“BEGIN, KING OF ISRAEL”
IT WAS AN early-summer evening in 1981, and Independence Park was filled with celebrants—old women in housecoats and slippers, workmen in undershirts with children on their shoulders. They were mostly Sephardi Jews, and they had come from Jerusalem’s forgotten neighborhoods to celebrate their newfound assertiveness, and to give thanks to the man who had helped them find their voice, Menachem Begin.
Toward the front of the crowd young men held each other by the waist and sang “Begin, King of Israel,” substituting the prime minister for King David in the old song. On a stage a banner proclaimed, “Peace, Security—Likud.”
Prime Minister Begin appeared, and the crowd roared. Braced by aides, Begin slowly mounted the three small steps of the stage. “Say ‘Shalom’ to Menachem Begin,” a Yemenite Jew with side locks told his young son. “Shalom,” said the child, laughing.
It was Israel’s tenth and most traumatic national election campaign. With the economy in disarray, the Labor Party was leading in the polls. The prospect of a return to power of the party that symbolized Ashkenazi paternalism had roused a Sephardi revolt. It felt like the beginning of a civil war. Local Labor Party headquarters were vandalized; Likud supporters attacked Labor supporters on the street.
“Brothers and sisters,” Begin began, and the the crowd cheered. Brothers and sisters! Labor leaders had rarely addressed them so intimately. They were the wrong kind of Israelis—their music ignored on the radio, their history not taught in schools, their guttural Hebrew mocked. The universities were filled with Ashkenazim, the prisons with Sephardim. In one sense it was a typical story of immigrant dislocation, but there was this unique anguish: the very religious faith that was the core of Sephardi identity and had inspired their return home had excluded them from Labor’s Israel, from being truly welcomed home.
Labor had wanted, at least in principle, to absorb Sephardim into Israeli society. But Labor had been impeded by its dream of creating a new Jew, secular and socialist. By contrast, Begin’s only expectation of Zionism’s “new Jew” was that he learned how to defend himself. Sephardi, Ashkenazi, religious, secular—Begin couldn’t care less. And so Sephardim loved this Polish Jew who kissed the hands of women and lectured foreign leaders about the Holocaust, because he loved Sephardim for who they were.
“Saddam Hussein calls on the world to help Iraq build atom bombs,” Begin continued, referring to the Israeli air strike two weeks earlier that had destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. “We’ll let Saddam Hussein build atom bombs—”
“Be-gin! Be-GIN!” Hands waved and teenage boys leaped, but most of all there was laughter, sheer pleasure in Begin’s understated Jewish irony.
“When I was a prisoner in Siberia,” said Begin, and he was again interrupted by chants. “Please, children—” He turned to the row of young men up front, and they instantly quieted to hear his memories of exile. In recounting these stories, Begin was telling the crowd that Israelis were not some new creature divorced from Jewish history. We were Jews first, Israelis second.
“LISTEN TO THEM,” Arik Achmon said to Yehudit. “They can’t even denounce us in proper Hebrew. A-smol”—duh left.
Even as a capitalist Arik remained a man of the left, by temperament, voting habit, commitment to social justice. But he was also an Israeli of the left in his sense of entitlement; and the Likud supporters were, as far as he was concerned, upstarts and ingrates. Who had built this country if not left-wing Ashkenazim? Who had suffered and fought and died so that the immigrants could have a home to come to?
However repulsive to Arik, the election campaign turned out to be good for Arkia. A new and reckless Likud finance minister, Yoram Aridor, had replaced the cautious Yigal Horowitz and sought to woo voters by reducing taxes on imported videos and color TVs (even though the country’s only TV station was still in black and white). The Likud was interested in keeping down prices before elections—no simple matter, given the triple-digit inflation rate—and that included Arkia’s flights to the southern town of Eilat, the most popular Israeli vacation destination.
A phone call to Arik from the transportation ministry: What will it take to keep you from raising prices?
A license for charters to Europe, Arik replied.
The ministry promptly granted Arkia charter flights to Paris, London, and Frankfurt, breaking El Al’s monopoly on Israeli flights abroad. “Out-and-out election bribery,” Arik called it, with the grim satisfaction of someone who was learning to master a game he despised.
AT A LABOR PARTY rally in Tel Aviv’s municipality square, a comedian named Dudu Topaz mocked Likud voters as second-rate soldiers, “doing guard duty if they serve at all,” while Labor voters served as pilots and commandos. He called Likudniks chah-chahim, greasers. Everyone knew which ethnic group he meant.
