosifa said dryly to Sarah.
Surprisingly, Sarah agreed to walk with him. She listened without comment to his monologue about Bnei Akiva and army and kibbutz. Then she said, “There’s no chance. When I marry, it will be to a Torah scholar.”
He waited outside her parents’ home in one of Jerusalem’s venerable ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, long stone buildings built around courtyards with wells. When she emerged, he escorted her through the narrow alleys. “It’s not appropriate,” she said to him, but she didn’t walk away.
Finally, Sarah’s father hid her in a relative’s home. Yisrael organized friends on a stakeout, following family members until the trail led to Sarah.
Address in hand, Yisrael set out for Jerusalem. It was snowing. Yisrael waited outside the house until Sarah appeared. They walked through the deepening snow, in secular neighborhoods where her father and brothers wouldn’t likely search.
At last Sarah began speaking about herself. She told of growing up in a family so poor that ten people shared one and a half rooms; when her brothers returned home from yeshiva boarding school, Sarah and her sisters would move into her grandmother’s cellar. Yet the Weisfishes, devoted to Torah study, considered themselves a kind of royalty. Remarkably, her father had also allowed her to cautiously explore the world beyond her ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. She had joined a library as a teenager, and the librarians, eager to open her mind, had plied her with novels. She was now studying biology in a junior college.
Yisrael asked if she could envision them together. She hesitated, and then repeated what she had told him before: I must marry a Torah scholar. But in Sarah’s hesitation, Yisrael sensed the beginning of a yes.
The next time they went for an illicit walk, Sarah’s father followed. When he caught up with them, he offered Yisrael a choice: marry Sarah or never see her again. “I want to marry her,” said Yisrael.
Even Sarah’s father had to concede that she had fallen in love. In his months of unrequited monologues, Yisrael had managed to convey his love for Israel and the Jewish people. Though he would never be a Torah scholar, Sarah respected his idealism.
They married that summer. Her family danced, more from obligation than joy. His friends raised bride and groom on chairs high over spinning circles. Yisrael rejoiced in his impossible victory. With enough chutzpah and determination, any border could be crossed.
THE HARELS LIVED in a small apartment in Petach Tikva, one of the indistinct towns around Tel Aviv. Yisrael had opened a small business importing electronic goods.
He still hoped to make his mark on Israel. He joined the young rebels of the National Religious Party (NRP), the political wing of religious Zionism. The NRP was run by an older generation of European-born Jews who accepted the party’s role of junior partner to Mapai and who dealt mostly with religious issues, like Sabbath observance in the public space. Why, demanded the young rebels, don’t we formulate our own policies on issues of national importance like defense? The partnership between the NRP and Mapai, said Yisrael bitterly, was like the relationship between a horse and its rider.
But Yisrael’s path into politics was blocked by his fellow NRP rebels, who regarded him as an opportunist, and he reciprocated their contempt.
MAY 1967. WHEN Yisrael got his call-up notice to join the 55th Brigade in the orchards, his first concern was leaving Sarah. She was in her eighth month with their second child. Her due date was June 5. Sarah’s parents suggested she move into their house in Jerusalem. Yisrael thought that made sense: If war breaks out, he reassured Sarah, it will be fought in Sinai and perhaps on the Syrian front, but certainly not in the capital. Jordan’s King Hussein would be crazy to start a war in Jerusalem, with all its holy places.
And so they agreed Sarah would seek safety in her parents’ home, near the border that divided Israeli from Jordanian Jerusalem.
THE NIGHT OF JUNE 6. Yisrael’s shirt was stained with the blood of the wounded he’d helped evacuate from the medics’ station. Where was Sarah now? The hospitals were filling up with wounded; would there even be a bed for her?
Yisrael entered a jeep taking a wounded man to the Bikur Cholim hospital. Yisrael explained his situation to the driver, who after the hospital stop-off took him to the Weisfishes’ home. Perhaps two dozen family members were crammed into the small apartment. “He’s alive!” someone shouted. Sarah was there; she hadn’t yet given birth. “We heard rumors that all the paratroopers had been killed,” she said calmly.
