“OUR FORCES PASSED A QUIET NIGHT IN SUEZ”
THE WAR ENDS, AND CONTINUES
THE IDF HAD beaten back invaders on two fronts under the worst conditions it had faced since the War of Independence, brought the battle into enemy territory ten days after the invasion, and extended its reach to within ninety-five kilometers from Cairo and thirty-five kilometers from Damascus.
Yet the people of Israel felt defeated. The initial disarray had shattered Israeli self-confidence. For the first time since 1948, Arab armies had taken the initiative. In eighteen days of combat in Sinai and on the Golan, Israel lost over 2,500 men, a quarter of them officers, along with over 7,000 wounded—the largest number of casualties in any war since 1948. For a population of three million, the losses were devastating. Everyone seemed to know someone who had fallen. Once again, the toll was especially high on kibbutzim.
The 55th Brigade had led the most daring operation of the war and then endured sustained bombardment—more intense, said Danny Matt, than in any battle in World War II. Yet the brigade survived relatively intact, losing fifty-seven men (along with three hundred wounded)—half the number of its fatalities in the battle for Jerusalem.
Along with grief came rage. The Labor Zionist leadership had led the Jewish people through the twentieth century, remained steady through war and siege and terrorism, through waves of mass immigration and economic devastation. Until now. How had the pioneer statesmen and their hero generals become so complacent, so arrogant, that they had failed to notice the growing strength of Arab armies and the prewar buildup on the borders?
The world had never seemed to Israelis a more hostile place than it did in late October 1973. The Arab oil boycott, which punished pro-Israel countries with a suspension of oil deliveries, pressured Third World countries to sever relations with the Jewish state, while panicked European governments suddenly discovered the Palestinian cause. Only two countries—the United States and Holland—stood with Israel. And who knew for how much longer? The whole world is against us, Israelis told each other. This fatalism about “the world” was a negation of Zionism, which had aimed to restore the Jews not only to Zion but to the community of nations. Gone now was the Zionist challenge to outwit the curse of Jewish history. The war that began on Yom Kippur threatened the secular Zionist dream of a normal Jewish state, a nation among nations, and seemed to return Israel back to Jewish fate.
ARIK ACHMON STOOD with folded arms and shook his head in disbelief as UN supply trucks drove through Israeli lines on their way to the besieged Egyptian soldiers of the Third Army. Another few days, he thought, and we would have forced the Egyptians to surrender.
The Israeli government had yielded to American pressure to prevent another humiliating Egyptian defeat. The Americans were hoping that if a stalemate were created, peace talks might result. Yet many of the men of the 55th Brigade felt betrayed. They had turned the war on the southern front in Israel’s favor. But the government that had failed to prepare for war and ignored warnings of the surprise attack, that had delayed a reservist call-up and vetoed a preemptive strike, had now committed its final folly.
Despite the cease-fire, sporadic shooting continued along the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. Reservists had been demobilized immediately after the fighting ended in the Six-Day War, but this time they were kept at the front. No one knew for how long. The men set up tent encampments in the agricultural belt on the “African” side of the canal, took over abandoned houses in Suez City, and prepared for a long winter.
Arik moved into Danny’s headquarters in an Egyptian army bunker. It was cold and damp and infested with gnats. “The Holocaust cellar,” they called it, after a museum of that same name on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
THE MIRACLE MAN
HANAN PORAT AWOKE, delirious, from a ten-hour operation. “I just saw Abu,” he told his wife, Rachel, standing by his bedside. “We danced together on Simchat Torah.” In fact he hadn’t seen his fallen friend since the first days of the war.
Part of Hanan’s shoulder, where the missile had hurled into him, was gone. His surgeon showed him a fist full of metal. “This came from your chest,” he said. There was more shrapnel that hadn’t been extracted. Hanan’s shattered ribs were tightly bandaged, and he could hardly move. Volunteers working the wards placed phylacteries on his arm and head.
As he regained focus, Hanan felt a sense of wonder. His survival, doctors agreed, had been miraculous. No one could remember a story quite like it. A shell bouncing off his shoulder? By thrusting him in the air, away from the blast, that initial crash of the shell had saved his life.
Leaders of the religious Zionist camp came to visit. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the former IDF chief chaplain and now the country’s chief rabbi, told Hanan that he was privileged to be wounded in the service of Israel. Hanan replied, “You, rabbi, were more privileged than even the Macabees. It took them a year to announce the miracle of Hanukkah. But when you blew shofar at the wall, you were announcing the miracle the same day.” Goren laughed appreciatively.
