ARIK ACHMON, CEO OF PRIVATIZATION
KANAF-ARKIA WAS THRIVING. By contrast, the parent company, Arkia, was a disaster. In debt, with aging planes, some of them dating to the 1950s, with too many employees and an all-powerful workers committee that vetoed layoffs, Arkia symbolized all that was wrong with Israel’s statist economy. How do you make a small fortune in Israel? went the joke. Invest a large one. No one even quite knew how much Arkia was worth; its managers could do no better than present books that were two years old.
As angry as Arik was with the Likud and its settlement policy, he found common ground with its stated commitment to a free market and privatization. And the first test case for privatization, the government decided, would be Arkia.
Arik and his partners placed a bid. Arik had big plans for Arkia: open new domestic routes, break El Al’s monopoly on flights abroad, and fly charters to Europe. But most of all he intended to turn Arkia into a model of efficiency and worker-management relations. He would fire extraneous employees and offer those remaining shares in the company’s profits. A humane capitalism, pursuing profit while protecting the worker. A capitalism worthy of a son of the kibbutz.
Not surprisingly, Arik happened to know the right person. The Likud’s finance minister, Yigal Horowitz—nicknamed “Mr. I-Don’t-Have” for his refusal to subsidize special interest groups—was an old friend of Arik’s. They had met in 1955, when Horowitz, then an independent farmer, had bought twenty cows from Arik, then manager of Kibbutz Netzer Sereni’s cowshed. With his keen eye Horowitz had noted that Arik delivered the same cows that Horowitz had chosen—an unusual act of good faith in a business where deception was widespread. And Horowitz never forgot it. Over the years, when they met at farmers’ conventions, Horowitz would refer to Arik as the most honest cowhand in Israel.
Arik’s main competition for the bid was a group formed, as it happened, by Horowitz’s two sons. Arik reassured his partners: If we make a convincing case, Horowitz will be fair. Horowitz, though, wasn’t convinced. After all, a subsidiary company buying out the parent company would be unusual anywhere, let alone as Israel’s first test case for privatization. Horowitz phoned Arik for reassurance. “We have real concerns about whether we can trust Arkia to your hands,” he said. “Are you really serious, Arik?”
“Serious, ready, and clear about what we want.”
They met in the finance minister’s office, a small room with a plain table and wooden chairs without padding. “I’m giving you Arkia,” Horowitz said. “Two things decided in your favor: your company’s experience, and the integrity of your group. I already knew in 1955 that Arik Achmon is an honorable man.”
There was one more obstacle to overcome. Arik needed the approval of the Histadrut labor union, which owned 50 percent of Arkia and was deeply suspicious of privatization. He would need inside help. And it so happened that one of Arik’s closest childhood friends, Moisheleh Bankover, was now the Histadrut official in charge of negotiations. Arik and Moisheleh had studied together in kibbutz boarding school, they’d been drafted together, their military numbers were separated by a single digit, they had gone through officers training together.
Arik told Moisheleh he intended to give employees a 25 percent share of Arkia.
The deal was signed in December 1979. Kanaf-Arkia paid $1.5 million for 75 percent ownership of Arkia, along with assuming Arkia’s $3.5 million debt. Employees were granted the remaining stock. Arik became CEO, and his partner, Dadi Borowitz, deputy. Horowitz raised a toast on shot glasses of brandy. What a country, thought Arik. Thanks to the sale of twenty cows, he was being given the chance to help modernize the Israeli economy.
“SHALOM, MY NAME IS ARIK and I’m the new CEO of Arkia.”
Several hundred employees were assembled in a hall in Ben-Gurion Airport. Arik’s appearance was meant to emphasize his direct style: unlike the previous CEO, who wore a jacket and tie, Arik wore jeans and a plaid shirt.
“My philosophy is simple,” he explained. “A company has the right to earn a profit. Employees have the right to honorable wages and fair advancement in reward for productivity. I see two legitimate options for employees: one, to work by the book; two, to strike. Sanctions, slowdowns, are the cancer of the Israeli labor force. For me, sanctions are not legitimate, because you aren’t fulfilling your responsibilities but you’re still getting paid as if you were.”
He stood feet apart, half smile anticipating the test of combat.