Yisrael glanced around the room. Among the children and old people were young, healthy men his age. Almost every kind of Jew was represented among the paratroopers—except the ultra-Orthodox. And here they were, preparing lamentations for the next holocaust.
Yisrael offered some words of encouragement to Sarah and fled.
THE ELITE SUMMONS YISRAEL HAREL
YISRAEL HAD MUCH to be grateful for in the summer of 1967. Sarah had given birth to a daughter. And he was writing—essays for religious Zionist publications warning against squandering the opportunities that the war had opened for Israel. Yisrael despised the national euphoria, the notion that Israel had just fought its last war. Precisely when the Jews lowered their guard was the time of greatest danger.
Yisrael wrote an essay about the need to encourage American Jews to immigrate to Israel. He noted that Arab intransigence might compel Israel to retain the new territories. And that, he conceded, would confront Israel with a severe demographic challenge. Massive American immigration, though, could save the Jewish state.
Yisrael mailed the article to Ha’aretz, the country’s preeminent newspaper. For several weeks he heard nothing. Then, one Friday morning, he opened the paper and saw an essay with the headline, “The Defeat in the War for the Jews.” And just below it, his byline.
No one from the newspaper had bothered to contact him, but what did it matter? The article took up nearly an entire precious Ha’aretz page. At that very moment, Yisrael Harel was being read by the nation’s leaders!
A letter arrived from Eliezer Livneh, one of the Labor movement’s preeminent intellectuals. He had read Yisrael’s article with interest, Livneh wrote, and would like to meet, to discuss a matter of national importance.
Livneh informed Yisrael that a new organization was being founded to pressure the government into settling Judea and Samaria, the liberated territories. The group included Israel’s two greatest living poets, Natan Alterman and Uri Zvi Greenberg, its leading novelists, Shai Agnon and Haim Hazaz and Moshe Shamir, and leading figures from the kibbutz movement. We would like you to join us, said Livneh.
Yisrael had read those writers since he was a boy, knew whole parts of their work from memory. And now the elite of the Hebrew renaissance was opening up to Yisrael Harel. It was his own Six Days miracle.
Livneh spoke of settling the land in terms of history and security and pioneering, the secular Zionist language Yisrael understood. Mercaz’s messianism was alien to him; Yisrael’s survivor instincts mistrusted utopian dreams.
Of course Yisrael would join. To go back to the old vulnerable borders was madness. And what nation would turn its back on its ancestral heartland, won in a defensive war against attempted genocide?
AS FANS STRUGGLED against the Tel Aviv humidity, the greats of Hebrew letters took seats around tables joined together in the café of the Writers’ House. They were left-wing Zionists and right-wing Zionists, nurturing old grievances that bored a new generation of Israelis. Until the Six-Day War it would have been difficult to bring these writers and activists together in the same room. Yet as men of history, they understood the moment. Poet Uri Zvi Greenberg had even told a reporter who spotted him at the Western Wall that he had stopped writing: No poetry, he said, could be as compelling as the vision of Jewish paratroopers on the Temple Mount.
Presiding over this luminous gathering was Natan Alterman, the nation’s most beloved poet. The great Israeli romantic, bard of the Jewish homecoming: “A man, a lover retrieved from the dust / Approaches a stall or two in the market / Buys amber earrings / For his wife retrieved from water.” Alterman wrote his weekly newspaper columns in rhyme, as if only poetry were adequate to the Israeli story. His love for the land of Israel was inseparable from his famous love for women: “There are those more beautiful than her / but none as beautiful in the way she is.”
Alterman looked around the table at the men who had answered his call to action. The Movement for the Complete Land of Israel, they were calling it. Here were the spiritual custodians of the nation’s rebirth, carriers of the secular Hebrew ethos. And their voices needed urgently to be heard. A young novelist named Amos Oz had published an article in the Labor Party daily, Davar, warning against the corrupting consequences of occupation. As if the Jewish people could be an occupier in its own land! The debate among Israel’s writers was linguistic: occupied territories versus liberated territories.
Yisrael sat silently, intimidated by reverence. Not only was he the youngest person around the table, and one of the very few with a kippah; he was the only unknown figure.