Asked what he’d thought about in those moments just after his injury, Hanan replied, “I thought, ‘So another one is being added to those who gave their lives for the Jewish people.’ ”
THE BARD OF SUEZ CITY
MEIR ARIEL’S UNIT was patrolling along the shore of Suez City when it came upon a bunker. Booted feet protruded from the aperture.
Meir and a friend crouched and entered. Inside, five Egyptian soldiers were asleep. “Brah!”—Out!—shouted Meir in Arabic. The dazed Egyptians lined up. Meir ordered them to empty their pockets. One produced a tag from an Israeli uniform. Meir and his friend looked at each other: he’d obviously taken it from a soldier’s body, probably in one of the outposts of the Bar-Lev Line. Meir pointed his gun, finger on the trigger. His friend was surprised to see him acting so decisively, so military. Any sudden move from the Egyptian, it seemed, and Meir would have fired.
IN MID-NOVEMBER ANOTHER CEASE-FIRE was negotiated, this time directly between Egyptian and Israeli officers. It was a hopeful moment: the first face-to-face negotiations between the two adversaries since the 1949 armistice.
But for Meir and his friends, living in an abandoned youth hostel in Suez City, the cease-fire simply meant a reduction in the level of fighting. Every so often, the Egyptians would remember the Israelis across the way and fire a single mortar, and Meir’s crew would fire a single shell back.
Life in Suez City settled into routine. There was guard duty and hunting expeditions for sheep and calves to roast at the campfires where the stubble-faced men in woolen caps chain-smoked and argued into the night about the government’s failures and sang the old songs, already nostalgic for a fading Israel.
Meir taught the men his songs. They sang “Legend of the Lawn,” about teenage love in the midst of the entangled collective: “There’s a pile of hevreh on the grass . . .” Someone suggested a post–Yom Kippur version: “There’s a pile of grass on the hevreh . . .”
The men loved “our Meir,” this pure soul who never argued or gossiped or raised his voice, who listened to their woes and was always ready with a kind word or, when words seemed inadequate, a sad empathic smile. “Az mah, hevreh? b’sach hakol . . .” (So what, guys? After all, it’s only . . . ), he said after a shelling, not bothering to complete the sentence. One of the men lost his home leave and was inconsolable; Meir held him until he calmed.
But as the weeks went on, Meir became withdrawn. Let him be, the men said to each other.
Meir was brooding over Tirza. As soon as he returned home from the war, she intended to leave for America to try her luck as an actress. She was beautiful, she had learned English in Detroit, and while doing some modeling in Tel Aviv, she’d met an American movie producer who offered to be her patron. Meir was devastated. He loved Tirza madly, which was the only way to love Tirza, the only way Meir could love. She said she’d be gone for a year. But who knew what could happen in a year?
It wasn’t only Tirza. His life moved between army and kibbutz, communal impositions. He showed no anger, only what one friend described as a sad stillness.
The strap of his gun tore, and Meir didn’t bother replacing it. He gripped the gun by its barrel, carrying it as an afterthought. One day, on patrol with his jeep, Meir suddenly called out, “I need to go back, I forgot something.” The jeep pulled up in front of the hostel, and Meir ran inside and reemerged with his gun.
A friend from home sent Meir marijuana, along with seeds, and he planted those beside the hostel. When he stepped outside “for a smoke,” even his commander didn’t interfere.
One of the men confided to Meir that he feared he was going to die in Suez City. Wordlessly Meir produced a joint, the only comfort he could manage.
MORNING LINEUP IN the courtyard of the hostel. Thirty helmeted men stood at ease in a ragged row, reservist style. The daily inspection: Were the guns oiled? Bullet clips filled?
Strap hanging from his helmet, bootlaces open, Meir dragged his gun on the ground behind him and joined the line.
“Meir,” said the commander sympathetically, “I have a suggestion. Why don’t you bring your guitar for inspection?”
The next morning Meir showed up with gun and guitar. “Are the strings properly tuned?” the commander asked.
“Everything is in order,” replied Meir.
AVITAL GEVA ENCOUNTERS YOEL BIN-NUN
EVEN IN SUEZ CITY, joked Avital’s men, our commander can’t resist doing an art project. Avital’s “art project” consisted of laying strips of camouflage across the facade of the abandoned school where the hundred men of Company D had camped. He extended the cloth to the facades of nearby buildings occupied by other units. Then his men broke down the side walls, allowing soldiers and jeeps and even tanks to pass between the buildings, out of sniper sight.
