THE LONELIEST MAN IN ISRAEL
FROM HIS CELL in Ramle’s maximum-security prison, Udi Adiv tried to follow the momentous changes occurring outside. The self-confident, seemingly invincible Israel he had known before entering prison had been shattered. But the new Israel, traumatized and divided, felt too elusive to grasp.
The distancing was mutual. Udi Adiv had faded from public memory. The trial that had scandalized Israelis less than two years earlier seemed, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, like history. Still, in Israel, no trauma was ever really forgotten, only displaced by new trauma, so that the country’s emotional life resembled one of its archaeological sites, an accumulation of disrupted layers.
Udi had been in prison for nearly a year when the war began. In a letter to a childhood friend from Gan Shmuel, he had called the war an inevitable outcome of Israel’s refusal to make peace—that is, dismantle itself as a Jewish state. But he confessed to feeling unease at being excluded from the Israeli collective at its most desperate time.
Still, those moments of emotional solidarity with his fellow Israelis were fleeting. At his insistence, he’d been moved to a cell of Arab security prisoners. A Shin Bet agent who came to check up on him urged Udi to express regret for his actions. “You think your Palestinian friends see you as one of them?” he said. “For them you’re just another Jew.” Udi replied, “My people are the revolutionaries of all nations.”
The prison authorities took their revenge by denying Udi his most basic requests, like allowing his parents to bring him extra underwear. He was sent, for no apparent reason, to the X’s, a punishment cell divided into three cages, each so small there was no room for a mattress. Sitting on the bare floor, he assessed his prospects for surviving prison as an intact person. You can do this, he told himself. Other revolutionaries came out of prison stronger.
He set himself a list of rules. First, forget your previous existence. Hope for nothing and expect nothing. Don’t anticipate visits from relatives and friends, don’t mark the wall of your cell with a calendar counting down the time, don’t hang family photographs over your bunk. Approach prison with the same curiosity you would apply to any society; become a student of its ways. Accept the petty humiliations, like eating with a spoon. Be intellectually engaged and emotionally detached.
He settled into a monastic discipline. Following 5:00 a.m. wakeup and body count, he jogged for an hour in the courtyard. After breakfast in the dining room, where he ignored the taunts of “traitor” from Jewish criminals, he did an hour of calisthenics. Then he worked on his Arabic, reading the bland Arabic edition of the Histadrut labor federation newspaper, the only paper allowed into the security cells. He read—Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Sartre, Kant. Often, after the 11:00 p.m. curfew, he continued reading by the dim light of the corridor.
The warden—“that racist Romanian,” Udi called him—ordered all Marxist books confiscated. From then on, he said, prisoners would read only what was available in the prison library. One of the prisoners appealed to the Supreme Court and won.
Udi had rarely been without at least one girlfriend since his teen years. Yet he accepted the absence of women with an equanimity he once would have believed impossible. Shortly before his arrest, he met a Frenchman who had spent time in a monastery. Udi had asked him how he’d survived without sex. The Frenchman replied, “My pleasure came from wisdom.” If he could sacrifice for a religious delusion, Udi now reasoned, then I can do no less for the sake of truth.
Udi wrote Leah, who had been with him the night of his arrest: it’s over between us. Leah had never been a real revolutionary. As a political prisoner, he explained to her, he needed a partner who was as committed as he was.
Leah left to study in Paris. Udi’s old girlfriend, the elegant Matzpen activist Sylvia Klingberg, began visiting Ramle Prison.
UDI SHARED A six-square-meter cell with thirteen inmates, in a section of the prison whose cells faced an inner courtyard. The cells alternately housed Jewish criminals and Arab security offenders. Each cell had its own bathroom, with a hole in the floor and a cold-water shower. Three times a week prisoners were taken to a communal shower, with hot water. Udi felt grateful to be among the Arab security prisoners, whose code forbade molestation.
Udi was accepted by his Arab cellmates; he was almost one of them. Most were Palestinian citizens of Israel with whom he could speak Hebrew. Several were Marxists, and together they studied political texts. Even the devout Muslims, whom Udi regarded as simpletons, were civil. Udi befriended three young men from the Galilee who had planted a bomb on a beach, wounding a woman; they were, thought Udi, naive. He tried to educate them. “Violence should be directed only against the institutions of the state, not against the people,” he said. “Our task as revolutionaries is to bring Jewish and Arab workers together.” They nodded and smiled, but Udi suspected he wasn’t getting through.
Udi was troubled by some of the talk of his fellow security prisoners, like the Palestinian who assured him that Israel would be destroyed by “our secret weapon, the Arab womb.” “Human beings shouldn’t be reduced to statistics,” Udi admonished.
“Hey, Udi, look at this,” called out a cellmate named Abu Tawfik, pointing to an article in the paper about a fatal car crash. “Three more Jews who are looking up at the flowers.” He smiled.
Udi was perplexed. Abu Tawfik wasn’t one of those primitive religious Muslims, but a Marxist like Udi. How could he be happy about the deaths of people just because they were Jews?
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
THE SIEGE AGAINST ISRAEL DEEPENED. PLO terrorists crossing from Lebanon invaded an Israeli apartment building and killed eleven residents. Another PLO group seized hostages in a high school, and twenty-one teenagers were killed during an IDF rescue operation. The PLO formally adopted the “stages plan,” declaring that any territory evacuated by Israel would be used as a base from which to destroy it.
To the dismay of Israelis, the legitimacy of the PLO only grew. In November 1974 PLO leader Yasser Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, where he denied the right of the “Zionist entity” to exist. Many delegates gave him a standing ovation.
GUSH EMUNIM BECAME a mass movement, impelled by faith in Israel’s redemption and by fear of Israel’s unraveling. Even for many secular Israelis, the group offered a way to fight back against the siege. Israel’s leading satirist, Ephraim Kishon, urged that the young people of Gush Emunim—the “knitted kippot” generation—receive the Israel Prize, the nation’s highest award. Even Yehudit Achmon’s father, Yaakov Hazan, a fierce opponent of Gush Emunim, confessed that he wished Hashomer Hatzair were still able to produce such dedicated youth.
One autumn night several thousand young people, carrying backpacks and sleeping bags, crossed the invisible 1967 border. Their destination was two sites in the West Bank, marked by Gush Emunim for future settlement. One group, led by Hanan Porat, walked along the cliffs of Wadi Kelt in the Judean Desert, heading toward Jericho.
Through the night and into the next day, the protesters evaded army roadblocks and pursuing soldiers. They slipped into a cave and then out the other side. Finally they were surrounded, and the IDF carried Hanan and his friends down the cliff on stretchers.
SEVERAL NIGHTS A WEEK, Yoel Bin-Nun went to the Gush Emunim office for meetings. The office—small, crowded rooms with overflowing ashtrays and mattresses on the floor—was located in an apartment building a block away from what had once been no-man’s-land separating Jordanian and Israeli parts of Jerusalem. The building’s narrow windows had been built as protection against Jordanian snipers, a reminder of the fragility of the old borders the Gush was determined to permanently erase.
After one late-night meeting, Yoel was driving home with Hanan Porat when Hanan admitted to feeling exhausted. Yoel, who didn’t have a license, couldn’t help with the driving. He persuaded Hanan, who recently had driven into a ditch and been briefly hospitalized, to stop at the side of the road. They were just past Bethlehem, near Solomon’s Pools, which had been a reservoir for ancient Jerusalem.
Hanan napped, and Yoel kept watch.
Hanan abruptly awoke and, as if resuming a conversation, said, “So let’s say it’s 1948, and the Arabs have accepted the [UN] partition plan. The Etzion Bloc is under Arab rule. Do you stay or not stay?”