“Don’t try to educate us,” a woman called out.
Arik stared at her for what seemed like a very long time. You people don’t have a clue who you’re dealing with—
Finally he said, “You had better forget everything you think you knew until now. And whoever can’t adjust should forget about working for me.”
Arik approached his new mission just as he had planned his military missions: flexible in tactics, fixed on goal. Ruthless if necessary, generous when possible. He readily accepted the Histadrut’s insistence on collective agreement with the ground workers, and granted longer vacations and salary increases to diligent employees.
“ARIK, YOU’RE GOING TOO FAR,” complained one of his partners. “You’re acting like a kibbutznik.”
“Base salaries will be determined by what the company can afford,” Arik replied. “But what matters to a worker isn’t only how much money he makes but whether he feels he is treated fairly.”
Arik exchanged his predecessor’s big office for a small adjacent room, and in place of the CEO’s Volvo continued to drive his old Fiat. He took a substantial pay cut, earning half the average Israeli CEO’s salary. (He was compensated with shares: he owned 7 percent of the company.)
In case anyone in Arkia hadn’t yet gotten the message that the era of status symbols was over, Arik moved the company from central Tel Aviv to modest quarters at Sde Dov, a small airfield near Tel Aviv. He bought several mobile homes from an evacuated Israeli base in Sinai and set those up as his headquarters, just like the mobile homes settlers were moving onto West Bank hilltops. For Arik, too, Israel was a kind of construction site, a work in progress.
Arik routinely left the office past 10:00 p.m. You stay as long as you need to, he told the managers. Some revered him, some detested him. In the end he knew there was only one group of people he could trust: the hevreh from the 55th Brigade. And so he brought in Fuchsy, the brigade’s operations officer during the Yom Kippur War, to head Arkia’s planning. And he appointed as company driver Papino, who’d been wounded in 1967 and adopted by Arik through his convalescence. And Yoske Balagan to head building maintenance. The paratroopers spoke about the Arkia staff as “the fighting family,” and getting the job done as “fulfilling a mission.”
In a flattering newspaper profile of the new Arkia, Yoske described the tensions between Arkia’s old-timers and the boys from the 55th: “They ask me, ‘Why do you work late at night when you don’t get paid for extra hours?’ The [work ethic] of ‘this idiot’ gets them angry. But what do they want? . . . I come from a different world, a world in which you have to give.”
ONE BY ONE, Arik invited the pilots in for a chat. The most pampered among Arkia’s employees, pilots evoked in Arik little of his sympathy for workers’ rights. They had all the arrogance of the combat pilots they’d once been, expecting to be treated as a savior elite. Though the company had use for no more than fifty pilots, it was paying the salaries of seventy. They received three times their regular pay for overtime, got paid from the moment they left their homes for work, and were granted extravagant compensation for every minute of delay in takeoff, even when they were initiating sanctions and responsible for the delay.
Arik’s goal was to dismantle that caste of privilege, replacing the pilots’ collective contract with individual contracts. He needed to wait for the right moment, catch them off guard, look for the breach in their defenses.
His immediate goal was laying off twenty pilots. That turned out to be the easy part: the Histadrut agreed that Arkia would collapse without the layoffs. “The rules of the game are changing,” Arik told a meeting with the pilots’ representatives. “But we’ll decide on the new rules together, through negotiations.” Until the time came for confrontation.
TWICE A WEEK, Arik left work early for his other job. He stopped at home, exchanged jeans and sandals for IDF uniform and red boots, and drove an hour north to a base near Haifa. After two decades in the paratroopers, Arik had been entrusted with founding and commanding a logistics brigade, whose task during war would be to supply an armored division with shells and fuel and food, as well as create first-aid stations. Arik, now a colonel, commanded two thousand reservists—drivers, mechanics, doctors—maintaining hundreds of trucks and armored vehicles and storerooms with thousands of tons of ammunition.
As much as possible, Arik sought to integrate the units under his command. One unit, for example, was entrusted with removing bodies from destroyed tanks, a task that included not only retrieving body parts but also scraping pieces of skin from a tank’s charred innards—because Jewish law, honored by the IDF, insists on the dignity of burial for any bodily remains. Arik paired the body-retrieval squad with the medical unit, so that the dead could be quickly identified.