With the new cease-fire, tensions eased. For the first time Avital could begin to think about the war. The sin of arrogance: Israel had really thought it was invincible. Golda and Dayan had assured that the new borders would keep Israel safe. But those borders had induced the very smugness that almost destroyed Israel on Yom Kippur. Why hadn’t Israel’s leaders aggressively pursued peace, checked every rumor of Sadat’s readiness for negotiations, instead of dismissing and suspecting—waiting, as Dayan had put it, for a phone call from Arab leaders?
Peace, Avital now knew, was possible. Egyptians and Israelis had greeted each other, embraced, on the streets of Suez City. Avital had acted then as a responsible officer, protecting his soldiers from danger. But there had been no danger, only exhausted men celebrating their common humanity. How could enemy soldiers turn in an instant into friends? Apparently the Middle East could yield surprises that weren’t only destructive but redemptive. Avital had seen a miracle. A vision of the end of days.
ONE SHABBAT MORNING, while visiting friends in the hostel, Avital heard a bearded young man with a knitted kippah speaking to a group of soldiers, evidently teaching some kind of class. The young man swayed slightly as he spoke, pulling the edges of his beard. Avital wasn’t sure what he was talking about, something about the Torah reading of the week. But it wasn’t the words that attracted him, but rather the bearded man’s evident empathy. When someone argued a point, he tilted his head, listening with the same intensity, it seemed to Avital, with which he’d spoken. Someone who could take another’s arguments as seriously as he took his own seemed to Avital worth knowing.
When the class ended, Avital approached Yoel Bin-Nun. “Listen, my hevreh are going crazy with boredom,” Avital said. “Why don’t you come by Company D and teach something about, you know, the Torah?”
And so the next Shabbat, after completing his morning prayers, Yoel went to the school. Avital greeted him with a hug; Yoel allowed himself to be embraced.
A dozen men sat on cots. Avital joined them. He felt like a child, ignorant of Judaism and eager to learn.
The Torah reading, Yoel explained in his deep voice, was about Joseph and his brothers. “Hevreh, look how beautiful this is,” he enthused, and read a few verses from his pocket-size Bible. The descent of the children of Israel into Egypt had begun through an act of hatred: Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers. That triggered a process in which the tribes of Israel were eventually enslaved. The redemption of the Jews would come, Yoel said, when they learned to love each other. And now we are back in the land of Egypt, secular and religious, correcting the sin of our last sojourn here. When we are united, redemption is possible.
Avital didn’t know if the Jews had been chosen for some special destiny, if the Torah contained clues to understanding Israel’s situation, if there was a God at all. But in Yoel’s presence Avital felt, if not quite faith, then peace.
Avital’s men confronted Yoel with their questions about God and their resentment toward the rabbinical establishment.
“I’ll make you a deal,” a kibbutznik said. “If you succeed in convincing me that God exists and that there is a divine hand guiding the world, I’m ready to become religious. But if I succeed in convincing you that it’s all nonsense, then you’ll become secular.”
“You’re asking me to give up my deepest beliefs,” Yoel replied, smiling. “Let each person observe and interpret in his way, but the Torah belongs to every Jew. Shabbat belongs as much to you as it does to me.”
“Listening to you,” Avital said to Yoel afterward, “I feel half religious.”
LATE AT NIGHT, Yoel and Avital sat on the upper floor of the abandoned school where Company D was camped and, wearing coats against the bitter wind that seeped into the unheated building, argued about the future of Israel. It didn’t matter that Yoel was a corporal and Avital a captain, or for that matter, that Yoel was a scholar and Avital didn’t know the most basic prayers. Somehow it didn’t even matter that Yoel was a settler for whom annexing the territories was part of the redemption process, while Avital was a kibbutznik for whom withdrawing from the territories was the hope for peace.
They agreed about this: Israel’s survival required moral renewal. “What I love about you, Yoel,” said Avital, “is that you don’t speak about rolling heads like the others here. ‘Golda has to go, Dayan has to go, Gorodish has to go.’ You’re speaking about moral transformation.”
“We need the moral vision of the kibbutz,” Yoel said.
”Yoel, habibi, you should be prime minister.”
YISRAEL HAREL UNDER FIRE
DANNY MATT ASKED Arik Achmon to prepare a report of the brigade’s actions in the Yom Kippur War, as Israelis were calling it, just as Arik had done in the summer of 1967 about the battle for Jerusalem.
