REVOLT AGAINST HEAVEN
IN THE JEWISH ENCLAVE in downtown Hebron, in the farming communities on the Golan Heights, a dozen young men, including leading activists in the settlement movement, were detained without explanation. It was Friday morning, April 27, 1984. Rumors and speculation spread among the settlements. Was it for the attack on the mayors? The Islamic College? Or something else, as yet unknown?
Yisrael Harel phoned contacts in the army, the government, the media. All we know, he was told, is that a disaster was averted at the last moment.
When Shabbat ended, Yisrael phoned prime minister Yitzhak Shamir at home. Menachem Begin had abruptly resigned as prime minister, broken by the ongoing casualties of the Lebanon War and by the death of his beloved wife, Aliza. And Shamir, like Begin a Polish Jew whose family had been killed in the Holocaust, had taken his place.
“I received very unpleasant information about actions that your people took,” Shamir told Yisrael.
“What actions?” asked Yisrael.
“I can’t say.”
That same evening the news was released: members of the underground had been caught placing bombs under five Arab buses in East Jerusalem. If the bombs had gone off, hundreds might have been killed or wounded.
Impossible, thought Yisrael. These were sane people. They knew that if those bombs had gone off the settlement movement would have lost its moral high ground. Maybe the Shin Bet security service felt so frustrated by its inability to solve the other attacks that it had contrived an atrocity conveniently averted at the last moment.
In fact, the security service had been following the terrorists for months. The plot to blow up the buses was the pretext the Shin Bet was waiting for to close in on the members of the underground.
An angry Yisrael appeared on the TV news. Our friends and neighbors have been arrested and not heard from since, he said. No phone calls to their families, no lawyers. Since when did people simply disappear in the state of Israel? What is this, Argentina?
On Sunday morning the police came for Yehudah Etzion.
WHAT MADNESS HAS taken hold of our camp? thought Yoel Bin-Nun. How could disciples of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, who were taught to sanctify the state as the vessel of redemption and who celebrated Independence Day as a religious holiday—how could they take the law into their own hands and undermine Jewish sovereignty?
By midweek, the news was out: members of the underground had indeed confessed—to the attack on the mayors, the murder of the students in the Islamic College, even the attempt to sabotage the buses.
Yoel was interviewed by Israel Radio. “We have to face the enormity of this sin,” he said. “They struck at the very existence of the state. Whoever usurps the role of the army and decides that he is fighting the war against Israel’s enemies according to his own understanding has despaired of the very existence of a Jewish state. . . . There are no private wars. . . . They severely undermined the government’s ability to maintain its sovereignty in the land of Israel. . . . And then of course there is the unbelievable moral degradation, particularly in the two most recent events [the Islamic College and the buses]. This is not only a matter of Jewish law but of natural law, of basic morality.”
Didn’t this slide into lawlessness begin with the mass squatting in Sebastia? the interviewer asked.
Yoel wasn’t ready to go that far. “There is no comparison between a public struggle against an order or a law, with what happened here. This is not a case of people taking the law into their own hands but of challenging the essence of the state. . . . For me, a revolt against the state is a revolt against the Kingdom of Heaven.”
In Israel’s polarized debate, where talk shows consisted of opponents simultaneously shouting, here finally was a voice that couldn’t be easily categorized. The nation began paying attention to Yoel Bin-Nun.
YISRAEL WAS OUTRAGED.
“I’m telling you as a friend,” he said to Yoel, “you’re going too far. You can’t keep kicking your own community while it’s lying bleeding in the road. You also have to offer some comfort, some solidarity. Otherwise, you’re going to end up without a constituency. The left will never accept you, and your friends and neighbors will reject you.”
“I heard what you have to say,” Yoel responded testily. “But you can’t always hide behind ‘protecting the camp’ and ‘unifying our forces.’”
“I’m no less against what happened than you are. The difference between us, Yoel, is that I don’t crave the approval of the left.”
THE YOUNG MEN entered the office of the Yesha Council, nodded at each other, looked away. For years they had come together, planning demonstrations and settlements, arguing about how far to go in challenging a hostile Labor government and pressuring a sympathetic Likud government. They had envied each other’s prominence and complained about each other’s arrogance; but those were small disturbances among tempestuous personalities who had managed to stay focused on their shared vision. In the history of Israel, no group of activists had had a greater impact: they had transformed Israel’s geography and politics and society. On the wall was proof of their victory, a map of the West Bank dense with dots marking settlements.