Moving back and forth between Arkia and the IDF felt seamless to Arik. Both tasks required commanding large organizations that provided services—in one instance to airline passengers, in the other to combat soldiers. Both systems needed to be at their peak performance, meeting nonnegotiable deadlines and ready for emergency.
Arik relished the daily test of his competence, his steadiness under pressure. His creativity was expressed by infusing cumbersome organizations with flexibility. He regarded the reservists under his command as “employees,” and in a sense he regarded Arkia’s employees as soldiers in an elite unit. If he often acted like an army commander in running Arkia, he often acted, too, like a CEO in running the brigade. Any soldier could approach him with a complaint or a suggestion. When someone addressed him as “commander,” he corrected: “My name is Arik.”
BETWEEN HIS WORK in Arkia and his enhanced responsibilities in the army, there were days that Yehudit didn’t see Arik at all. Yehudit herself was working full-time—her therapy practice was thriving—and running the household. But Yehudit complained only when Arik spoke brusquely to the children.
The Achmons took out a large mortgage and built a house in North Tel Aviv. The area had become transformed from their student days into a center of the Israeli elite. The one-story house was modest, certainly compared to those of their neighbors, some of whom installed marble bathrooms. Arik owned a single suit, which he saved for travel abroad. He and Yehudit rarely vacationed; their children joked that, for all of Arik’s access to free airline tickets, he was like a monkey without teeth, unable to eat peanuts.
The focus of admiring profiles in the business sections of the newspapers, Arik never felt more fulfilled. The newspaper photographs showed a handsome man in his late forties with thin lips and receding hairline exposing an implacable forehead. Yet his raised eyebrows exposed an involuntary tenderness, as though he were still capable of being surprised by the world, a naïveté disconcerting in a face so single-minded it could be mistaken for ruthlessness.
He would have laughed at the notion that he—of all people!—was capable of naïveté. He knew his strengths and weaknesses: not the most empathic person, but ready to go through fire for a friend. He wasn’t nice, but he was good. True, he had a healthy opinion of himself. And why not? Everything he touched succeeded.
ARIK AND HIS PARTNER, Dadi, began turning a profit. Where Arik was precise, scrupulous, Dadi was reckless, grand. Dadi’s expertise was buying and selling planes, and his sense of timing seemed impeccable.
Dadi had always wanted to be a paratrooper. And so Arik had brought him into the 55th Brigade as a quartermaster.
“You can’t trust Dadi,” Yehudit warned Arik. “He doesn’t think twice about lying when it’s useful to him. And the time will come when he will lie to you too.”
“Dadi?” Arik said, laughing. “He idolizes me.”
“Arik, be careful.”
OPERATION SELF-SACRIFICE
ON A BITTER-COLD NIGHT in the Etzion Bloc, with the wind repeatedly knocking out the generator-powered electricity, Yisrael Harel stood before the leaders of the settlement movement gathered in emergency session and summoned all the gravitas his mournful face could manage.
There can be no settlement without land, Yisrael explained. Yet the settlements were being choked for lack of land on which to grow. Ofra had been allocated a ludicrous few hundred dunams—how could it hope to absorb the dozens of families on its waiting list? The Likud government wanted to create a law that would turn all non–privately owned land in the territories into state lands on which settlements could be expanded, but Begin feared the Americans. If the land issue wasn’t resolved, and Palestinian autonomy declared, then a PLO state, God forbid, would emerge in Judea and Samaria.
Yisrael didn’t mention the complexity of the state land issue. Many Arabs who couldn’t produce a deed still claimed land their families had worked for generations. The Supreme Court had already uprooted one settlement rising on contested land. Yisrael believed in Arab-Jewish coexistence; yet settlement expansion would intensify Palestinian fears and resentments. Still, weighed against the threat of a PLO state, that risk was unavoidable.
Here, then, said Yisrael, was the plan: We will launch an open-ended hunger strike until the government agrees to turn much of the West Bank into state land.
There was unease in the room. Yisrael was asking them to protest against the most pro-settlement government since 1967. What would the public think?