The assignment meant interviewing dozens of officers and soldiers. Arik asked Yisrael Harel to be his assistant. Not that Arik expected much help from him. He’s not a real fighter, he doesn’t understand war— Still, Arik liked Yisrael, his partner in helping bereaved families, and he’d enjoy the company.
Yisrael was thrilled. On home leave, he bought, for interviews, the latest model of tape recorder with his own money. Yisrael referred to himself as Arik’s partner. When Yisrael wasn’t around, Arik referred to him as “the tape carrier.”
Danny moved headquarters from the “Holocaust cellar” to an abandoned Egyptian army base in the agricultural belt. Arik, who knew how important it was for Yisrael to be among the powerful, invited him to sleep in the officers’ quarters, though Yisrael only held the rank of sergeant.
“Get him out of here,” demanded a friend of Arik’s, repeating a common sentiment among the officers. “He doesn’t belong among us.”
Arik refused. “He’s the chief education officer, he’s working with me, and he will have the status of an officer,” he said.
ARIK AND YISRAEL traveled to the brigade’s outposts along the patchwork front, interviewing reservists.
In Suez City Arik went to see a friend in the youth hostel. There he found Meir Ariel lying on a mattress on the floor, strumming his guitar. Arik expected Meir’s usual effusive greeting. But Meir seemed withdrawn.
“What’s with Meir?” Arik asked Meir’s commander.
“He just misses home, like everyone,” the commander replied. “He’ll be okay.”
Arik knew that Meir wasn’t like everyone. And he wasn’t at all sure that Meir would be okay.
ARIK AND YISRAEL sat on a rooftop in Suez City, drinking coffee with officers who had secured the Yard on the night of the crossing. They could clearly see Egyptian positions barely a hundred meters away. But the front had quieted, and no one felt the need to sit behind sandbags.
After the interview, Arik and Yisrael walked down the stairwell, back toward their jeep. Just as Yisrael was passing a window, a mortar shell, and then two more, exploded in the courtyard. The window shattered. Yisrael cried out. Arik, a few meters behind him, rushed down the stairs.
Yisrael leaned against the wall. Arik checked his head and torso: clean.
A medic ran up the stairs. He pulled down Yisrael’s pants: a few metal and glass fragments in his thighs. You don’t die from this, thought Arik.
There was a flow of blood. Flesh wounds, reassured the medic.
Yisrael was quiet, and Arik appreciated his restraint. “Yihyeh b’seder, Yisrael”—It will be okay—Arik reassured him, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
Arik and the medic carried Yisrael to the jeep and rode with him to a field hospital. “In a few weeks you’ll forget it,” the doctor told Yisrael.
When Arik returned to officers’ quarters, he announced to his friends, laughing, “Hevreh, you won’t believe it, but Yisrael Harel has just earned his Purple Heart.”
FAR FROM HOME
A TRAUMATIZED ISRAEL resumed the motions of normal life. Universities opened two months late; a third of the students were still mobilized. With the scarcity of gasoline, drivers had to leave their cars idle for one day a week. Businesses were failing, kibbutzim had lost large parts of their harvests.
The men of the 55th had been called up in early autumn; it was now early winter. Sporadic shooting continued on both fronts. No one could say when this reserve stint, already the longest in the country’s history, would end.
A truck mounted with a bank of phones circulated among the IDF positions, and the men lined up to call their families. Leaves were given grudgingly, usually for forty-eight hours. Problems accumulated on the home front, and reservists were demanding longer leaves.
Zviki Nur, commander of the 28th Battalion, decided to appoint an ombudsman to advise him on the most pressing cases. He looked for someone whose judgment would be trusted by his fellow reservists. He chose Yoel Bin-Nun.
Yoel took the assignment as a religious duty. All other armies, he said, march on their stomachs, but the IDF marches on its home leaves. Few armies fought in conditions of such intimacy between the home front and the actual front as did the IDF. Leaves raised motivation, reminding soldiers they were fighting to protect their families.
Past midnight, following Zviki’s nightly briefings of the battalion’s commanders, Yoel began what he called his office hours. He weighed need against need—a business going bankrupt, a pregnant wife confined to bed. When he felt overwhelmed, he asked for God’s guidance. Avital saw it as a sign of Yoel’s modesty that he made a point of returning afterward to his unit, rather than sleeping in the officers’ quarters.