“Hanan,” Yoel replied slowly, “I didn’t go through two thousand years of exile just to raise my children in exile in the Holy Land, when there is a Jewish state half an hour away.”
“What, are you crazy?” said Hanan. “No matter what, we don’t move from Kfar Etzion. Why is there even a question?”
PRIME MINISTER RABIN accused Gush Emunim of trying to topple his government, threatening Israeli democracy. Yoel wrote an op-ed appealing to Labor leaders to remember their roots. He invoked not the Torah but secular Zionism: there is nothing more sacred in the Zionist ethos, he wrote, than settling the land of Israel.
A kibbutznik with gray stubble and a woolen cap showed up at Yoel’s door with a warning. His name was Yehoshua Cohen. As a young man, he had been an assassin for the anti-British underground the Stern Group (known to the British as the Stern Gang); later he became bodyguard and confidant to Ben-Gurion on the desert kibbutz Sde Boker, where both men had lived. A sympathizer of the settlers, Cohen had helped found the field school at Kfar Etzion.
“Yoel,” Cohen said grimly, “your camp is going too far. You’re trying to bring down Mapai, and it can’t be done. The left will do anything to stay in power. They’ll stage a coup here. They’ll take over the radio and the TV.”
“What are you talking about?” said Yoel.
“You don’t know them like I do.”
“You know the left of the old generation, Yehoshua. But I serve with their sons. Maybe some of the older people would want to do that. But the hevreh from the paratroopers? No way.”
THE NEARLY-NINETY-YEAR-OLD WOMAN sitting beside Hanan in the front seat of the car keenly watched the landscape of terraced hills passing outside her window. Rachel Yanaít Ben-Zvi had an eye for the potential of empty space. One of the legendary figures of Labor Zionism, she had as a young woman founded a female workers’ collective to train pioneers for agricultural labor rather than traditional women’s roles and, as she later wrote, to “satisfy their passion for a partnership with mother earth.”
For Hanan, the support of Ben-Zvi, who also happened to be the widow of Israel’s second president, was a gift. Op-eds in the Israeli press were deriding the Gush as a distortion of Zionism, which had intended to replace the messianic fantasies of exile with the responsibilities of the real world. Opponents noted the contradiction at the heart of the Gush, a strange hybrid of Zionist activism and messianic passivity: Since redemption was imminent, why worry about problems like the demographic threat to the Jewish state of annexing two million Palestinians? Some on the left went so far as to condemn Hanan and his friends as anti-Zionist.
Yet here was Rachel Yanaít Ben-Zvi, confirming the Gush’s claim to pioneering legitimacy.
They drove through the West Bank. Few Israeli soldiers were visible, their presence unnecessary in the pastoral calm. Just beyond the Arab village of Ein Yabroud, near Ramallah, rose Mount Ba’al Hatzor. Bulldozers were clearing the top of the hill. Hanan explained that this was the highest spot in southern Samaria, and that the army was building a radar station.
“Why don’t you establish a work camp there?” suggested Ben-Zvi. Hanan grasped the historic reference: in the pre-state era, the pioneers had built roads and cleared land as prelude to creating towns and kibbutzim. Maybe Gush Emunim activists should help build this army base, continued Ben-Zvi. And then forget to leave.
Hanan brought the idea to the Gush Emunim executive. We’ll ask the contractor building the base to hire our people, he said.
Nonsense, countered Rabbi Moshe Levinger, head of Hebron’s settlers. As soon as the work is done, your construction workers will be sent packing.
But Yehudah Etzion, Yoel’s devoted student and a member of the executive, was enthusiastic. He offered to organize a work group.
Yoel backed Yehudah: here was a way of bypassing the Rabin government’s opposition, infiltrating rather than storming the territories. “We need to walk a thin line,” said Yoel. “Create facts on the ground, and if possible without going head-to-head with the government.”
Yehudah brought together ten friends willing to work on the base. Hanan convinced the contractor to hire them and secured a work permit from the defense ministry, granted on condition that the group not stay overnight in the West Bank and create a de facto settlement.
The group set out from Gush Emunim headquarters in a Land Rover that had once belonged to the Jordanian army. Yehudah, curly red hair protruding from a floppy kibbutz hat, rode atop the jeep, one foot propped on the spare tire attached to the hood. One of the young men was a doctor who took leave from work to join the construction crew.
Working against a fierce wind, they drove poles into the hard earth, constructing a four-kilometer fence on Mount Ba’al Hatzor. Evenings they returned to Jerusalem. Yehudah slept in the Gush office.
As the weeks passed without change, group members concluded that no settlement was going to come from their efforts. One by one, they dropped out.
Demoralized, Yehudah consulted with his teacher. “Yoel, we can’t continue like this. Either we become a settlement or we will dismantle.”
Yoel recruited several volunteers to help Yehudah. One morning they took a taxi from the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem to downtown Ramallah. From there they took a taxi to Mount Ba’al Hatzor. Yoel told the Palestinian driver to take them near El Yabroud, the village closest to the radar base, whose existence was a military secret. “Ah, to the radar,” replied the driver in Hebrew.
That night Yoel returned to a disapproving Esther. “The land of Israel cannot be settled by trickery,” she said.
THE ASCENT OF MEIR ARIEL
TIRZA ARIEL RETURNED home from America. She hadn’t succeeded there as an actress. But, working as a makeup artist, she had managed to save some money. And she opened a private bank account.
“Everyone here has grandparents in the city, except for us,” she told Meir, justifying her refusal to turn over her earnings to the kibbutz. “So only our children shouldn’t have bicycles?”
Meir objected feebly. “We have everything we need,” he said. Tirza was adamant. Some on the kibbutz suspected her of sinning against the collective, but this was Mishmarot, and no one made it an issue.
The Ariels resumed life as if nothing had changed. Tirza got a job marketing for Mishmarot’s factory, which made frames for sunglasses. Soon she was pregnant with the Ariels’ third child.
But for Meir nothing felt normal. He was sleeping with the wife of a neighbor, with teenage girls half his age. Though he didn’t ask—that was the agreement between them—he assumed that Tirza was likewise having affairs. The house was a wreck—dirty clothes on the floor, dishes in the sink, broken toys in the yard.
“We have to stop this charade,” he said to Tirza. “Whatever you want—separation, divorce. It’s not your fault. It’s my problem.”
“Don’t ever talk to me about divorce again,” said Tirza.
ON PASSOVER EVE, Meir and Tirza and the children celebrated the seder with Tirza’s parents in the dining room of Kfar Szold, their kibbutz in the north.
Meir sat glum, unable to join in the singing. What was the point of this ritual of pretend devotion? Every year, like dutiful children, the secular kibbutzniks recited passages from the Haggadah, extolling the God of Israel for ancient miracles. If there was a God, we shouldn’t be making a mockery of the seder by eating nonkosher food. And if there wasn’t a God, then why bother with the seder at all?
Meir stepped outside, into the Galilee silence. The singing in the dining room receded.
Meir gazed upward. The stars seemed fierce. Alive. He continued staring into the illumined void, as though he were expanding, merging into vastness.
And then he knew: Nothing was random. Of course there was a God. He had asked a question and the universe had responded. How could he have ever doubted the obvious?
THE BIRTH OF OFRA
ON APRIL 20, 1975, after a day of work on the fence, Yehudah and a dozen friends broke their daily routine. Instead of returning to Jerusalem they drove to Ein Yabroud, below Mount Ba’al Hatzor. They turned across the road into a valley without trees. Between the boulders, sage was in purple bloom.