The movement, said Alterman, would be launched with a manifesto, proclaiming the irreversible return of the nation to Judea and Samaria. He urged those present to solicit signatures from their friends, fellow writers and intellectuals.
Hesitantly, Yisrael offered a suggestion. Why not expand the range of signatories to include other parts of the Israeli public—religious Zionists, for example? “There are many young people within my community who have been waiting for this moment,” he said. “I’m sure we can find support among them.”
Aside from the Mercaz yeshiva, brought to national attention by the Six-Day War, the religious Zionist community was hardly known for political daring. Its aging leaders preferred pragmatic politics to grand visions. In the “waiting period” before the war, they had been among the most dovish members of the cabinet, skeptical of a preemptive strike against Egypt and even initially hesitating over the conquest of the Old City.
Yet here was a young man suggesting a shift within one of Zionism’s most moderate communities. Religious Zionists and West Bank settlement? Perhaps it was worth a try.
Yisrael, emboldened, offered one more suggestion: Why not reach out to younger writers? The only names Alterman and his friends were suggesting for their manifesto were authors of their generation. What about Amos Oz? “I’ll be happy to contact him,” Yisrael offered.
At the mention of Oz, there was silence around the table. For Alterman, Oz’s offense was not only political but literary: he was part of a generational revolt against the writers of 1948, against the mythic Zionist themes of destruction and rebirth. Oz and his fellow young novelists wrote in a spare Hebrew about the Palestinian tragedy and the decline of kibbutz idealism. For Alterman it was no surprise that they opposed annexing Judea and Samaria: their Zionism, like their prose, was anemic.
Alterman, red-faced, pounded the table: a wordless veto.
Afterward novelist Moshe Shamir approached Yisrael and slapped both his cheeks, at once playful and rebuking. “What did you do?” he said. No one was allowed to upset Alterman.
“I think we can win over Amos Oz,” Yisrael persisted. “If he were to get an invitation to join Alterman, he would be so flattered he wouldn’t be able to resist. That’s human nature.”
CAFÉ CASIT
THE BLESSINGS OF the Six-Day War didn’t cease for Yisrael Harel. Not only had he been courted by the elite, but now an old dream of becoming a journalist—nurtured as a child when he would stand at his neighborhood kiosk and read competing party newspapers—had become fulfilled.
The Movement for the Complete Land of Israel needed an editor for its newspaper, This Is the Land, and Yisrael was given the job. “But I’ve never been an editor,” he protested. Don’t worry, the movement’s elders assured him, you’ll learn.
The premier issue appeared in April 1968. The newspaper argued the need to annex the new territories on security and economic and, most of all, historical grounds. Yisrael wrote about Hebron’s just-reborn Jewish community. He described men in prayer shawls walking through the market past sullen Arab merchants and half-ruined stone buildings, some with indentations marking where mezuzahs had been ripped out. After a long day of domestic chores, exhausted young women sat together and studied Torah. One of the founders of the kibbutz movement, Yisrael noted, once said that a sign of authentic settlement was the presence of children. And among the Jews of Hebron, there were many children.
According to Yisrael, even the Arab owner of the Park Hotel, where the settlers had held the seder, was happy that the Jews were returning: “‘Building is cheap,’ he said, smiling.”
YISRAEL TURNED OUT to be a talented journalist. Working without an assistant, he published the twelve-page biweekly alone. The pay was symbolic, the hours open-ended, the pressure of editing the greats of Hebrew literature immense. But Yisrael had never been happier. He would have gladly served this cause and these men for no pay. There, on the masthead, was his name beside Alterman’s.
Along with editing the paper, he helped coordinate movement events. When a decision needed to be made about the next conference or newspaper ad, Yisrael would go to Alterman’s table in Café Casit on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv.
In Café Casit writers celebrated their book launchings and theater directors their opening night. The owner, Hatzkel Ish-Casit (“man of Casit”), a former pioneer who’d come to Tel Aviv to recuperate from malaria and was now a chain-smoking fat man, routinely extended credit he knew wouldn’t be repaid to artists and renowned wild men cherished for their indulgences by an austere society longing for normalcy. The food was Eastern European, cholent and kishke and gefilte fish, which Hatzkel would distribute gratis when the mood struck him. He adopted struggling artists who received their mail at the café, sometimes addressed only “c/o Casit, Tel Aviv.” Even as the city closed down well before midnight, Casit continued, smoky and boisterous. Sometimes a group would begin a Hebrew song and everyone would join in; on Independence Day people danced on the tables.