One afternoon, during a staff meeting, Yoel excused himself to pray. As Yoel headed toward the door, Avital called out, “You don’t have to leave.” Yoel found a corner to recite the afternoon service. Avital watched him slowly swaying: Avital wanted to offer himself the way Yoel was now, confessing his smallness before the enormity of existence. Unable to pray, Avital felt happy in proximity to Yoel’s prayer.
YOEL WAS SENT for a three-day trip to the home front, to assess the most pressing cases. He flew to Israel in a Hercules transport plane, which hovered low to evade Egyptian radar.
Yoel informed the disappointed driver assigned to him that they would be spending no more than a few hours with their own families. “What did you think,” said Yoel, “that we would live it up?” Yoel didn’t even visit Hanan in the hospital; that would be stealing time from the men who depended on him.
Yoel’s wife, Esther, in her ninth month with their third child, was furious. “You’re taking care of everyone else’s needs but your own,” she said when he came home for a brief visit. “Your children haven’t seen you in months, and I need you. Why don’t you put yourself on your list?”
“I can’t exploit my position for my own benefit,” Yoel replied.
What’s the point of arguing? thought Esther. He’ll always do exactly as he thinks, regardless of the consequences.
ARIK ACHMON RETURNED home on leave to a desperate Yehudit. He had never known her so angry, so hurt. Since Yom Kippur, she had been alone with Arik’s nine-year-old son, Ori. “He cries when he wakes up and doesn’t stop crying until he gets to school,” Yehudit said. “Then he waits for school to be over and starts crying again.”
Most of all she was furious at Arik. Other reservists had pleaded special circumstances and been discharged. “Arik, just tell them what’s happening here and I’m sure they’ll understand. You’re trying to build a second family, not easy under the best circumstances.”
“Danny needs me at his side,” Arik replied.
“What about me? What about your son? You’re not eighteen anymore, Arik. It’s time to stop defending the homeland and take care of your family.”
Yehudit should know—this is the price people like us pay for having the right values and education.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, noncommittal.
“Arik, I can’t go on.”
“I know I can depend on you, Yehudit. I know you’ll be strong.”
Damn it, he’s right—
MEIR ARIEL SINGS THE BLUES
ON GUARD DUTY around late-night campfires, the reservists in Suez City dissected the war. Who was responsible for the depleted stockpiles of weapons they had found on Yom Kippur? For the intelligence failure to read the most blatant signs of impending invasion? For the doctrine of Israel’s invulnerability and the contempt for the fighting capability of the other side? For the strategic stupidity of the Bar-Lev Line? Someone had to answer for this.
The radio played a song that seemed to have been written for the men of the 55th: “We liberated the Wall for you and we drained swamps / We stood watch over you in difficult times / We gave you everything, we asked for nothing in return / . . . We knew that soon, soon, a day would come / But now there are those who are not so sure.”
LATE AT NIGHT, on a hilltop overlooking the empty harbor, Meir Ariel sat on a chair stripped to its metal frame and strummed his guitar. He was supposed to be keeping watch for Egyptian commandos landing from the sea. But he’d sat here night after night, and no commandos appeared.
Meir and three other men, now sleeping in the adjacent tent, took turns on guard duty. They tried to make life comfortable. They’d hooked up a small generator to a jeep and brought a hot plate into the tent. Though it was against regulations, they’d installed a lightbulb, which they covered with a blanket.
Soon Meir’s watch would end and he would drink a cup of tea steeped with apple slices and read a bit of Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream and drift into World War II–era Cuba. He imagined a brightly lit casino boat from Havana appearing in the harbor and taking him far from here.
Strumming, he half spoke, half sang the words of a new song: “Reading Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway / translated nicely by Aharon Amir / Soon he’s going to amuse her on his wide bed / And he’s one of the saddest men in the city.”
He continued: “Maybe tomorrow I’ll finally go on leave / I’m bound to the binoculars, just not to think / Light and tea with sliced apple await me in the tent / and a cigarette and a story, good and strong / . . . And then another gaze at the moon, at the city and the sea / And then a friend comes and says, Your time has passed.”
Meir wasn’t writing a protest song, just the forlorn cry of a soldier watching his life slip away. A lament for all the vitality consumed by the country’s security needs.
Back in the tent, comfort eluded him. “Downed two sliced-apple teas, another four, five cigarettes / The song got stuck here / But now he’ll amuse her on his wide bed / . . . Our forces passed a quiet night in Suez.”
“A GENERATION IS ABOUT TO BE REPLACED”
HANAN PORAT LAY in a crowded ward for soldiers recovering from lung injuries. He thanked God that he wasn’t in the burn unit, where the wounds were so unspeakable they were referred to among the hospital staff with the euphemism Hashem yishmor—“God protect us.” He was healing, doctors said, remarkably well.