They came to a row of abandoned barracks, partly stone-faced, without doors or glass in the windows. In 1967 the Jordanian army had begun building this base, but the Six-Day War had intervened. Yehudah’s group intended to spend the night here and simply stay on.
A dozen supporters arrived from Jerusalem, with sleeping bags and gas burners and canned food. One young man missed his ride and hitched, part of the way on a donkey cart. Yehudah and his friends swept the concrete floors and laid plastic sheets over gaping windows and blankets across doorways. “If only the war had happened a little later,” joked one young woman, “we would have gotten better housing.”
Meanwhile, in a coordinated move, Hanan Porat was meeting with Defense Minister Peres in Tel Aviv to convince him to allow Yehudah’s work detail to remain in the abandoned camp. “Look, Shimon,” said Hanan, “you can’t deny the spirit behind our repeated attempts to settle in Samaria. You have to allow this spirit some outlet, some positive expression. Otherwise there will be a very hard confrontation. Allowing the creation of a work camp could bring a certain calm. And what are we talking about? Some people working at an army base and then sleeping over.”
Hanan of course wasn’t threatening. All he was saying was that unless Peres conceded, matters could get out of hand.
Peres said, “If you say that you want a work camp and it isn’t recognized as a settlement, I’m ready to issue instructions not to remove you. But we won’t subsidize this, and we aren’t committing ourselves to anything aside from basic security.”
Peres must have understood the subterfuge, that what began as a daily work detail was now about to become permanent. Was Peres allowing himself to be duped because he supported settling the site? Or was he acting cynically, to embarrass his political rival, Rabin? Cynicism would not have been out of character for Shimon Peres. Unlike Rabin and Dayan and other leading Labor politicians of his generation, Peres was not a war hero but a bureaucrat. Though responsible for some of Israel’s greatest military achievements—arming the IDF in 1948 and negotiating Israel’s nuclear reactor with the French in the early 1960s—he hadn’t served in the army. Rabin despised him as a schemer.
Hanan agreed to Peres’s conditions. Without government deliberation, without word reaching the media, the first settlement in Samaria had just been established.
“THE BA’AL HATZOR Work Camp,” read the sign. Twenty-five kilometers north of Jerusalem, eight kilometers northeast of Ramallah. Two dozen young people, three of them women, settled in. Hanan temporarily joined them, to supervise the transformation of an abandoned military camp into a settlement, just as he had done in Kfar Etzion.
Hanan objected to calling the embryonic settlement Ba’al Hatzor, after a Canaanite deity. Instead he suggested Ofra, after an ancient Israelite town in the area cited in the book of Joshua.
Supporters appeared with spring beds and chemical toilets and a small generator that kept breaking down. Teenagers from Bnei Akiva painted the barracks and plastered holes where pipes had been ripped out by pillagers. A truck arrived with cement blocks. A farmer on his tractor appeared every afternoon to help clear fields. When settlers offered to reimburse him for gasoline, he replied, “Hevreh, don’t embarrass me.”
Ofra’s first family, a couple and a baby, arrived toward the end of the first week, close to midnight. They were given their own barracks. Two dozen young people crowded into the room, lit by kerosene lamp. Accompanied by a guitar, young men danced in a circle, their shadows on the newly painted walls.
Supporters came from around the country to celebrate the first Shabbat in Ofra.
Barely an hour before the beginning of Shabbat, Yoel told Esther, “I can’t keep away.” Esther and Yoel had long ago resolved never to spend Shabbat apart, and aside from Yoel’s reserve duty, they’d maintained their vow. Reluctantly, Esther agreed to join him.
The Bin-Nuns packed up their three children and got a ride with a student of Yoel’s. They reached Ofra with sundown.
The young people, mostly singles, crowded around long tables for the Friday-night meal, kibbutz-style. The singing went on for hours. Despite herself, Esther was charmed: here was the authentic face of Zionism, a youth movement atmosphere of purity, truth. These young people weren’t singing for the television cameras, but to celebrate being together in the land of Israel. This is how it must have been, she thought, when her parents settled the Etzion Bloc in the 1940s, singing against the darkness.
“If the government agrees to turn this into a settlement,” she told Yoel, “I could see living here.”
A WEDDING IN RAMLE PRISON
“LET’S GET MARRIED,” said Sylvia Klingberg, sitting across the metal grille from Udi Adiv.
“Married?” said Udi, trying to hide his surprise.
“It makes sense,” insisted Sylvia. “It will be easier for me to get permission to visit. And for you to ask for a pardon.”
“If you’re ready to do it,” said Udi, “then okay.”
AS HE APPROACHED Ramle Prison, Dr. Marcus Klingberg, Sylvia’s father, was horrified to encounter a crowd of journalists, including a TV news crew filming guests arriving for the wedding. Klingberg was the deputy director of Israel’s top-secret biological weapons facility; what would his colleagues think when they saw him on the news? They might even suspect him of being a traitor like his new son-in-law.
Twenty awkward celebrants gathered. Among them was a Matzpen activist who had once been a student in the Mercaz yeshiva. There were, it seemed, almost as many prison guards as guests. The warden came by to offer good wishes. Udi’s parents brought cookies and soft drinks from the kibbutz dining room. Sylvia’s father brought cognac.
They were a handsome couple: Sylvia, with long black hair and a stylish dress; Udi, tall and slender, with close-cropped hair. He’d been allowed to exchange his brown prison uniform for a white shirt and jeans, his first civilian clothes since his arrest. He tried to smile for the camera.
Udi’s father and younger brother, Asaf, held up a prayer shawl over the couple, while the prison rabbi, in black fedora and long gray beard, rushed through the blessings. Udi smiled, bemused or perhaps embarrassed. Then he smashed a glass, in mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem.
There would be no consummation. Udi had appealed to the courts for a furlough, but the judge had turned him down. It was dangerous to release Udi Adiv for even one minute, he’d said.
Udi and Sylvia were given exactly two minutes alone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and hugged her.
ZIONISM AVENUE
OFRA QUIETLY TOOK ROOT. Meanwhile Gush Emunim’s public campaign to settle in Samaria, the northern West Bank, focused on a valley near Nablus known as Sebastia, the name of a Roman-era city and now of a nearby Arab village.
Gush Emunim was drawn to the area because it had been home to the capital of the northern Israelite kingdom, destroyed by Assyria in the eighth century BCE. There, around an abandoned Ottoman-era railway station, Gush activists repeatedly pitched their tents, only to be forcibly evacuated by the army. Each thwarted attempt brought a stronger one. Thousands hiked toward Sebastia. A couple was married there. During one evacuation a bearded protester was photographed carrying a Torah scroll as soldiers led him away. Israelis shuddered at that image: the young man was the soldier who had been photographed during the Yom Kippur War at the Suez Canal, carrying a Torah scroll as he was led into captivity.
So far the Rabin government had managed to block Gush Emunim’s attempt to turn Sebastia into the breakthrough point for settlement in the northern West Bank. Frustration among Gush activists was growing. If we don’t achieve a more tangible victory than a fictitious work camp in Ofra, they said, the movement will lose its momentum, its chance to change history.
AND THEN, UNEXPECTEDLY, Gush Emunim received a gift.
On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly voted, 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, to declare Zionism a form of racism. The resolution, initiated by Arab nations and endorsed by the Soviet and Muslim blocs, was the culminating moment of the growing Arab success, impelled by the oil boycott, to isolate Israel. Sitting in solemn assembly, the UN in effect declared that, of all the world’s national movements, only Zionism—whose factions ranged from Marxist to capitalist, expansionist to conciliatory, clericalist to ultrasecular—was by its very nature evil. The state of the Jews, the Israeli political philosopher J. L. Talmon noted bitterly, had become the Jew of the states.