Alterman’s table was a place of national pilgrimage. Politicians came to consult him about how to deal with rivals, generals confided military strategy, kibbutzniks shared their commune’s dilemmas, young poets their work. After a few drinks he became expansive; after a few more, occasionally abusive. He once ended a friend’s book-launching at Casit by pulling off a tablecloth, crashing dishes to the floor.
Yisrael sat in awed silence at Alterman’s table, observing the writers as they drank shot glasses of brandy and argued about politics and gossiped about each other’s infidelities. Yisrael was the lone man in Casit with a kippah, but he’d gotten used to being the exception.
Alterman and his friends in the movement appreciated Yisrael. Here was a young man who, in his total devotion to Zionism, seemed to belong more to their generation than to his own. Perhaps too, they sensed that, aside from his kippah, there was nothing particularly religious about Yisrael. Or rather, that what was religious about Yisrael was what was religious about them: awe at the nation’s improbable survival and even more improbable return home, and a commitment to protect it at any cost.
YISRAEL WAS OFFERED a job as an editor at the Friday magazine supplement of Ma’ariv, one of the country’s major newspapers. Ma’ariv allowed Yisrael to write as well as edit, and he turned out to be a talented investigative reporter. A series he wrote on corruption in local rabbinical councils drew national attention. Clearly Yisrael didn’t fit the stereotype of the nice religious Jew.
motta gur heard about the rising young journalist in the brigade and offered Yisrael the position of chief education officer. The position included coordinating efforts to record the battle of Jerusalem for posterity—or what the brigade’s cynics called Motta’s PR campaign to become the IDF’s chief of staff.
The Movement for the Complete Land of Israel had connected Yisrael to the literary and political elite; Ma’ariv had connected him to the media elite. And now this: a role that could gain him entry into the paratrooper elite. What more could Yisrael Harel have hoped for?
A PARTNERSHIP OF SERVICE
THE FOUNDATION FOR the Families of the Fallen of the 55th Brigade held its first meeting in the apartment of Moisheleh’s widow, Daliah. On Arik’s suggestion, Yisrael was elected chairman. Arik sensed that the position was important to Yisrael. We can put his ambition to good use, thought Arik.
The foundation’s first decision was to assign friends of the fallen soldiers to their families. The volunteers—“Friends of Dad”—were instructed to visit the families at least once a month, assist the widows with practical problems, and attend family events like children’s birthday parties. Arik and Yisrael each took responsibility for four families.
Meanwhile Yisrael was editing a narrative history of the battle for Jerusalem. A team of volunteers had assembled hundreds of interviews, diary entries, and letters to wives and girlfriends from among the fighters. When Yisrael had a question about the accuracy of a detail, he consulted with Arik. Also on ethical questions, like whether to write that one of the officers had been killed by friendly fire. “We can’t write lies,” Arik said, “but we don’t have to reveal the whole truth.”
Arik liked the diligent culture officer. He appreciated professionalism, and Yisrael was a fine editor. As for Yisrael’s right-wing politics, Arik dismissed that as harmless delusion. Let him and his friends imagine they can determine the future borders of the state; meanwhile, the Labor Party will continue to rein in the utopian fantasies of the Jews.
“Srulik,” Arik called him, a Yiddish endearment for Yisrael. The nickname seemed to Yisrael a subtle put-down, reminder of his outsider status as a religious Jew. But he kept his resentment to himself.
NATAN ALTERMAN DIED in 1970 at age fifty-nine. Some said the poet died of heartbreak. Only a mass immigration of Western Jews, he had argued, would allow Israel to absorb the West Bank without risking a Palestinian majority, but the Jews weren’t coming.
Café Casit closed for the funeral. Yisrael Harel was assigned the role of escorting the poet’s mistress behind the casket.