The next night, the Likud held a rally in the same square. Voice quivering, Begin cited the chah-chahim slur. “Until this morning I had never heard the word ‘chah-chahim’ and didn’t know what it meant.” In the underground struggle against the British, he continued, we made no distinctions between Jews. “When that—what’s his name—Dudu To-paz—made his evil comments, the whole crowd that stood here yesterday cheered. Now let me tell Dudu To-paz about whom he [dared] speak. Our Sephardim were heroic fighters”—like the two captured underground members who blew themselves up with a smuggled grenade rather than allow the British to hang them. “Ashkenazis? Iraqis? Jews!”
Begin continued: “Yesterday, in this place, there were many red flags. Today there are many blue-and-white flags. That is the moral difference, the historic and ideological difference, between us and the socialist Labor Party. They still haven’t learned what the red flag symbolizes in our time. . . . This is the flag of hatred of Israel and of arming the enemies of Israel who surround us. This is the flag of oppression of the [Soviet] Jews and suppression of Hebrew. This is the flag of the Gulag. . . . And this is the flag that was flown yesterday by those who were brought here from all the corners of the land by buses and by the trucks of the kibbutzim.”
THROWN ON HEAVEN’S MERCY
MENACHEM BEGIN WAS narrowly reelected.
In a radio interview on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, Begin repeated his election-eve attack on the kibbutzim. Referring to a TV news clip that showed a kibbutznik beside a swimming pool, Begin contemptously compared him to “some American millionaire.” “Millionaire kibbutzniks with swimming pools” entered the Israeli lexicon.
Avital Geva was beside himself. The most frugal, the most devoted workers in Israel: millionaires with swimming pools? Yes, Mr. Begin, Ein Shemer has a swimming pool, and let me tell you how it came to be built. The year was 1946. Our parents, who had left their homes in prewar Poland to build Ein Shemer, were grieving the destruction of the world they had left behind, cut adrift in the new world they were trying to create. Then someone had an idea: Let’s do something that will give us and our children a sign of faith in the future. How about a swimming pool? It seems silly, I know: a swimming pool as their answer to destruction. But they were modest people, our parents, and a swimming pool offered a measure of comfort in this harsh land they were trying to tame.
But there was no money for a swimming pool, Mr. Begin. And so the kibbutzniks took jobs after a day’s work in the fields, to pay for construction material. And they built the pool themselves, without hired labor.
And now, Mr. Begin, you want to destroy the kibbutzniks with ridicule, with demonization. What will be left in this country if you turn these good people into parasites?
ON POSTERS ALONG the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem highway, on banners hanging from porches, a nightmare image spread: a map of Israel and of the Sinai Desert covered with black diagonal lines, symbolizing the dismantling of the country by stages. First Yamit and the other settlements in Sinai, then the settlements in Gaza, then the settlements in Judea and Samaria, followed by the Galilee and the Negev. There would be no end to Arab territorial demands because the issue wasn’t the borders of a Jewish state but its existence.
According to the timetable of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Sinai peninsula was to be returned to Egypt in April 1982, in ten months’ time. Begin appointed Ariel Sharon as minister of defense, and entrusted him with overseeing the evacuation, including the uprooting of Sinai’s settlements.
Hurban, opponents of withdrawal were calling it. Hurban was the most dreaded word in the Hebrew language: literally “destruction,” but more than physical ruin. Hurban meant the destruction of the Temple, the exile of the Divine Presence. And this hurban would be self-inflicted. It was a repudiation of the gift of the Six Days, a setback to the redemption process, a rebellion against the will of heaven. A spiritual tragedy that called for a spiritual response.
YOEL BIN-NUN WAS late as usual. It was just past dawn on Rosh Hashanah, and for the past hour Yehudah Etzion had been waiting for his friend in Ofra’s prefab synagogue. Yehudah should have known: Yoel inhabited another time zone, perhaps another era. But how could he be late for this?
They were planning to tear open the gates of heaven, throw themselves on God’s mercy, and appeal for a reprieve from the coming withdrawal. At Yehudah’s urging, Yoel had agreed to revive an ancient tradition: blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah at sunrise, a practice halted during the Roman occupation because Jews feared the Romans would mistake it for a call to war. Sunrise had now passed. But if Yoel showed up soon they could still manage to preempt the morning worshippers and perform their desperate ritual.
Yoel appeared, without apology. The two young men covered their heads in prayer shawls and approached the Ark. The synagogue filled with early morning light.
They retrieved a Torah scroll and unrolled it to the story of the binding of Isaac, which is read on Rosh Hashanah morning and invokes a last-minute reprieve. Yoel sang the words in his deep voice. “And it came to pass, after these things, that God did test Abraham, and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am.”