And then he read an article in a kibbutz newspaper, and the next phase of his life’s mission was revealed. The article, written by a kibbutznik named Arnon Lapid, was called “An Invitation to Weeping.” “I want to send you all an invitation to weeping,” Lapid wrote. “We’ll weep for hours, together, because I can’t do it alone. . . . I will weep over my dead. . . . And you will weep over yours. . . . We’ll weep . . . for the illusions that were shattered, for the assumptions that were proven to be baseless, the truths that were exposed as lies. . . . And we will pity ourselves, for we are worthy of pity. A lost generation . . . in a land that devours its inhabitants.”
Hanan felt as if his wounds were being torn open. He would have shouted if he had the voice. Pity the generation privileged to restore Jewish sovereignty to the land of Israel? What small-mindedness, what weakness of character! Where would the Jews be now if, in 1945, they had thought like this Arnon Lapid? Israelis would do now what Jews always did: grieve for their dead and go on, with faith and hope.
A plan was forming in Hanan’s mind. A response to despair. A new settlement movement, modeled on the pioneering movements that had built the state.
But this time the movement would be led by religious Jews. There was no choice but to step into the void left by the depleted kibbutzniks like Arnon Lapid. A movement of the faithful. All those who understood that Zionism was about not refuge but destiny, redemption.
The word would come forth from Hanan’s hospital room, from his shattered body holding the unbroken spirit of Israel.
IN SUEZ CITY, Yoel Bin-Nun was reaching a similar conclusion. Why were Israelis, even some of his fellow paratroopers, speaking in such apocalyptic terms, as if this were the beginning of the end of the Jewish state, God forbid? Why were Avital and his friends speaking about the collapse of the conceptzia, the security concept of holding on to the territories that had guided Israel since 1967?
“Hevreh, what are you talking about?” Yoel berated. “Exactly what ‘conceptzia’ has collapsed? The government is responsible for the operational failures, and it has to pay the price, but why was the war such a surprise to you? It was the most expected thing that the Arabs would attack again! We recovered much faster than other countries would have in our place. All of France collapsed before the Germans in three weeks. It took five years to liberate it. We revived in less than three weeks and won. We should declare a day of thanksgiving!”
A great change, Yoel predicted, was coming. “The Israel that will emerge from this war will be a different Israel,” he told Avital late one night. “A generation is about to be replaced.”
“Okay, Yoel,” said Avital, “so the right comes to power. I accept that my camp has to pay a price for what’s happened. Okay. But what then? We build settlements all over the map. Fine, it’s our land, the heart of the land of Israel. But what about the Arabs there? Do we annex them? Give them the vote? Or not? And then what? Another war? How does it end?”
THREE MONTHS AFTER THE WAR, Hanan Porat returned home. Though his shoulder and ribs throbbed, and it was sometimes hard to walk or even breathe, he dispensed with a cane and then stopped going to physiotherapy. He dismissed his wife’s pleas to continue treatments. There were more urgent matters at hand.
Hanan had no name for his new settlement group, no funds, no roster of activists. But he did have the blessing of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. Ignoring his pain, Hanan began a round of meetings with rabbis and politicians, similar to the frenetic activity he’d undertaken to found Kfar Etzion in the summer of 1967. But this time he felt even greater urgency: redemption was at war with apocalypse.
Hanan was sitting in a parked car near the Mount Etzion yeshiva when he saw Yoel, still in uniform, approaching. It was the first time they’d met since the war. They had left an Israel still infused with the spirit of 1967, and had returned to a shattered nation.
Hanan remained in the car and rolled down the window. “Yoel, something must be done to rouse the people,” he said, dispensing with greeting.
Yoel wanted to laugh with joy. Only Hanan could have survived a direct hit by a shell and then so quickly return to his old self—optimistic, obtuse, one-pointed, unstoppable. “I’m with you completely,” Yoel said.
ESTHER GAVE BIRTH to the Bin-Nuns’ third child, a boy, and Yoel allowed himself a proper leave to attend the circumcision.
He arrived in Jerusalem during a snowstorm. A rabbi who taught at the Mount Etzion yeshiva and who lived in Jerusalem offered to drive Yoel, along with the mohel, the circumciser. Ordinarily the drive from Jerusalem, on a narrow road that wound through Bethlehem, took half an hour. But now, under blinding conditions, they drove so slowly that Yoel wondered whether they would arrive at all.