“Everyone [in the government] agrees with us, everyone tells us how right we are, and nothing is being done,” said a leader of the Gaza settlements. “That’s why I plan to fast.”
“I’m already hungry,” said another Gaza settler. “But, seriously, I’m afraid it won’t work. . . . We need to disrupt the public order. Tomorrow I can close the entire [Gaza] Strip. Five, six truckloads of tomatoes spilled on the road, and there’s no construction work in Tel Aviv.” Palestinian laborers would be blocked from reaching their jobs in Israel.
“At sixty liras a kilo?” someone said in mock horror at wasting expensive tomatoes.
“A hunger strike is the last resort before a violent struggle breaks out, and I’m afraid that will happen,” said a representative from a settlement in Samaria.
Someone recalled that during a visit to the Etzion Bloc, Yitzhak Rabin had once expressed support for its return to Jordan: “Rabin said that he didn’t mind visiting this place with a visa. How is it that he didn’t leave on a stretcher?”
“Under no circumstances will we be dragged into acts of violence,” said Yisrael.
YISRAEL AND FIVE other men set up a big tent across from the prime minister’s office, laid mattresses on the ground, and declared a hunger strike. “Stop Strangling the Settlements,” read one banner.
The strikers consumed only water, and on Shabbat, fruit juice. Operation Self-Sacrifice, they called it. A fellow faster said to Yisrael, “It may turn out to be a fast to the death.” “It won’t come to that,” Yisrael reassured him. “They won’t let us die outside Begin’s door.”
Begin sent his bureau chief to plead with the hunger strikers to end their fast and invited them to meet with the prime minister. Yisrael refused. “We’re not interested in more promises,” he said. His elderly parents also came to plead, but halfheartedly: they’d never had influence over him. Sarah tried another approach: “How will you be able to lead the struggle without strength?” “If I eat,” Yisrael replied, “I won’t be the leader of the struggle.”
A week into the strike, the fasters agreed to meet with Begin. Yisrael insisted on entering the prime minister’s office without assistance.
“Stop this hunger strike,” Begin half demanded, half pleaded. “You’re breaking my heart.”
“You promised us there would be many more [settlements],” said Yisrael. “Why aren’t you fulfilling this promise?”
“I gave my word to the Egyptians and to Carter,” replied Begin.
“You keep your promises to the goyim. But not to your own voters.”
“Until this man apologizes,” Begin said to an aide, “I’m not continuing,” and left the room.
“How can you speak that way to the prime minister?” a fellow striker berated Yisrael.
“I spoke the truth,” Yisrael insisted. “I have nothing to apologize for.”
Begin returned, and the meeting resumed. It ended without agreement.
The hunger strike continued into its second, then its third week. The big tent was surrounded by little tents: dozens joined the fast. Thousands came to show support.
On the fourth week, the hunger strikers permitted themselves soup.
Hanan Porat appeared and began making a speech about faith and redemption. Yisrael cut him off. “Hanan,” he said, annoyed, “this group doesn’t need ideological inspiration.” Hanan offered to speak to Begin on the group’s behalf; Yisrael told him his intervention wasn’t necessary.
In fact Yisrael saw his fellow hunger strikers—most of them pragmatic young men who headed local settlement councils—as the nucleus for a new kind of settlement leadership, more mainstream, less mystical, than Gush Emunim. When this was over, he intended to form an umbrella council of settlements—expand the settlement leadership beyond Hanan and his friends.
As a result of the prolonged fasting, Yisrael experienced heightened clarity. He handled media, met with government representatives and well-wishers, and even continued editing Nekudah from the tent. Liberated from dependence on food, he felt exhilarated, seemed to intuit exactly the right response to every problem.
On the forty-fourth day, an emissary from Begin appeared with an offer: the government would set up a committee, to be chaired by Ariel Sharon, to find legal solutions to the land dilemma.
“It’s a trick,” a striker warned; “they’ll bury us in committee.” Yisrael disagreed: “It will be a committee with our supporters, most of all Sharon. Besides, you have to know when to stop. People are going to start giving out. This is the right moment.”
The hunger strike ended the next day. It was the eve of Shabbat. On the door of the Harel home hung a sign prepared by Yisrael’s children: “Welcome Home, Abba!” Yisrael, pale and gaunt, staggered into the bedroom and collapsed.