Yehudah produced a shofar, a ram’s horn, recalling the ram sacrificed in place of Isaac. He blew the shofar, thirty strong and distinct blasts, some staccato, some prolonged.
“The fate of the Sinai settlements hangs on the scale of judgment,” Yoel said. “If there is a moment where they can be saved by heaven, it is now.”
TWO DAYS AFTER Rosh Hashanah, on October 6, at the annual parade in Cairo celebrating the Egyptian attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, Islamic fundamentalists assassinated Anwar Sadat.
In Ofra, the news was greeted as miraculous: The Protector of Israel has saved us from ourselves. That night, in Ofra’s synagogue, worshippers recited a psalm thanking God for destroying enemies: “God of Vengeance, repay the arrogant in kind.”
Word of the Rosh Hashanah shofar blowing had gotten around, and some regarded Yoel with awe, as though he had manipulated heaven. “Here I am, trying to create a movement to stop the withdrawal,” a neighbor said to him, “and you blow shofar and everything is reversed.”
“It’s not because we blew the shofar,” insisted Yoel, perhaps fearing to take responsibility for an act of heaven.
That night Yoel walked in downtown Jerusalem. He looked at the faces around him and saw anxiety. What would happen to Israel now? Would the peace with Egypt hold?
The dissonance between Ofra and Jerusalem: here Sadat’s death was seen not as reprieve but as threat. And if this was the attitude in right-wing Jerusalem, what must they be thinking in Tel Aviv?
Back in Ofra, Yoel said, “We’re living in a fantasy world. The people want this peace. We’re alone.”
A FAREWELL TO SINAI
EARLY ONE MORNING in February 1982, Eldad Harel, almost eighteen, eldest son of Yisrael and Sarah, left the yeshiva where he was studying and hitched a ride south, toward Sinai. He carried a khaki knapsack, a sleeping bag, and a Kalashnikov, borrowed from Ofra’s arsenal. Accompanying him was a friend named Dudi, who wore an Egyptian army coat his father had brought back from Sinai in the Six-Day War.
For both boys, this was a last fling before the army. It was also a farewell to Sinai, which Israel was scheduled to return to Egypt in two months, unless Eldad’s father and his friends succeeded in preventing the government from withdrawing. Neither Eldad nor Dudi told their parents that they were leaving yeshiva without permission and planning to hike through Sinai in the middle of winter. Why worry the parents? We’ll be back by the end of the week, the boys reassured each other; no one will even notice we were gone.
Short but powerful, Eldad would wander, alone, through the Arab villages around Ofra. He often visited a young man in Ein Yabroud, the village just across from his home (though, as Yisrael noted pointedly, those visits were never reciprocated); together they would catch poisonous snakes and sell them to a university laboratory. Eldad would disappear from school for days at a time to rock-climb in the Judean Desert, training to try out for the IDF’s top commando unit. Once, climbing down a cliff, he found himself dangling over a fifty-meter drop without enough rope; friends pulled him back up, and Eldad calmly resumed the climb.
Near Eilat, Eldad and Dudi hitched a ride with an army truck that took them deep into Sinai’s mountain range, near Santa Katerina, said to be the site of Mount Sinai. Where will we sleep? asked Dudi. Right here, said Eldad. It was so cold that Dudi thought they might die of exposure. They built a fire; when it died down, they buried coals in the sand beneath their sleeping bags.
By day, they hiked the remote hills. Aside from a few soldiers and Bedouin, they were alone.
On the last evening of their trek, they came to the southern tip of Sinai, near Sharm el-Sheikh. Total darkness set in. They stood on an unlit road, at an intersection, hoping to hitch a ride back to Eilat.
A semitrailer approached. Eldad stood at the edge of the road, extended his arm, and pointed toward the ground. Dudi stood a few meters behind. The driver, spotting Eldad, came to a stop. Eldad approached the cabin and asked whether he was heading toward Eilat. Sorry, said the driver.
Eldad closed the cabin door and walked toward Dudi. The semitrailer, slowly turning at the intersection, swerved and hit Eldad. The driver didn’t notice that Eldad had fallen, and the massive tires rode over his body.
Dudi rushed toward him. Blood trickled from Eldad’s mouth. “He ran me over,” he managed to say before losing consciousness. Dudi ran after the truck. “Stop!” he shouted. But the driver didn’t hear Dudi’s cries and drove on.
Dudi grabbed Eldad’s Kalashnikov and tried to fire in the air. But the gun jammed.
An army jeep appeared. An ambulance was summoned. Eldad’s pulse weakened. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was dead.