Addressing the General Assembly, Israel’s UN ambassador, Chaim Herzog, noted that the resolution had been passed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the Nazi pogrom that in effect began the Holocaust. The attempt to destroy the Jews, said Herzog, was always preceded by the attempt to delegitimize them. Then he ripped up a copy of the resolution.
For all Herzog’s resoluteness, the secular Zionism he represented was mortally threatened by the UN resolution. Zionism had promised to cure anti-Semitism by demythologizing the Jews, transforming them into a nation like all other nations. The reason for anti-Semitism, wrote one nineteenth-century Zionist theoretician, was that the Jews, a disembodied people without a land, were “haunting” the nations; anti-Semitism, he concluded, was a fear of ghosts. Give the Jews a state—a flag and postage stamps and marching bands—and they would become concretized, demystified. Normal. Zionism had been the Jews’ last desperate strategy for collective acceptance among the nations. And now that strategy had failed. Zionism had been turned against itself: the very means for freeing the Jews from the ghetto had become the pretext for their renewed ghettoization.
Only Gush Emunim had a ready explanation for why this was happening. It was an old Jewish answer, and it first appeared in the Bible: “Lo it is a nation that shall dwell alone and not be reckoned among the nations.” Not that Hanan and Yoel and their friends welcomed Israel’s isolation. But it hardly fazed them. Goyim were acting like goyim; now Jews needed to act like Jews, embrace their unavoidable uniqueness and fulfill their redemptive destiny, the world be damned. Increased settlement in all parts of the land is the only answer to the UN resolution, Gush Emunim declared. And many Israelis now agreed.
Gush Emunim announced plans for yet another gathering in Sebastia, this time on Hanukkah, at the end of November. It quoted the book of the Macabees: “We have neither taken other men’s land, nor possessed that which belongs to others, but the inheritance of our fathers.”
TEN DAYS AFTER THE UN VOTE, on the night of November 20, terrorists crossed from Syria into the Golan Heights and entered a yeshiva in the settlement of Ramat Magshimim. The terrorists were drawn to a light in a dorm room. They broke in and opened fire, killing three students. Two of them were from the Mount Etzion yeshiva—students of Yoel Bin-Nun—who happened to be visiting friends.
Yoel was a teacher of soldiers; burying students was part of the job. But these boys had been gunned down, helpless. No way for Jewish soldiers to die in the land of Israel.
The people of Israel, thought Yoel, needed an infusion of strength. And Hanukkah was an auspicious time. The upcoming protest in Sebastia would be the eighth attempt to settle in Samaria since Hawara, and that too was auspicious: Hanukkah commemorates the small vial of oil that defied natural law and burned in the Temple for eight nights. Eight was a number for miracles.
THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 30, the second day of Hanukkah, was bright and cold. Despite forecasts of heavy rain, several thousand people met at rendezvous points near the old West Bank border. They were Orthodox families with young children, Bnei Akiva girls in long skirts, and Bnei Akiva boys with white ritual fringes hanging down their jeans. They carried sleeping bags and knapsacks, filled with a change of clothes and sandwiches and menorahs to light the hills of Samaria.
They set out in cars and vans and buses. The slow procession came to an army roadblock. Protesters left their vehicles. Led by guides, they began walking east toward Sebastia, a day’s distance by foot.
In the sun and wind marchers sang Hanukkah songs celebrating the courage of the few against the many. The UN, the media, the left, their own government, everyone was against them—but what did that matter? They were the children of the Macabees.
Walking at the head of the line was Naomi Shemer, composer of “Jerusalem of Gold.”
Shortly after nightfall, the first trekkers reached a valley near the Palestinian village of Ramin. Four kilometers and one final hill separated them from the valley of Sebastia. Guides decided not to risk the slippery slopes in the darkness. Marchers unrolled sleeping bags beneath a cloudy sky and prepared to spend the night. They laid menorahs on rocks and lit candles in the strong wind, trying to protect the flames with their bodies. “We kindle these lights,” they sang, “to recall the redemptive acts, miracles and wonders which You performed for our forefathers, in those days, at this time.”
Then came the rain. Thundering, flashing. Hikers huddled beneath spread sleeping bags, but the rain penetrated. Nothing to do but wait out the night.
The government rejected a request from Gush leaders to open the roadblocks and allow them to bring food to the valley. They sent a taunting telegram to the cabinet: “Were your hearts moved more by the [Egyptian] Third Army than by your own citizens?”—referring to the previous government’s acquiescence to American pressure to allow supplies to reach trapped Egyptian soldiers.
In the uncertain dawn, drenched protesters began arriving in Sebastia. The valley had turned to mud. Each new group was greeted by singing and dancing. The unstoppable force of those who felt as if they had personally waited through two thousand years of exile for this moment.
The rain continued, and most protesters soon left by buses provided by the army. But several hundred remained. And though Sebastia was declared a closed military zone, hundreds more continued to come.
The abandoned railway station was transformed into a kitchen, dispensing soup and sandwiches. Activists driving on the old train tracks smuggled in tents, and a camp rose around the small lake the rains had formed in the center of the valley. Zionism Avenue, read a makeshift sign, a response to the UN.
Though it had acted resolutely against previous attempts to settle Sebastia, this time the government hesitated. Jewish leaders from around the world were gathering in Jerusalem for a solidarity conference in response to the Zionism = racism resolution, and the government didn’t want to mar the event with an ugly confrontation. By the third day of the protest, government officials were telling the press that the evacuation would be deferred until the following week. “The hand of God,” said Yoel Bin-Nun.
In the freshly painted basement of the railway station, Gush leaders sat around a table, arguing strategy. The low-roofed, windowless room, barely two by four meters and dimly lit by a generator, was heavy with the dust of a half century of neglect. Under no circumstances do we voluntarily leave, said Rabbi Levinger. To Yoel, Levinger’s words sounded like a threat of blood.
Fearing civil war, Yoel circulated among the soldiers, wishing them a joyful Hanukkah. He approached General Yona Efrat, commander of the central front, who had assured Rabbi Zvi Yehudah during the Hawara evacuation that the IDF didn’t shoot Jews. “You’re making a big mistake,” Efrat told Yoel. “Instead of fighting the government over Samaria, you should be settling those areas like the Jordan Valley where there is consensus.”
THE RAINS STOPPED. All through the week protesters came and went. Some hiked through fields of Palestinian farmers, trampling crops that got in their way.
Young people toured the nearby ruins of ancient Samaria, remnants of the eighth-century BCE palace of the kings of Israel and a kilometer-long avenue of pillars from Herodian times. Here is your past and your future, Sebastia seemed to say; the time has come to turn these ruins back into thriving communities.
Sympathetic kibbutzniks brought an oak sapling to plant in the makeshift settlement. “If heaven forbid they evacuate you,” one said, “take the oak with you so that it won’t be left here alone.”
Several thousand demonstrators spent Shabbat in Sebastia. General Efrat brought his family. He blessed the wine, and soldiers and squatters shared a meal. Yoel calmed; there would be no fratricide here.
YISRAEL HAREL WAS in bed with a sprained back.
He tried to be helpful by phoning his friend, the IDF chief of staff, Motta Gur. “You know us, Motta,” he said. “You know we’re serious and responsible. But we can’t control everyone in the field. Tell Rabin not to involve the army in an evacuation. Don’t let it become violent.”
In fact Motta had already told an outraged Rabin that the IDF shouldn’t be employed for political ends like evacuating protesters. Nor did Motta conceal his sympathy for the would-be settlers. “My soldiers,” he called them. He meant Yisrael, Hanan, and Yoel.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 7. A helicopter landed in Sebastia, and out stepped Defense Minister Peres.