HE HAD BARELY SLEPT a few hours when he was awakened by an urgent knock on the door. Standing outside was a fellow hunger striker and one of the few secular Jews among the leaders of Gush Emunim. He had driven from his home in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, with terrible news. Six settlers were dead, many more wounded, in a terrorist ambush on a group of Jewish worshippers in Hebron. They had left the Tomb of the Patriarchs after Friday-night prayers. The ambush occurred outside Hadassah House, where Avital Geva had burned the calves’ heads a year earlier.
Nothing, Yisrael knew, would be harder for his community to tolerate than the murder of Jews in Hebron—a new Hebron massacre, evoking the victims of the 1929 pogrom.
The next morning, after restless prayers, the entire Ofra community crowded into the settlement’s clubroom. On the wall hung a relief map of the land of Israel. Summoning all his strength just to stand before them, Yisrael offered a military-style briefing. “It happened after prayers,” he said, deliberately laconic. “Several terrorists stood on the roof, opposite Hadassah House, and fired into the hevreh with Kalashnikovs and grenades.”
Despite our outrage, Yisrael continued, we must refrain from vigilante violence and allow the army to work. Those who want to do something constructive should work toward preventing the withdrawal from Sinai. “Every one of us will have to take some role in the public effort. At least something. Look, I’ve taken a leave without pay from my work in Yediot Aharonot.”
Someone called out, “It seems to me that there are more than enough big shots circulating among us with official cars and walkie-talkies.” Who did Yisrael think he was, presuming to be their leader?
There it was again, that old accusation Yisrael had heard as a young man. All his rage against those who had confused his passion for the Jewish people for self-aggrandizement focused now on this heckler. “So you found someone to blame,” Yisrael said sarcastically. “Really, I don’t have the strength to argue with you. I’m simply exhausted. . . . I’m amazed at how people who barely came to support us, people who continued going to work every morning, people who did nothing—how they dare at a time like this to criticize us. Chutzpah!”
A friend tried to calm him: “Congratulations for the hunger strike, but I don’t think you know what every person here does for the community. I ask that every one of us engage in self-examination, not in examining his friend.”
THE NEAR-SIMULTANEOUS EXPLOSIONS that wounded two Palestinian mayors and targeted a third happened on the thirtieth day following the massacre in Hebron, and that was the first clue that Jews were behind the attacks: thirty days marks the end of a phase of the Jewish mourning period. The attacks happened within half an hour of each other, and in the same way: bombs detonated when the mayors turned on the ignition of their cars. One man lost both legs, another a foot: whoever had done this knew exactly how much explosive was needed to maim rather than kill. A third mayor was spared when an Israel Police sapper tried to detonate a bomb attached to the garage of the mayor’s home; the bomb blew up in the sapper’s face, blinding him. The three mayors had apparently been targeted because they had supported attacks against settlers. The crippled mayors were to be a living warning.
The attacks were the work of Yehudah Etzion and his friends in the underground. Following the Hebron massacre, they’d decided to temporarily divert their attention from the Temple Mount. Yehudah, though, had been ambivalent: He helped coordinate the attacks but decided not to take part personally, fearful of getting arrested and destroying his plan.
The bombings were denounced by Prime Minister Begin, by Orthodox Knesset members, by the country’s chief rabbis. Among settlers, though, there was little outrage; many supported the attacks outright. In Ofra some said with knowing smiles, It’s the Shin Bet; who else could be so professional?
For Yoel, usurping the authority of the government of Israel was to challenge divine authority. Writing in his diary, he described the attackers as “Sabbateans,” followers of a false messiah.
Yisrael Harel suspected that the attackers might be Arabs trying to discredit the settlement movement. “It isn’t reasonable that Jewish hands committed these acts,” he wrote in Nekudah. “And even less reasonable [to assume] that Jewish residents of this region were involved in the incident. All that [settlers] want is for these parts of the homeland, the heart of the land of Israel, to be under the laws of Israel and part of the state of Israel. If so, isn’t it twisted to undermine the rule of law?”