YISRAEL WAS AWAKENED by knocking. It was past midnight, and Yoel was standing at the door.
Yisrael looked at Yoel’s face. “Who?” he asked.
“Eldad.”
“How?” Yisrael managed to ask.
Yoel told him.
“Should I stay?” Yoel asked.
“No need,” said Yisrael.
“No!” Sarah screamed, and then went still.
Yisrael hugged her. They wept together, but quietly, so as not to awaken the other children.
NEIGHBORS FROM OFRA, Sarah’s ultra-Orthodox relatives, paratrooper kibbutzniks wearing handkerchiefs for kippot, gathered together in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, just across the valley from the Temple Mount. Arik Achmon noted Yisrael’s restraint: Srulik is strong—
Black-bordered ads appeared in Nekudah, signed by local settlement councils, repeating the words, “May you be comforted in the building of the land.”
The seven days of mourning were observed at the Harel home. Motta Gur and Ariel Sharon came, along with Knesset members and journalists. Yisrael maintained composure by playing the host. The only time he broke down was before several paratrooper widows whom he had adopted.
Arik arrived with Danny Matt. Arik and Yisrael embraced.
“Tell me what happened, Srulik.” In Arik’s work with the widows, he had learned to avoid empty words of comfort, and focus instead on practicalities: What happened? What do you need?
Yisrael phoned Eldad’s friend, Dudi. Come be with us, he urged. Yisrael wanted to reassure Dudi that the family didn’t blame him.
When Dudi entered the Harels’ crowded salon, Yisrael embraced him. When he left, Yisrael urged, “Keep in touch.”
FROM SAVIOR TO DESTROYER
IN OFRA, IT WAS a year of tragedies. Two other residents were killed in accidents—devastating for an intimate community. Some suspected a flaw among the faithful that had weakened divine protection or even invited judgment. All of Israel was responsible for one another, the saying went—not only for taking care of each other’s needs but literally responsible for each other’s sins. Who, then, had brought disaster on them all?
Someone recalled that Yoel and Yehudah had blown the shofar on Rosh Hashanah morning. Whoever changes the order of shofar blowing, the rabbis had warned, invites disaster on Israel. By what authority had Yoel and Yehudah acted? At one of the funerals, a neighbor said to Yoel, “You and Yehudah blow shofar, and now we go to funerals.”
“What do I know of God’s calculations?” responded Yoel angrily. “I’m not responsible for Sadat’s assassination, and I’m not responsible for this.”
Yisrael Harel reassured him, “Don’t worry, Yoel, I don’t accept this nonsense.”
But Yoel couldn’t be calmed. How dare they! This was superstition of the worst kind. And what did it mean about the cohesiveness of the camp of the faithful if, in time of crisis, some of his neighbors could turn on him?
LEANING INTO A LECTERN, Yoel looked around at his students, the soldiers of the Mount Etzion yeshiva, and spoke about the binding of Isaac. According to most commentators, he noted, God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son was a test of Abraham’s faith. But one commentator, the Rashbam, had a different view. He saw the command as punishment—for Abraham ceding the land of the Philistines to Abimelech, king of Gerar. “‘And God’s anger was raised about this,’” Yoel quoted the commentator, “‘because the land of the Philistines is included in the borders of Israel.’” Concluded Yoel: “You committed your son to a compromise on the land? Now return him to Me.”
Yoel drew the inevitable connection. According to the book of Deuteronomy, he noted, the area of Yamit is included in the borders of Israel. “For the first time in the history of Israel, the government is violating its main purpose: protecting the people and the land.” The government of Israel, the very power intended to fulfill God’s will in history, was abusing its authority to undermine divine will.
A student said he wanted to join protesters planning to barricade themselves inside Yamit. “What does Rabbi Yoel think?” he asked.
“If it were possible to stop the withdrawal by bringing a hundred thousand demonstrators, who would physically prevent it with their bodies? It would be forbidden, my friends.”
Yoel tilted his head and eyed with satisfaction the confused looks of his students. “Because,” he continued, “that would mean violating the authority of the state of Israel. If the state cannot sign international agreements, it will be an empty shell.” Preserving the authority of the state of Israel, even when it sinned, was a divine prerogative.
“Still, I do see value in protesting: to make clear that a part of the people of Israel has no share in this sin. A woman who is raped is permitted to her husband; a woman who acquiesced is forbidden to her husband. We need to say that this is a rape, and that we don’t acquiesce. For the sake of history.”