Young people danced in welcome, convinced he’d come to announce the government’s capitulation. But Peres didn’t come with an offer. Instead, he told the Gush leaders in the basement that if the squatters didn’t leave Sebastia within twenty-four hours, they would be forcibly removed.
Levinger tore his shirt in mourning. What a showman, thought Yoel with disgust. Levinger ran out of the room. Hundreds of protesters gathered around him. “Hurban!”—Destruction!—he shouted. “Tear your clothes! This is a day of mourning!”
Hanan followed Levinger outside. Among the angry young men in kippot and hooded coats, Hanan spotted a middle-aged, bareheaded man holding an unlit pipe—the poet Haim Gouri, who was writing a series of reports on Sebastia for the Labor Party daily, Davar.
Gouri was both moved and frightened by Sebastia. The schism between left and right, he said, was being fought in his soul. He had been a founder of the Movement for the Complete Land of Israel and loved the purity and self-sacrifice of these young religious people. But he feared their contempt for government authority, their willingness to tempt civil war. He believed that the land of Israel belonged in its small entirety to the people of Israel, that the Jewish claim to Judea and Samaria—the root of Jewish being, won in a defensive war—was as powerful as any people’s claim to any land. But he was tormented by the Palestinian villagers watching the would-be settlers move toward Sebastia, felt the immovable force of their competing claim.
“Why don’t you come inside and see what you can do?” Hanan said to him.
Gouri followed Hanan into the station. No one thought it odd that Israel’s most intense political struggle was about to be mediated by a poet. Gouri suggested that a small group of squatters relocate onto a nearby army base, while the government then debated the next step—similar to the compromise that Rabin had suggested at Hawara. Peres didn’t reject the proposal. The Gush leaders said they would consider it.
As Hanan and his friends debated in the basement, their followers gathered around bonfires against a bitter wind, awaiting a decision.
What was the point, insisted Levinger, of accepting a compromise that we rejected at Hawara and which Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had so adamantly opposed? “We must resist with full force,” he said.
“Reb Moishe,” said Hanan, affectionately addressing Levinger, “if we don’t accept the compromise, the government will use all its force against us. God forbid, God forbid, there can be a disaster here. And we won’t achieve anything.”
“Don’t push the government into a corner,” pleaded Yoel. “We can’t risk another Altalena”—the Irgun munitions ship that Ben-Gurion ordered sunk off the coast of Tel Aviv in 1948, as close to civil war as the Zionist movement ever got. “If our struggle is defeated, there will be no chance of resurrecting it.”
As for the compromise, added Hanan, “we will turn it into a victory in the perception of the public. And once we’re settled in the area, we’ll know how to expand our presence.”
A majority of the executive voted to accept the compromise.
The next morning a four-man delegation drove to Peres’s office in Tel Aviv. One of the Gush leaders came barefoot.
Peres suggested moving thirty settlers to the army base. “Make it thirty families,” said Hanan. Peres agreed; why nitpick? He has no idea, thought Hanan, what a difference there is between thirty Orthodox individuals and thirty Orthodox families.
Peres left the office, phoned Rabin, and finalized the deal. When he returned, he cautioned the delegation that this was an interim agreement, that the cabinet would reevaluate its status in three months and decide the settlers’ fate. Then an aide brought brandy and shot glasses.
Until that moment, the Rabin government had managed to resist the pressures of Gush Emunim. But something in the government’s resolve had been broken. The UN had conspired with Gush Emunim to defeat the Zionism of normalization. Symbolically if not intentionally, the Labor government was yielding to Hanan’s Zionism of destiny.
Back in the car Hanan told his friends, “We have to present this as a great victory, to raise morale. We have to declare before the world that the government has permitted a Jewish settlement in Samaria.” In fact, the government had agreed only to allow thirty families to move to an army base near Sebastia. But that was not how the compromise would be announced.
Unknown to Hanan, an emissary of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had meanwhile appeared in Sebastia, with a message from the rabbi: No compromise. Yoel, who hadn’t joined the delegation to Peres, was horrified. Would Rabbi Zvi Yehudah sabotage the agreement, just as he had at Hawara? And at what price?
Back in Sebastia, Hanan rejected the ultimatum. “It’s too late,” he said. Even Levinger agreed, warning against humiliating “the Kingdom,” as Kookians referred to the government of Israel. The nine-day confrontation was over.
Levinger announced through a megaphone: the government of Israel has agreed to establish a settlement in Samaria.
Holding each other’s shoulders, the young men danced. Yoel stood to the side and watched. He didn’t like crowds. And he mistrusted ecstasy. He felt relief—they had avoided another Altalena. But no joy. This outcome could have been achieved at Hawara, without the confrontations of the last year and a half. And all because of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. How could the man who once spoke prophecy be so wrong now?
Hanan was raised above the crowds. “Am Yisrael chai!”—The people of Israel live!—the young men sang. Hanan closed his eyes, smiled. Jacket open against the wind, arms spread wide, embracing the land.
THE LAW OF EXILE
A MONTH AFTER the terrorist attack on the Golan Heights, the Mount Etzion yeshiva held a memorial for its two fallen students. Several hundred mourners filled the dining room, the largest space in the yeshiva. Rabbi Yehudah Amital eulogized one of the young men: “His long day began with prayers at dawn and continued [with Torah study] into the late hours of the night.”
Afterward, the young men returned to the study hall. One student, Yitzhak Lavi, approached Yoel and suggested a drill. If terrorists could strike in a yeshiva in the Golan, then why not here? Only recently there had been an army alert.
Yoel was head of the yeshiva’s security detail, Yitzhak a member. But the group functioned more by consensus than hierarchy; this was, after all, a yeshiva, not an army unit.
Optimistic, dependable, Yitzhak Lavi was regarded as a leader among the students. He was the first hesder yeshiva student to become an IDF officer. Yitzhak, friends said admiringly, wouldn’t think twice about charging into enemy fire.
Yitzhak and Yoel agreed to play the role of guards, and Adi Mintz, another student, the role of terrorist.
Yitzhak and Adi had their Uzis with them, Yoel his pistol; in these tense days, they carried their weapons at all times.
Adi removed the bullet clip from his Uzi. He kept the safety latch off, ready to shoot in simulation.
Yitzhak and Yoel waited near the back entrance to the dining room for the “terrorist” to appear.
Adi rushed toward them. Yitzhak overpowered him and grabbed the Uzi.
Adi retrieved his gun and instinctively inserted the bullet clip. He forgot to turn on the safety latch.
One more time, Yitzhak suggested.
Adi rushed toward Yitzhak again. Too soon: he wasn’t ready. Adi aimed at his chest and fired.
Yitzhak fell.
Students hearing the gunshot rushed out of the study hall. A student, an army medic, removed Yitzhak’s shirt and tried to stanch the bleeding. Yitzhak stopped breathing. Yoel placed his mouth against his, trying to revive him. Without success.
YOEL STOOD AT THE EDGE of the cemetery, watching the flag-draped coffin being lowered into the ground, but dared not approach the mourners. During the shiva, he stood outside the building where the Lavi family lived, walked around the block, stood again outside the building, and finally left.
His nights were torments. How could this have happened? During an exercise intended to prevent the death of students? Was it his fault? He should have checked Adi’s gun. But this wasn’t the army; everyone was responsible for himself. Still, technically he was in charge. However inadvertently, he had exposed his students to a fatal recklessness.
The police investigation absolved him of wrongdoing. When some yeshiva students wondered aloud about the sin that had caused the tragedy, Rabbi Amital denounced such talk as primitive, and the speculation ceased.