On Nekudah’s cover was the headline “Who Harmed Coexistence?” Yisrael meant coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Along with that question appeared a photograph of an old Arab man wearing a kaffiyeh in animated conversation with a young Jewish man in sandals and knitted kippah. The young man was Yehudah Etzion.
YISRAEL HAREL, CEO OF JUDEA AND SAMARIA
EVERY FEW DAYS, Yisrael visited another settlement. He drove on dirt roads and on fresh asphalt to shaved patches of hill surrounded by ancient terraces. Some communities consisted wholly of rows of mobile homes; in others, rows of small houses with red roofs. Like a lost mythical land, Judea and Samaria was resurfacing. Yisrael was a practical man, concerned with organizational structures and political debates, but there were times when he felt overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape and the poetry of the historical moment.
The purpose of his travels was to convince settlers to support an umbrella council of settlements. And the message he conveyed at meetings was as usual grim. True, he said, the hunger strike had been successful. The government was releasing more land, and settlements were being built again—there were now over three dozen in the West Bank and Gaza. But the permanence of those communities couldn’t be taken for granted. What the government intended to do to the settlements in Sinai, it could one day decide to do to the settlements of Judea and Samaria.
The solution, concluded Yisrael, was unity: “We need an organization to represent us, just like the kibbutzim.” Each kibbutz, he explained, sent delegates to its federation, entrusted with deciding the movement’s practical and ideological direction.
Yisrael spoke of ensuring that the needs of settlers became part of the government bureaucracy, not granted as political largesse: “We pay national health insurance just like other citizens of the state of Israel, but we have to fight the bureaucracy to get benefits. Every year we have to fight the Education Ministry to build new classrooms. Our needs should be a natural part of the ministries’ budgets.”
It wasn’t easy convincing the settlers to unify. There were austere kibbutzniks farming in the Jordan Valley desert and “quality of life” settlers living in West Bank suburbs, working-class Sephardim trying to move into the middle class and middle-class Ashkenazim trying to become pioneers. And each group had its own reservations about joining Yisrael’s proposed council.
At a meeting in Kfar Etzion, the Orthodox kibbutz that was the first West Bank settlement, a member said to Yisrael, “There is a national consensus supporting [the existence of] Kfar Etzion. But if we join the council, and the government decides to dismantle Kedumim [a new settlement in Samaria], we would be forced to support Kedumim.”
Yisrael could hardly restrain himself. “If there won’t be Kedumim, there won’t be Kfar Etzion,” he said. “It pains me that I have to debate a pioneer in his own house. But I don’t see how I can establish the council without the kibbutzim among us taking a leading role.” Kfar Etzion voted to join the council.
In the Jordan Valley, Yisrael reassured the secular kibbutzniks that the council would not be a front for the messianists of Gush Emunim. In Kiryat Arba, the settlement near Hebron, he reassured the messianists that he had no intention of displacing Gush Emunim. “I’m not trying to fill the shoes of Rabbi Levinger and Hanan Porat,” he said. “I don’t have the charisma. But I can compensate with organizational skills.”
Not that he wanted to exclude Gush Emunim, far from it: the messianists, with their capacity for self-sacrifice, were essential to the settlement movement. Moreover, Yisrael was a democrat: the council needed to contain all facets of the movement. Yisrael believed he could control the messianists, tame their excesses, and harness their fervor for the movement, just as utopian fantasies had helped the socialist pioneers overcome impossible obstacles. Far better those who erred in overzealousness than the bourgeois Orthodox Jews Yisrael had grown up with, decent people who would never change history.
THE STAGE WAS SET with a fan of Israeli flags, a harp, and photographs of Theodor Herzl and Rabbi Kook. The Samaria Girls’ Choir sang an old pioneering song, extolling the spade and the hoe that together turn the land into “green flame.” Aside from the photograph of Rabbi Kook, it could have been the setting for a convention of kibbutzim. A member of a veteran kibbutz who’d come to show solidarity told Yisrael, “Only here are these songs still sung.”
In the end, most of the settlements sent representatives to the founding meeting of the settlers’ council. The rules were determined by Yisrael. Decisions would be made by consensus. Along with official delegates he invited as nonvoting delegates “men of the spirit, who are essential for an ideological movement”—rabbis and intellectuals, including Yoel Bin-Nun.