THOUSANDS OF MOURNERS were pressed together in the quiet side street before the Mercaz yeshiva, bent beneath a heavy rain. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook’s body, wrapped in a black-striped prayer shawl, was held aloft on a stretcher. Loudspeakers carried Psalms in broken voices. “Abba”—father—some mourners called out.
It was Purim, the holiday marking the victory of Israel over its enemies. No one more embodied the spirit of Purim, the promise of a happy ending for the Jews, than Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. Why was his soul being returned to heaven on this of all days? In a little over a month from now the withdrawal from Sinai would be completed. How would his followers endure the brokenness of the land without his militant optimism, his ferocious love for the land of Israel, for every Jew? Perhaps, some speculated, God has taken Rabbi Zvi Yehudah now to spare him from witnessing the imminent uprooting, the beginning of the unraveling of the Six Days. Perhaps, said others, he was taken to appeal in heaven against the hurban.
He was ninety-one years old, and he had suffered. A leg had been amputated—just as a part of the land of Israel was now being amputated. So it was for a tsaddik, a holy man: his being absorbs the travails of Israel.
Standing among the grieving students of Rabbeinu, “our rabbi,” Yoel Bin-Nun felt gratitude and distance. He had learned the way of Jewish wholeness from Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. When the rabbi had grabbed his hand, long ago, at that ultra-Orthodox rally in Jerusalem, he’d transformed Yoel into an unconditional lover of the Jewish people, its sinners no less than its pious, perhaps more than its pious. And when Yoel heard him, on that awesome night in Mercaz, cry out for the severed parts of the land of Israel, the rabbi had bound him to its healing.
Yet in recent years Yoel’s encounters with Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had become frustrating. Yoel had turned to him for guidance in dealing with unimagined complexities: How to act when the government of Israel is opposed to the wholeness of the land of Israel? How to relate to leftist brothers who in their unrealistic but understandable passion for peace were prepared for territorial concessions? Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had responded with the same insights Yoel could recite from memory. The rabbi hadn’t tried to reach out to Yoel, understand how he had grown. He wanted me to stay like the rest of his students, tape recorders quoting Our Rabbi—
Yoel thought back to that night in Hawara, when Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had stood before an IDF officer, opened his coat jacket, and dared him to shoot. Yoel had wept then—upset, he thought, to see his rabbi so agitated. But perhaps he had realized that his trust in his teacher would never be the same, that he was now on his own. Perhaps, glimpsing his future loneliness, Yoel had wept for himself.
“THERE WILL BE NO WITHDRAWAL”
THE SIX-DAY WAR unleashed among Israelis paradoxical longings. Judea and Samaria promised a restored past; Sinai’s vast emptiness promised a limitless future.
Nine thousand Israelis lived in Sinai’s fourteen settlements. Labor governments had built these settlements, most of them farming villages, with national consensus. After all, Israel had fought four wars in Sinai, and the desert offered strategic depth. Unlike the West Bank, there was no demographic problem in Sinai. And the eucalyptus-shaded villages, built on sand, were small miracles, exporting dates and mangoes and roses.
The largest settlement in Sinai was the Mediterranean coastal town of Yamit. The sea was barely a kilometer away from the low, whitewashed houses rising from the dunes. At night, as the town fell silent, residents could hear the waves approaching.
Yamit was to be Israel’s city of the future. Unlike so many Israeli towns, expanded under pressure of immigrant necessity and in seeming contempt of the landscape, Yamit was planned in harmony with its stunning surroundings. Most homes had a view of the sea. Electric wires and cables were underground. Parking was on the periphery; one could walk from one end of town to the other on tree-lined paths without crossing a street. Secular and relaxed, Yamit embodied the Sinai ethos: residents wore bathing suits and walked barefoot in the shopping center.
As the withdrawal date approached, Yamit began to empty. By spring 1982, most residents, along with farmers of the neighboring villages, had accepted government compensation and left. Refugees of peace, they called themselves bitterly. Their places were taken by political squatters, many of them West Bank settlers. Hundreds of Orthodox families moved into emptied apartments. Religious schools were established, along with separate afternoon study groups for men and for women. Yamit was transformed into a devout community, Sinai supplanted by Judea and Samaria.
ESTHER BIN-NUN DIDN’T want to go to Yamit. She was for positive action, not futile protest. But Yoel couldn’t keep away, and Esther had long ago determined that no matter what, the family stays together. And so shortly before Passover, Yoel and Esther and their four children arrived in Yamit. They found an apartment stripped bare; even the light fixtures had been removed. They rolled out sleeping bags and settled in for the holiday.
Yisrael Harel, of course, intended to go to Yamit: the head of the Yesha Council belonged on the front line. But how could he bring the family? Expose their three surviving children—ages fifteen, ten, and seven—to yet another trauma so soon after Eldad’s death?