Still, Yoel knew what he must do: if no one would punish him, he had to punish himself. While the Torah didn’t regard an accidental killer as a murderer, he was to be confined to a “city of refuge”—at once to protect him from the avenging family of the victim but also to punish him. Din golah: the law of exile.
Adi briefly left the yeshiva. Yoel stopped teaching, but then returned. He considered leaving his home in Alon Shvut. Though he wasn’t an accidental murderer, he still felt bound, he confided to a student, by the law of exile.
A STRANGER IN THE MIRROR
ALL HIS LIFE Meir Ariel had wanted to be like everyone else. The only way to be normal was to accept the great pretense—to live as if death were illusory, as if this life would last forever. But he couldn’t stop the voice taunting him with his own mortality. When he looked in the mirror, a stranger seemed to stare back.
Meir wrote a song in which he imagines being released from a psychiatric ward and told by doctors to visit the airport every month. It will help calm you, they say. Meir wanders the airport, disoriented by his kibbutznik provincialness, eyeing the beautiful women and humiliated by desire. The airport is the place of escape; but Meir isn’t going anywhere. He watches the planes land and depart, like souls being born and dying. A Swissair Boeing takes off in an explosion of light. Orgasm, madness, birth, death: airport as world.
MEIR DISAPPEARED. At first Tirza pretended not to notice. But by the third day she began to worry. Where was the boy? In the hospital, the morgue? Had the earth swallowed him up?
In fact he was in a lockup in Tel Aviv. He’d been arrested while trying to buy hashish from an undercover cop in a park. He didn’t have money to cover bail, and that was fine with him. Don’t you want to call home? he was asked. Not necessary, he said.
Being in prison, Meir felt, was like visiting a foreign country. Who knew when he would have this chance again? He befriended the inmates and the jailers, who were fascinated with this strange and lovable kibbutznik. It wasn’t every day, after all, that a kibbutznik ended up in jail. Meir spoke to his cellmates without patronizing them. He knew about human weakness and was no man’s judge.
A week after his arrest, Meir finally phoned the kibbutz office. Tirza screamed. “I have to get you out of there,” she said.
“It’s no rush,” said Meir. “I’m having an interesting time.”
When Tirza arrived at the lockup, Meir greeted her without relief. “Who asked you to get me out?” he said.
“Autist, mefager, idiyot,” said Tirza.
MEIR WAS READING PSALMS. The rich Hebrew stimulated him. And David’s faith somehow soothed him. Meir had been raised on the Bible, but as history, not religious truth. As teenagers Meir and his songwriting partner, Shalom Hanoch, would joke about biblical characters, inverting the Bible’s heroes and villains. Goliath was misunderstood, Meir would say, and then he and Shalom would go on about the upstart David who stole Saul’s crown and how Ishmael and Esau were the good guys rather than their wimpy brothers, Isaac and Jacob. Meir would defiantly shout the ineffable name, Jehovah, daring God to defend His honor.
Meir loved the biblical heroes precisely for their flaws. That the Bible could be so brutally honest about the nation it was intended to celebrate seemed to attest to its credibility. Could its testimony, then, also be trusted about the God of Israel? Was the notion that there is a creator and a plan really more absurd than the notion that reality formed itself, and there was no plan?
Teach me Torah, Meir said to one of Mishmarot’s founders, Yaakov Gur-Ari, a Talmud scholar in his youth. Yaakov had run the cowshed until the kibbutz shut it down, in part because members hated the smell. “The cow wants to nurse more than the calf wants to suckle,” the old cowhand said to Meir, quoting the rabbis.
Yaakov suggested that, as a musician, Meir should learn how to read the Torah’s musical notes, the way it is chanted in synagogue. And so, like a boy preparing for his bar mitzvah, Meir sat with Yaakov on Shabbat mornings, singing Torah.
IT’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL
THE BIG ISRAELI rock band of 1976 was Tamouz, founded by Shalom Hanoch. Shalom had returned from London just before the Yom Kippur War. Though he’d managed to release an album in English, it was a bigger success in Israel than in England—no surprise, given Shalom’s heavily accented English. It’s cold in England, he said on his return home; one could die there and no one would notice.
But Shalom refused to feel at home in Israel. He sang of his alienation from collective identities in the elegant Hebrew of his kibbutz education. Yet Shalom’s songs helped define a new generation’s Israeli identity, at ease with itself and not requiring the constant self-reflection of the founders.
With its edgy keyboard, long drum solos, and bombastic guitar overtures, Tamouz was Israel’s first great hard rock band—rock music that could have been created anywhere and just happened to be sung in Hebrew. No postwar angst or protest, no national emotions at all.
Despite itself, Tamouz reflected the new national mood, at least among many secular Israelis—a fierce insistence on normalcy, on getting on with life, pretending that Israel was anywhere.
Shalom brought several of Meir’s songs into the group’s repertoire, including the band’s most emblematic hit, “End of the Orange Season.” Shalom had composed the music, together with another band member, Ariel Zilber, who grew up on Udi Adiv’s kibbutz, Gan Shmuel, and who left because, as he put it, playing rock ’n’ roll seemed more interesting than picking cotton. “End of the Orange Season” was a paean to kibbutz romance, making love to the smell of orange blossoms, the next stage after the tenuous flirtations among the teenagers piled on the grass. Yet it became a metaphor for the end of the era of Zionist innocence, of the agricultural and egalitarian Israel, one of whose symbols was an orange.
Tamouz produced only one album before breaking up. Ariel Zilber, angry that the band wasn’t playing his songs, appeared at concerts with a paper bag over his head.
For Shalom, working as part of a band, a collective, felt claustrophobic. It’s starting to feel like a kibbutz, he said.
MEIR CONTINUED TO WORK in the cotton fields. Tamouz’s popularity had no impact on his career. A friend produced a demo tape on which Meir sang “Our Forces Passed a Quiet Night in Suez,” but the radio stations weren’t interested.
Shalom went solo, revered as Israeli rock’s greatest songwriter. But he knew the truth. “I’m good,” he told a friend from Tamouz, “but there’s someone who is better.”
Yet outside the small circle of rock musicians, no one knew that Meir Ariel, adrift on a peripheral kibbutz, was writing his generation’s greatest songs.
THE ART OF DECLINE
“THERE IS NO PLACE more conservative, more irrelevant, than this palace of polished marble,” Avital Geva declared to a small crowd of the curious, about to enter the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. “It is a closed circle, a swamp without oxygen.”
Avital stood beside a bookshelf filled with moldy books embedded in cement; worms crawled through the pages. He had submitted the work for inclusion in an exhibit of conceptual art, and this was opening night. But the museum director had refused to place the bookshelf within the museum for aesthetic reasons, and in the end compromised by installing it in the plaza.
Avital was obsessed with decay. In one exhibit he displayed bones and false teeth; in another, a plastic pond filled with fedoras and dead fish preserved in salt. How else to describe what was happening in the country? Leading members of the Labor Party were being accused of bribery and embezzlement. The kibbutz movement, once Israel’s moral conscience, was paralyzed by inertia. The Zionist revolution was founded on Jewish labor; but now Arabs were working the fields and building the houses. And after its victory at Sebastia, Gush Emunim seemed immovable. “Just look at Hanan high on their shoulders,” he told Ada, disgusted. “It’s all power power power. They’re destroying Judaism.”
“You can’t equate Gush Emunim with Judaism,” argued Ada, who taught Bible in Ein Shemer’s high school. “One of the major concerns of Judaism is the limits of power. The occupation is the problem, not Judaism.”
“They’re causing me to lose my love for Judaism,” said Avital.