Just past Bethlehem, the car began to skid. Sunset was approaching. “I’m afraid there won’t be a circumcision today,” the rabbi said.
Yoel stepped out of the car. Standing in the blizzard, he prayed. “I raise my eyes toward the mountains, from whence will my help come. My help comes from the Lord, creator of heaven and earth.”
A snowplow appeared. The car followed the plow up the inclining road, and reached the Bin-Nun home ten minutes before sundown. The circumcision, including the blessings, was completed within five minutes—“a Guinness record,” Yoel joked. The baby was named Odeyah, “I give thanks to God.” Yoel explained to celebrants that he’d chosen the name as a response to the war. “I give thanks to God,” said Yoel, “because we were saved by a miracle.”
The next day, he was back in Suez City.
AFTER A MONTH of convalescing at home, Yisrael Harel returned to Africa. Though shrapnel remained in his left leg, he was no longer limping.
The injury only confirmed for him his place in the brigade’s inner circle. He felt closer than ever to Arik, literally his brother in arms, the man who had carried him, bleeding, down the stairwell in Suez City. Just like the song that was playing on the radio: “Be a friend to me, be a brother / extend a hand in troubled times / I’m your brother, don’t forget.” Arik was the antidote to the Haifa kids who had taunted him and thrown rocks at the Bnei Akiva clubhouse, to the Mapai goons who had split his head open during the demonstration against Shabbat desecration. What else had Yisrael Harel ever wanted but that Jews in a hostile world should treat each other as brothers?
THE FAITHFUL STEP INTO THE BREACH
A WINTER NIGHT in Kfar Etzion. Pine trees swayed in the fierce wind, and the thin windows of the concrete houses shook. Inside the kibbutz dining room, inadequately warmed by kerosene heaters, some seventy young men sat on benches around long tables. Most were recently demobilized soldiers. Yoel, on leave, didn’t wear his uniform: the IDF had to be kept out of politics.
It was January 30, 1974, and the young men had gathered to found a group that would inspire Israel in its crisis of confidence—a rescue mission for the endangered spirit of 1967. It’s up to us now, thought Hanan. He looked around the room: most participants had grown up in Bnei Akiva. The presence of a few bareheaded men—settlers from the small Labor Party settlements on the Golan Heights and in the Jordan Valley—only confirmed that the pioneering momentum had shifted to the Orthodox.
Hanan, the wounded hero, the first settler, called the meeting to order. Shirt untucked, knitted kippah pinned to unruly hair, he conveyed indifference to his appearance, a man devoted wholly to the nation. Whatever doubts had once tormented him about subsuming his spiritual needs to his public persona had vanished. What could possibly be more ennobling than the convergence of Israel’s destiny with his own?
Speaking rapidly, Hanan denounced the government for its weakness. What had Israel gained by refusing to launch a preemptive strike on Yom Kippur morning and then surrendering to American pressure to save the Egyptians from defeat? Only the world’s contempt. And now the government was preventing settlement in the land of Israel.
Hanan’s audience understood that he was not speaking merely politically but theologically. God acted in history through the people of Israel; when they were strong, as in the Six Days, God’s glory was augmented. But when Israel acted in fear toward the gentiles, God’s Name was desecrated.
Yoel passed a note to Hanan, suggesting that the group choose a name. Hanan ignored him. Yoel wrote another note, and Hanan ignored that too. He always does that to me—
Yoel passed a third note: “We’ve been meeting for years, and nothing has happened. If we don’t choose a name nothing will come out of here either.” He added a Talmudic phrase: “The name determines.”
This time Hanan responded. “A suggestion has been made that we choose a name,” he announced. “Any suggestions?”
“Without question, Emunim,” called out a young rabbi. The Faithful. The name was adopted unanimously.
The next day one of the papers reported that a gush, or bloc, of pro-settlement activists had formed. Hanan adopted the term: Gush Emunim—Bloc of the Faithful.
A MERGING OF ELITES
ON A FREEZING windy morning in early February 1974, a man smoking a pipe stood alone on a muddy slope overlooking the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem and declared a hunger strike. He intended to continue until Defense Minister Dayan resigned for his failure to prepare the country for war. He tried to drive the wooden poles of his protest signs into the ground, but it was too rocky. Instead he gathered piles of stones to balance the signs. One was directed at Golda Meir: “Grandma + 3000 Dead = Failure.”