Sarah was adamant: We are going to Yamit. “We’re a family,” she said. “Whatever we go through, the children will go through.”
EVEN AMONG THE messianists of Gush Emunim, Yisrael Ariel, chief rabbi of Yamit, was regarded as an extravagant dreamer. Ariel saw the Six-Day War’s new borders as merely the first step toward fulfilling the biblical promise of borders stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. He was working on a multivolume atlas that would include all the important sites within that fantasy map.
A former Mercaz student, Ariel—then known as Yisrael Shtiglitz—had fought in Jerusalem with the 55th Brigade. On the morning of June 7, 1967, as the paratroopers were gathering at the Western Wall, he was assigned to help retrieve body parts of the scouts killed outside the Lions’ Gate. Later that same afternoon, Ariel saw a column of prisoners of war. Moving toward him, single file, hands on head. Who were they? He felt a sudden panic: maybe they were Israeli POWs, and the Jordanians had won the war. How could he be sure? For all he knew, the war was lost and Radio Cairo had told the truth: Nasser’s army had conquered Tel Aviv. He would not let them take him alive. He would die fighting, turn the Temple Mount into Masada . . .
Now, as Yamit began to empty and the Six-Day War’s borders constricted, something in Rabbi Ariel broke again. As if his vision of destruction in the Six-Day War hadn’t been hallucination but premonition.
YAMIT’S PROTEST LEADERS argued over tactics. How to stop the approaching withdrawal: With prayer and fasting? Civil disobedience? Violent resistance? Could they really raise a hand against Jewish soldiers?
Hanan Porat was ambiguous about the limits of protest. He spoke of creating a “balance of fear” to prevent withdrawal, but then warned of violence against soldiers. “We must not injure,” he said, “but we are permitted to be injured.”
Hanan was now a Knesset member, for a new right-wing party called Tehiya (Renaissance), founded to stop the withdrawal. But the party had won only three seats in the 1981 election. Yisrael Harel had warned Hanan: “Your strength as a leader is to be above politics. You’ll lose your prestige and effectiveness.” But Hanan was convinced that the new party, which united secular and religious in support of the post–’67 borders, was a spiritual achievement.
Hanan was also convinced that the withdrawal wouldn’t happen. “In another few weeks, hundreds and thousands will come to the Yamit area, to strengthen us,” he said. “With God’s help there will be no withdrawal.” Quoting the rabbis, he added, “‘God’s salvation comes in the blink of an eye.’”
Rabbi Levinger of Hebron delivered a Shabbat sermon in Yamit’s synagogue, urging squatters to be prepared for mesirut nefesh, martyrdom, if necessary.
He’s lost his mind, thought Yoel; he’s telling Jews to commit suicide—
“I don’t want to stay here,” Yoel told Esther afterward. “There could be blood.”
The Bin-Nuns left their bare apartment in Yamit and moved into an abandoned house in a nearby agricultural village.
THE ARMY SEALED the roads leading into Sinai. The thousands of protesters Hanan had promised were now effectively blocked. At most, mere hundreds would be able to slip through. The evacuation was scheduled for April 26, a week after Passover.
A crowd gathered at a roadblock outside Yamit. It was an early spring morning, though in the desert it felt like summer.
A teenager crawled under a police van and tried to puncture a tire; he was caught and dragged into the van. Protesters tried to push past police to retrieve him.
Buses and jeeps appeared, filled with paratroopers. They lined up on the sand.
Rabbi Ariel approached them. “Soldiers! Disobey orders!” he called out. “Don’t allow Jews to be uprooted from their homes in the land of Israel. This is against the Torah.”
The rabbi was arrested for inciting insubordination.
SONG OF THE SEA
MAIL SERVICE AND garbage collection in Yamit were suspended. All stores, except for one grocery, were ordered closed. Then the phone lines were cut.
A song by Naomi Shemer played on the radio, a plea against uprooting a sapling. The song became the anthem of a dying Yamit.
Settlers responded with acts of faith. Yoel wrote a report about a harvest in one of the agricultural settlements. He sent the report via courier to Yisrael Harel, who had briefly returned to Ofra: “Following the first day of Passover . . . the residents of Atzmona [a Sinai settlement], along with many guests, went out to harvest the first melons that were planted three months ago. The harvest will continue with God’s help for another two months. . . . The event ended with singing and dancing. The 60-dunam area will produce, with God’s help, around 250 tons.”