What was happening to him? He wasn’t only protesting rot but creating it. Only his work with young people still evoked the joy of creation. He was teaching art—“teaching life,” he said—at Ein Shemer’s high school. And young people accepted him as one of their own, sharing their capacity for wonder.
Avital salvaged a discarded bus and turned it into a makeshift classroom. “What did you think, hevreh, that we’re going to sit in little rows and copy the Mona Lisa? I’m here to teach you philosophy. To challenge basic assumptions. This cup of coffee—is it aesthetic or not? I want you not just to judge but to create. The only way to create something new is to see things in a new way. With the eyes of a child.” Avital knew nothing of Zen Buddhism, but he was talking about beginners’ mind.
“AND SO, AVITAL, our friend,” began the interviewer from the regional newspaper, “you’ve come to a sad end. You’ve turned into a museum creature. Decadent . . . successful. They’ve given you a prize. How did you fall so low? By the way—how much?”
“Six thousand lira,” Avital said, embarrassed.
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem had awarded Avital a prize for his work in collecting books about to be processed into pulp and distributing them in kibbutzim and Arab villages around Ein Shemer, a project he’d begun in 1972. “I began to realize that art isn’t doing provocations in galleries in Tel Aviv,” Avital told the interviewer. “That has no value compared to things that can be done here in the area.”
“What was the response [to the project] in Ein Shemer?”
“In recent years they’ve become too sensitive to issues of cleanliness, and I was afraid they’d toss all these [worn books] in the garbage. . . . I put piles of books in Givat Haviva [the educational center of Hashomer Hatzair]. . . . The administrators were outraged. ‘What’s this, you’re throwing books around like chicken feed?’ The ‘cultural avant-garde’ of Hashomer Hatzair was concerned about aesthetics, that the books weren’t arranged orderly like soldiers in a lineup. But no one there thought about salvaging thousands of books that were about to be turned into pulp. . . . This concern for beauty and perfection is making us empty.”
TWO DUMP TRUCKS filled with compost appeared at Ein Shemer’s high school. Avital guided them through the gate, past the single-story houses that served as dorms to a patch of lawn. “Here, here,” he called out, “great!” The trucks proceeded to dump their loads onto the grass.
The principal ran out of his office. “Lunatic! What are you doing?”
Avital tried not to laugh. “It’s an educational tool,” he explained. “We’re working on a project: Can garbage be aesthetic?”
“This time you’ve gone too far, Avital. I swear to you, you’ll never teach here again. This gets cleared away right now!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it when the project ends. In two weeks.”
They compromised on four days.
THE GREENING OF OFRA
JUST WAIT AND SEE how many leave when winter comes, warned the pessimists in the not-quite-legal settlement of Ofra. The winter of 1976 was especially bitter: snow covered the valley, and winds seemed intent on uprooting the settlers’ barracks. But no one left.
Another three families joined, imparting a sense of permanence to the community. Families were allotted their own barracks, while singles lived in rooms lined with cots. Phone calls were made from the coffeehouse near the mosque in Ein Yabroud, the Arab village across the road. A van shuttled members between Ofra and Jerusalem, about half an hour away, driving through Ramallah.
Ofra was run as a kind of kibbutz, more by necessity than ideology. Though salaries weren’t pooled, the dining room, bathrooms, and showers were all communal. Settlers rotated responsibility for kitchen and guard duty. At the weekly meetings they vehemently debated issues great and trivial. Should Ofra be a mixed secular-Orthodox community or entirely Orthodox? (Orthodox: several secular young people who joined soon left.) And if Orthodox, how open to modernity? (Open: they preferred university graduates to full-time yeshiva students.) Should the community hire a rabbi? (No, because he would likely disapprove of young women wearing pants instead of modest skirts and of married women not covering their hair.) Should they hire Arabs for building and gardening? (No, argued Yehudah Etzion: Jews must do their own physical work.) What should they serve for breakfast? (Yogurt.)
On Tu b’Shvat, the festival of trees, Defense Minister Peres visited Ofra and planted a sapling. It’s time to end the fiction of Ofra as a work camp, Peres said. Ofra was hooked to the local electricity grid, and the army provided settlers with weapons for guard duty.
YISRAEL AND SARAH HAREL, with their four children, came often for Shabbat. Here in this hard beauty, in fields of boulders and wildflowers with terraces and wells and ancient ruins, the state of Israel could be reimagined, as if it were 1948 again and the country had not yet been disfigured by corrupt politics and pettiness and hasty housing projects. Here Yisrael’s dream of a religious Zionist pioneering elite was coming to life.
He belonged among them. But it wasn’t easy for a family man in his thirties to move to Ofra. Sarah had already made enough sacrifices for him, left her ultra-Orthodox family for Yisrael’s world. Now Yisrael would be asking her to become a pioneer.
Sarah didn’t understand Zionism, the pride of a Jewish flag and a Jewish uniform. But Jews settling the land of Israel: what could be more self-evident? Nor was she afraid of austerity: she had grown up in a house no less cramped that the Jordanian army barracks of Ofra.
“I like the people in Ofra,” she said to Yisrael. “There is something pure about them.”
A YEAR AFTER its ambiguous founding, Ofra was thriving. There were 140 residents, 80 of them children. There was a workshop for wooden toys and one for ladders (“Beit El Ladders,” named for the nearby site of Jacob’s dream). There was a chicken coop, and forty dunams were cleared for a cherry orchard. Around the concrete bunks were the beginnings of lawns and flower beds.
Hanan Porat spoke at the first-anniversary celebration: “They accuse us of being dreamers. That’s true. Here Jacob dreamed his dream and his ladder reached the heavens, and he received the promise of Providence that this land would be his. Zionism is, in its essence, the fulfillment of the dream of generations.”
The newspaper Ma’ariv offered this sympathetic report on Ofra’s first anniversary: “Across from the entrance to Ofra is an Arab house. In the evening the hevreh go there to drink coffee, to improve their Arabic and to connect with the neighbors.” The article quoted one of the young settlers: “If the Jews won’t create ill will between us and the Arabs, we’ll get along fine.”
By “the Jews,” he meant the left.
WHAT IS THIS, AMERICA?
THE FOUR-DAY CAMP for the fatherless children of the 55th Brigade resembled any Zionist youth camp in the summer of 1976. Tents in a forest clearing, hikes, campfires into the night.
Nearly two hundred children—far more than in previous summers—attended the four-day camp this year. Partly the increase was due to the Yom Kippur War, which made dozens of children eligible. Those included the three children of Avinoam “Abu” Amichai of Kfar Etzion. The increase in population was also because of a decision taken by Yisrael and Arik to open membership to families of fallen soldiers from the IDF’s other two paratrooper brigades.
Arik served as camp director, Yisrael as activities director. Arik and a dozen fellow volunteers shared a room lined with cots. Yisrael slept in a tent.
When the camp ended, several members of the executive complained about the spartan conditions. Why don’t we give the kids a good time instead of subjecting them to boot camp? Why not take them, say, to an amusement park?
Yisrael was outraged. What made the camp special was precisely its ability to impart the Zionist values that the children’s fathers had sacrificed their lives to protect.
“We don’t want to spoil them,” Arik said, backing Yisrael. “They have to be prepared for life.”
“They already know about life,” someone countered. “What’s wrong with giving them some fun?”
These bourgeois lawyers, Yisrael seethed afterward to Arik. What were they trying to do, turn Israel into America?
“I also prefer the way we’ve done things until now,” Arik said. “But times are changing. Maybe it’s not our job to be educators.”
“That’s exactly our job,” countered Yisrael. “They’re ruining everything we built.”
“They’re our comrades, Srulik. Don’t treat them as enemies.”
Yisrael, in the minority, quit.