His name was Motti Ashkenazi, and he had commanded Budapest, the only outpost on the Bar-Lev Line that hadn’t fallen to the Egyptians. With shell fragments in his back, he and his men had held out for five days against constant bombardment that turned most of Budapest to rubble. And now Ashkenazi was demanding a reckoning. Why had he, as commander of a frontline position, received a mere half-hour warning before the Egyptians launched their attack on Yom Kippur? How could we go back to business as usual when that very mentality had led to the disaster?
Only one newspaper reported, briefly, on the hunger strike. It was hard to take Motti Ashkenazi seriously. Protest movements scarcely made a difference in Israel. The Labor Party, entwined with the state, seemed impervious to public pressure.
On day two of the hunger strike, a soldier on a single crutch appeared. He’d read about the protest, he explained, and left his hospital room to join. He said nothing more. Ashkenazi assumed he was suffering from shell shock. The two young men sat together in silence.
On day five, Ashkenazi felt close to collapse. He checked himself into the hospital, and doctors rushed him into surgery, removing the shrapnel in his back. The next day he signed himself out and resumed his hunger strike. Several dozen demobilized reservists joined him. By the end of the week the media was reporting the beginning of a movement.
YISRAEL HAREL WAS organizing a “university” in Africa for reservists whose studies had been interrupted by the war. Yisrael enlisted a hundred volunteer lecturers and planned over two hundred courses—in physics, classical languages, Jewish philosophy. Bar-Ilan, the Orthodox-sponsored university, agreed to serve as supervisor. An abandoned Egyptian army base was turned into the “university of the brigade,” as the men called it, and a catalogue was printed.
But before classes could begin, the order came to decamp. Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state, had negotiated a separation of forces between Egypt and Israel. Nearly five months after Yom Kippur, the last IDF units were leaving Africa.
THE NIGHT BEFORE demobilization, Yisrael invited a group of friends for a talk.
“Hevreh,” he said, “what are we prepared to do to make this a state worth living in?”
“What are you suggesting?” someone asked.
“That we help Motti Ashkenazi.”
“We’re still in uniform, Yisrael,” someone countered. “This isn’t the place for this discussion.”
“Srulik is right,” said Arik, using his nickname for Yisrael. “This disaster has a father and a mother. There has to be accountability.”
Yisrael was thrilled. He, a son of religious Zionism, and Arik, a son of Labor Zionism, would join together to help bring down the corrupt regime of Mapai.
Arik was unsparing in his critique of the political culture created by his party. “When you are in power for too long,” he said, “political considerations became more important than national considerations. All the institutions and leaders I grew up believing in have failed. The system that I was sure was foolproof has failed in every way. We can’t depend on anyone but ourselves.”
THE NEXT DAY, February 21, 1974, the men of the 55th Brigade gathered along the Egyptian shore of the Suez Canal, near the spot where the paratroopers had first crossed. The farewell ceremony had almost been canceled: a tank brigade had been given the honor of being the last Israeli unit out of Africa, and the paratroopers revolted. We were the first ones into Africa, Danny Matt insisted, and we won’t leave unless we are the last ones out. The IDF relented.
In June 1967 the paratroopers had ended their war by lining up, parade style, on the Temple Mount. Now they simply gathered around as Danny addressed them. “We, the paratroopers’ brigade,” he said, “were entrusted with being the lead unit in the force that brought about the turning point in the war and returned the initiative to the IDF. . . . You stood day and night beneath a murderous bombardment . . . deployed against us with a strength we hadn’t known in previous wars. Thanks to our ability to hold the bridgehead, the IDF succeeded in transferring the necessary forces and establishing its great foothold on Egyptian soil.
“I was privileged to command you—veterans of the retaliation raids [of the 1950s], liberators of Jerusalem and trailblazers in the Yom Kippur War. . . . Let us hope that the [prophet’s] vision will be fulfilled in us, that ‘nation won’t lift sword against nation and won’t learn war anymore.’ ”
The Israeli flag was lowered from a pole mounted near the bridge. Then the men released balloons and colored smoke grenades.
Kibbutzniks and religious Zionists, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, university students and workers: they had created an intimate society. Now they were returning to their separate lives in a wounded and divided Israel. Someone scrawled a farewell message onto the side of an armored car: “From the wars of Egypt back to the wars of the Jews.”
Arik walked slowly across the bridge toward the Israeli-held side of the canal. He had always managed to slip, seemingly without effort, from soldier back to civilian. But now he felt overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions: pride, anger, heartbreak. One more mission accomplished. But how many more times could they keep giving their all, compensating for the failures of their leaders?