STUDENTS FROM YAMIT’S military yeshiva, arms around each other’s shoulders, led the crowd of religious Jews moving slowly from the center of town into the darkness, toward the sea. A young man bearing a torch, a pillar of fire, walked before them. There were high school students, old people, women with baby carriages. “Israel, trust in God,” they sang.
It was midnight, the seventh day of Passover. The night, according to tradition, when the Red Sea split for the Israelites.
The crowd came to the shore, where the desert met the sea. As waves broke behind him, Rabbi Ariel addressed the faithful. He spoke of the biblical figure, Nachshon Ben-Aminadav, the first to leap into the Red Sea even before it parted: “[Nachshon] plunged into the water without making rational calculations, without considering the security situation. He offered his life, and in his merit the miracle occurred.”
Yisrael Harel, back for Yamit’s last stand, watched teenage girls looking expectantly toward heaven. What would happen to their faith, he wondered, when the bulldozers came?
THE LAST STAND
TALMEI YOSEF, A small agricultural settlement near Yamit, appeared deserted. Its lawns and vegetable gardens had withered; plastic from vanished greenhouses blew across the sand.
A month earlier, Talmei Yosef had been evacuated by the army; even its greenhouses had been dismantled. The families that had built Talmei Yosef had been too traumatized to resist, quietly boarding the IDF buses that drove them into sovereign Israel. There they were taunted by Israelis envious of the financial compensation offered them by the government. Millionaire extortionists, some called them.
As soon as the veterans left, Gush Emunim squatters took their place. And now the squatters were inside the red-roofed houses as the army returned.
The soldiers wore caps, not helmets, and carried no arms. Among the soldiers were young women, assigned to evacuate the female protesters. The soldiers divided into teams and began knocking on doors.
Yoel Bin-Nun had affixed a note to the front door of his borrowed house: “Officer/soldier, Shalom. . . . You are hereby warned that this act constitutes a crime against the people of Israel in its land.”
Yoel’s eight-year-old son, Odeyah—“Odi”—was troubled by the letter. “Abba,” he said, “it’s forbidden to tell soldiers not to do their job.”
“Why, Odi?” asked Yoel. “Explain it to me.”
“What if there’s a war,” said Odi, “and someone will say, I don’t want to fight?”
Yoel stroked his son’s head and said nothing.
When soldiers entered the house, Yoel sat on the floor like a mourner and was dragged away to a waiting bus.
YISRAEL HAREL DROVE to Atzmona, a Gush Emunim “protest” settlement of trailers and tents, near Yamit.
“I’m the head of the Yesha Council,” Yisrael told soldiers at the roadblock. That Yisrael expected to be allowed through reflected the ambiguous identity of an organization at once quasi-official and oppositional. The soldiers let him pass.
Atzmona’s several dozen residents, many of them Mercaz students, had made a theological decision: they would not resist the soldiers because that would violate the authority—the sanctity—of the Jewish state. Nor would they call on soldiers to disobey orders. Instead, they gathered together, reciting Psalms.
Several young men stood on a scaffold, pouring cement onto a skeletal structure: they were building Atzmona’s synagogue.
Soldiers sat on the sand, waiting for the order to move in. Their commander, Amos, reminded them, “There aren’t two sides here.”
Yisrael approached Amos, who recognized the head of the Yesha Council. Pointing to the building crew, Yisrael said, “Look what faith these people have,” and added, “Let them be evacuated last.” Amos agreed.
A young woman, a settler from Hebron, asked Amos for permission to address his soldiers. Amos looked at Yisrael. Yes, Yisrael nodded. The kerchiefed woman spoke quietly about how the Jewish people had built a state from the wilderness, and now this good land would be returning to wilderness.
Amos said to her gently, “We have to finish.”
She ignored him, her voice turning shrill.
Too bad, thought Yisrael, she doesn’t know when to stop.
Settlers quietly accompanied soldiers to the buses. No one needed to be dragged. Several teenage girls collapsed, and were carried by female soldiers. The young men on the scaffold continued to pour cement.
When all the other settlers had been removed, soldiers approached the building site. The workers laid down their tools and slowly walked toward the buses.
All the hope destroyed in Sinai, all the youthful promise—
Yisrael returned to his car and wept.
TEN ACTIVISTS FROM a far-right fringe group, Kach (Thus), headed by an American-born rabbi, Meir Kahane, barricaded themselves in an underground bomb shelter in Yamit and vowed to commit suicide if the town were evacuated.
Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren was flown down to Yamit and, shouting through a vent, tried to convince the protesters to emerge, but there was no response. One young man, a doctor named Baruch Goldstein who had recently immigrated from the United States and whose sister was barricaded within, stood outside, reciting Psalms.