WEEKENDS, ARIK SKYDIVED. To clear my head, he explained.
Arik had begun to skydive on a dare. One day in 1972, two young South African Jews on motorcycles showed up at his office. They had founded a skydiving club in Johannesburg, they explained, and wanted to do the same in Israel. But the IDF had vetoed the idea: the only parachutists in Israel’s skies, said the IDF, would be in red boots.
Arik made the right calls, and together with his two investors, founded Israel’s first skydiving club. “Of course you’re too old to jump,” one of the partners told him. “Oh, really?” said Arik, who since then had skydived over a hundred times.
One Friday afternoon, Yisrael accompanied Arik to the skydiving club, located near Kibbutz Ein Shemer, to photograph him for a newspaper essay. They went up together in a Piper Cherokee. Yisrael stood at the door and shot as Arik jumped. Arms spread wide, alert to the effect of the slightest move of a limb, a turn of the head, plunging at the speed of 260 kilometers an hour, he began to slowly count, savoring his discipline even as the world seemed to spin out of control. When he reached 35, he tugged open the chute.
Afterward Yisrael gave his friend a gift: a photo album with pictures of Arik conquering the skies.
OFRA, SUMMER 1976
“YOEL, WE NEED YOU,” said Yehudah Etzion. He wanted a spiritual teacher for Ofra, someone who would make explicit the connection between the daily newspaper and the weekly Torah portion. Not an official rabbi—Ofra seemed adamant on that point—but a guide for the community’s religious and moral and political dilemmas.
Ever since the shooting death of Yitzhak Lavi, Yoel had wanted to exile himself from his home. Now Yehudah was offering him the chance.
“We will need a bathtub for the children and a way to install a washing machine,” said Yoel.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Yehudah.
FROM RELATIVES AND FRIENDS, Yisrael Harel faced incredulity. Yes, of course idealism is admirable, they said, but this time you’ve gone too far. “What are you looking for in the wilderness?” Sarah’s father demanded.
Yisrael’s editor at Ma’ariv summoned him. “We can’t have one of our senior people living in an illegal settlement,” the editor said. “It will reflect badly on the paper.”
When Yisrael didn’t respond, the editor continued, “You’re going to have to choose between Ofra and your job.”
Yisrael returned to his cubicle, phoned an editor he knew at a rival daily, and quit.
IN AUGUST 1976, shortly before the beginning of the school year, a dozen families, including the Harels and the Bin-Nuns, moved to Ofra. Each family was given a barracks, divided by a curtain into a parents’ bedroom and a children’s bedroom. The floors were rough concrete. But there were now indoor bathrooms and kitchen sinks.
Yoel and Yisrael’s lives had converged at crucial moments—Bnei Akiva in Haifa of the 1950s, the paratroopers in the orchards of May 1967. But they had never been intimate. They had naturally gravitated to different parts of the settlement movement—Yoel to the messianists of Gush Emunim, Yisrael to the secularists of the Movement for the Complete Land of Israel. Yoel’s knitted kippah covered most of his head; Yisrael’s smaller knitted kippah was a badge of loyalty more than faith.
Now Yoel and Yisrael were neighbors; their children would grow up together. For both men, a shared goal was the only worthy reason for friendship. There was no place for trivial ambitions, for mere conversation. When matters of pride and hurt arose, those were given ideological justification. There would be no easy friendship between them.
On their first Shabbat in Ofra’s prefab synagogue—the first building constructed by the settlers—Yoel and Yisrael were called up to bless the Torah. When each finished reciting his blessing, the congregation responded with the same joyful song, based on the words of Jeremiah, “V’shavu banim l’gvulam”—and the sons shall return to their borders.
AVITAL GEVA CELEBRATES A JUBILEE
IN KIBBUTZ EIN SHEMER they debated the delicate line between a growing restlessness among members and the need to preserve collectivist principles. Should parents be allowed to visit their babies and toddlers outside the allotted forty-five minutes a day? (Yes, provided they don’t disturb the “educational order.”) Should members be allowed to travel abroad if the ticket is a gift from a family member? (Yes, but then you forfeit your turn to a kibbutz-paid trip abroad for the next fifteen-year cycle.) Should the kibbutz pay the government television tax for televisions purchased privately by members? (No, but the kibbutz will buy fifty TVs.)
EIN SHEMER WAS preparing for its jubilee celebration. Avital joined the planning committee. The projects were predictable—a pageant, a sports day, a symposium on the future of the kibbutz. “Why don’t we do something different?” Avital suggested.
“What do you have in mind?” someone asked warily.
“Building a greenhouse and growing tomatoes,” he said.
The members were confused. “You’ve always been in the orchards,” one noted. “What do you know about growing tomatoes?”
“Nothing! But I’ll learn. This will be my gift to Ein Shemer for the jubilee. Every family will be given a plot, as big as they want, to grow tomatoes. It will bring the kibbutz together. What better way to celebrate the jubilee than by strengthening our togetherness?”
Avital approached Avishai Grossman, Ein Shemer’s secretary general. There was a discarded chicken coop near the rubber factory, in the center of the kibbutz; why not let Avital turn it into a greenhouse?
Though Avishai wasn’t much older than Avital, the kibbutz official regarded him as one would a mischievous child, with affection and exasperation. Avishai had never understood what Avital was trying to say with all his artistic provocations. What had been the point of painting the trees purple and dumping garbage on the high school lawn?
Still, Avishai could see nothing wrong with the project Avital was now proposing. Besides, it was just for a year, right? Not even Avital could turn this into a scandal.
EVENINGS, AVITAL’S FRIENDS helped him transform the chicken coop into a greenhouse. They removed the cages, spread plastic walls, and replaced the asbestos roof with plastic just before the first rains came. But how to make the dead earth, gray from two decades of neglect and compacted chicken droppings, come alive again? Avital took a sample of soil to a laboratory and was told: Impossible, you won’t be able to grow anything in this.
Avital began intensively watering the ground. Then he ordered fresh soil—hamra, rich and red—and lay it over the ground. “Look at this delicious earth!” Avital said. “Ya Allah, you can eat it!”
Dozens of families signed up. “Each according to appetite,” Avital said, encouraging families to claim as much space as they wanted within the one-dunam greenhouse. Kibbutzniks came straight from work, exchanging insights on their budding plants as rain and wind shook the plastic walls. For Avital, the tomatoes were just a pretext for a happening, a useful work of conceptual art—a reminder to his friends of the joy of communal life.
YISRAEL HAREL’S VINDICATION
SHORTLY AFTER THE HARELS moved to the wilderness, Arik and Yehudit Achmon drove to see them. “I can’t help being interested in what’s happening there,” Arik told Yehudit. “You can’t keep away,” she said, though she too was curious to glimpse this unexpected turn in the saga of pioneering Zionism.
Smiling broadly, Yisrael introduced Arik to his neighbors as “my commander and friend.” Then, still smiling, he brought his guests into his thirty meters of home. Yehudit thought of her father, living in a tent in Mishmar Ha’Emek.
In Arik’s grading system, Yisrael had just moved up the scale from a mere tarbutnik, culture officer, to magshim, a pioneer who fulfills his highest ideals.
“Srulik?” said Arik, his intonation a slight questioning, as if seeing Yisrael for the first time. “Kol hakavod”—well done.
Yisrael had waited his whole life for this moment of vindication.
Deeply moved, he said, “You, Arik, are one of the people I most respect. I know how to recognize people of quality.”
For the first time in their relationship, Arik regarded Yisrael as an equal. In one sense, more than an equal: even if Arik had agreed with the settlers ideologically, he wouldn’t bring his family here. In that respect, Srulik has surpassed me.