Almost all the delegates were male and—despite Yisrael’s hope for broader secular representation—Orthodox. They could have been divided into two categories: the “beards” and the “mustaches.” The “beards” were Kookians, messianists. They wore big knitted kippot and white shirts and laced black shoes in winter and sandals with socks in summer. The “mustaches” tended to be more nationalist than devout, “religious” an adjective that described their Zionist identity, and redemption more self-generated than divinely imposed. They wore compact knitted kippot and jeans and kibbutz-style work shirts and work boots in winter and sandals without socks in summer. Yoel was closer to the beards, Yisrael to the mustaches (though he himself didn’t have one).
Yisrael was unanimously elected chairman. No one was more capable of connecting the settlers to the political and military establishments than Yisrael Harel. Among settler leaders, he was the most worldly. The others knew how to organize settlement groups, evade army roadblocks; Yisrael knew how to make important contacts. His work in the media, in the Movement for the Complete Land of Israel, in the paratrooper association, had connected him with the secular elites in a way that few Orthodox Jews had achieved.
The council’s closing proclamation reflected its desperate optimism, affirming the goal of annexing Judea and Samaria but warning that any other alternative—whether the Labor Party’s vision of dividing the territories with Jordan or the Likud’s vision of autonomy for Palestinians—would endanger Israel’s survival. “Any foreign administration will necessarily lead to an independent Arab Palestinian state in the land of Israel, and threaten the existence of the people of Israel in its land.”
The settlers called their new organization the Yesha Council. Yesha was the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. By happy coincidence, the word yesha also meant “salvation.”
YISRAEL AND ARIK SURVEY THE LAND
YISRAEL HAREL STOOD on the empty hill and pointed to the hill across the valley, busy with bulldozers and cranes. Beside him stood Arik and Yehudit Achmon. Yisrael was taking his friends on a private tour of the landscape he was helping transform. On that hill, Yisrael said, an agricultural settlement is being built. Over there, an ultra-Orthodox town. And on that third hill, an upscale community of private homes. The land lay open, pristine and beckoning. “Look around you,” continued Yisrael, “everything is empty. There is enough room to settle without dispossessing anyone.”
Hands on hips, Arik slipped into the posture of a military briefing. Despite himself, he was impressed. Yisrael and his friends had figured out how to overcome the limited pool of religious Zionists and entice whole sectors of the Israeli public to the settlements. You want a big house with a garden for the price of an apartment on the coastal plain? Nofim is the place for you. You want to live in an ultra-Orthodox ghetto, complete with built-in sukkah on the porch? Come to Emanuel.
“As you can see, there are no Arab villages in sight,” Yisrael said.
Nu, really, Srulik: that’s your answer to the demographic problem?
You and I, Arik thought, represent opposite visions of Israel. With Arkia, Arik was trying to extract Israel from an outmoded socialist ideology and create a rational and efficient economy, connect Israel with the world through new air routes, create, in other words, a normal country—goals threatened by the settlements. Yisrael’s outmoded pioneering ideology was building the anti-normal Israel, a Jewish ghetto that would be an outcast among the nations.
Arik detested the settlements as mimickry of the kibbutzim, the real expression of pioneering Zionism. When his parents and their friends built Givat Brenner, they had been on their own. But for the settlers, no amount of IDF protection was ever enough.
Here in this romantic landscape, thought Arik, was rising the greatest mistake in the history of Israel.
“Tell your father that I’m inviting him on a tour of the settlements,” Yisrael said to Yehudit, referring to Hazan. “I promise to keep it discreet.”
Sure, she thought. As if anything in this country was ever discreet.
They drove to the nearby settlement of Kedumim. Yisrael introduced Arik and Yehudit to one of the movement’s rising stars, a woman in a tight kerchief and tight smile named Daniella Weiss. “We’ve won on every front,” she told her Tel Aviv guests. “Except for one: We haven’t yet managed to convince people like you. That will come, of course, the more everyone realizes we’ve reached the point of no return.”
In the car on the way home, Yehudit said, “Did you notice that she didn’t look us in the eye? She kept staring over our heads.”
“Of course,” said Arik; “she doesn’t want to lose eye contact with God.”