“THE EVACUATION HAS BEGUN,” announced loudspeakers mounted by protesters on Yamit’s rooftops. “Everyone to your stations. Soldiers! We tell you today to disobey the order. . . . For the rest of your lives you will carry the knowledge that you uprooted a city in Israel.”
Hundreds rushed to the rooftops. Helmeted soldiers laid ladders against the two-story buildings. Cranes lifted cages; from inside soldiers sprayed foam. Protesters threw stones and tried to topple the ladders with poles. Black smoke rose from burning tires. Loudspeakers played the staccato song “Ammunition Hill,” conjuring the spirit of the Six-Day War: “The sun rose in the east / over the fortified bunkers / over our heroic brothers / . . . on Ammunition Hill.”
Young men in jeans and T-shirts, some in prayer shawls, were dragged into cages. “Shame!” cried the loudspeakers. The soldiers, warned by their officers against excessive force, didn’t use their batons.
On one roof, high school girls in long skirts recited Psalms.
A shofar sounded. “Eretz Yisrael!”—Land of Israel!—a man shouted.
Yisrael stood on a rooftop with Sarah and the children. Protesters laid barbed wire down the middle of the roof. Somehow the Harels’ seven-year-old son Itai found himself on the wrong side of the barrier. Sarah reached over and retrieved him.
“Utzu eitzah v’tufar!”—Their plans will come to naught!—the protestors around them sang. Yisrael didn’t join in. Instead, he took photographs. Therapy, he told himself.
Soldiers reached the Harels’ roof. “Disobey orders!” Sarah shouted at them. “Don’t uproot settlements!” the Harel children chanted. Soldiers lifted them down the ladders.
GENERAL CHAIM EREZ, commander of the Sinai evacuation, entered the home of Rabbi Ariel. Leave us for a few minutes, Erez told his soldiers.
The rabbi said to the general, “After destruction comes renewal. Let’s drink l’chayim.” They raised shot glasses.
IT TOOK THE army two days to remove 1,500 protesters from the rooftops and from inside the houses. Few were wounded, none seriously. Thanks to the restraint of the army and the relative restraint of the settlers, the struggle for Yamit turned out to be a kind of theater, a play about civil war.
The last to be evacuated were the radicals in the bunker. After failed attempts to penetrate the steel door, a bulldozer crashed through a side wall. Protesters threw chairs; soldiers sprayed them with foam. “Let’s see you hurt a rabbi!” shouted their leader, Meir Kahane, as he was dragged outside.
What could be salvaged—greenhouses, prefab structures, giant refrigerators in packing plants, five hundred dunams of trees, even bomb shelters extracted from the earth—was shipped back to Israel. The rest was bulldozed.
General Erez addressed his soldiers: “I believe that the sacrifice the state made was necessary. There was an opportunity [for peace] that couldn’t be missed. . . . Those resisting the withdrawal aren’t more Zionist than those who evacuated them, and they don’t love Israel more than we do.”
SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE, among them Yoel and Hanan and Yisrael, managed to slip back into the ruined town.
They gathered at an IDF memorial for soldiers who had fallen in Sinai’s battles. The memorial had been a series of concrete pillars, which now lay toppled and scattered. Sand blew in the hot wind. A singed smell rose from the ruins of the dynamited shopping center.
The ceremony began with the symbolic tearing of clothes of a mourner. The honor of being the first to “tear” was given to Avraham Bar-Ilan, Yamit’s town planner. Immediately following the ceremony, Bar-Ilan intended to drive to Gaza, to become regional planner for its new settlements. What better response of a faithful Jew to hurban than to build in the land of Israel?
An army jeep appeared. “Don’t start up again,” a megaphone called. “Leave the area.”
Yoel ignored the order and read aloud, from his pocket Bible, Ezekiel’s vision of resurrection: “The hand of the Lord was upon me . . . and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones . . . and, lo, they were very dry. . . . And He said unto me: Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered: O Lord God, Thou knowest. . . . Then He said unto me: ‘Prophesy over these bones. Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live.’ ”
Yoel thought of the photographs taken in the death camps just after the war, the mounds of corpses that hadn’t yet been burned. And of the state of Israel that arose three years later. A Jew couldn’t help being an optimist. Even here, among the ruins.
Hanan read aloud a list of Sinai’s destroyed settlements and vowed to return.
They sang “Hatikvah,” the anthem of hope. They walked to the last intact building in Yamit, a synagogue. There they removed the round, wood-encased Torah scrolls. Slowly, silently, they walked toward the road out of town. Soldiers and police joined the procession.