But now some of them were wondering: Did they still belong in the same camp? Could Moshe Levinger, the radical rabbi from Hebron, and Yoel Bin-Nun, the moderate rabbi from Ofra, continue to be comrades when they saw each other as betrayers of their camp’s deepest values?
“Friends,” began Yisrael Harel, “I know you’re expecting me to give you information about the recent events. But I’m climbing the walls. No one is telling me anything.”
“Who was authorized to issue a group indictment for all of us?” one delegate demanded. He meant Yoel.
Rabbi Levinger shouted, “At least these people [from the underground] did something for the Jewish people, while many here were sitting in cozy armchairs!”
Yisrael, who rarely raised his voice, shouted at Levinger: “You’re the one who says the state is holy! I don’t use such formulations. But then you go and support a group that undermines the authority of the state? What state can tolerate this?”
Yoel insisted on an unequivocal condemnation. “A call has to come from here for a general soul-searching in our community,” he said.
Yisrael turned angrily to Yoel: “How can you go on the radio and make pronouncements? I don’t know what happened, but you already pass judgment.”
Like Kibbutz Gan Shmuel after Udi Adiv’s arrest, the Yesha Council debated whether to fund the defendants’ legal expenses. Only for those who express regret, said Yoel. The council voted to help defendants who didn’t commit or intend to commit murder—in effect, those who had participated in the maiming of the West Bank mayors.
After the others left, Yisrael and Yoel lingered. They needed each other’s company, especially now. They shared the same anxieties: How would they face their secular supporters who had trusted them to responsibly carry out the national mission? How would the settlement movement endure if it were no longer perceived as mainstream?
The phone rang. Yisrael listened silently to the voice on the other end. “God help us,” he said. Yehudah Etzion had been implicated in a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock.
LATE AT NIGHT, with only the call of the muezzin to break the stillness, Yoel wrote to Yehudah. “You have brought idolatrous fire into the holy dwelling place,” Yoel accused. Judaism aimed at sanctifying the physical; Yehudah had attempted to coarsen the sacred. “You didn’t blow up the Dome of the Rock, but you did blow to pieces the movement of the faithful that we founded. . . . Repent, Yehudah, for the sake of the true redemption you long for and tried to quicken (and thereby delayed), so that the idolatrous fire may be re-sanctified through a holiness arising from the courage of patience.”
Was Yoel in any way responsible? There were nights he was convinced he was blameless. After all, he had taught Rabbi Kook’s writings to hundreds of students, and none but Yehudah had so distorted those teachings. But there were also nights when he sensed he had unknowingly encouraged Yehudah’s recklessness, as though he’d given his favorite disciple a weapon without checking whether it was loaded.
THE JEWISH UNDERGROUND was banner headlines for weeks. The revelation that religious Zionists—the dancing young men of Sebastia, some of them army officers—had planned to bomb crowded buses and destroy the Dome of the Rock, risking war with the Muslim world, strained even the Israeli capacity to endure the unexpected. Israel’s president, Chaim Herzog, spoke of “poisoned fruit”; leading rabbis condemned the underground as madness. In the newspaper Ma’ariv, Srulik, a beloved cartoon figure in a kibbutznik’s hat who embodied the scrappy Israeli, pointed a finger at himself with a stunned look that said, Who, me?
“I’m not surprised,” Arik Achmon said to Yehudit. “The signs were there all along. Yisrael can talk all he wants about how they have the best youth. But they remind me of the Stalinists we grew up with, people who despised doubt and had answers to every question.”
“It’s interesting,” replied Yehudit in her slow, thoughtful way, “that when the left turns extreme we produce traitors like Udi Adiv, and when the right turns extreme they produce murderers.”
YISRAEL HAREL DROVE to the Israel Television studios in Jerusalem. After the confessions of the underground members and the report of Yehudah’s Temple Mount plot, he could no longer avoid an unequivocal condemnation. They have harmed Jewish morality and most of all the settlements, he told the nation. Even if they are good people, I won’t forgive them for this.
Driving back home, Yisrael felt again that moment of deep satisfaction when he returned to the cool mountain air and glimpsed Ofra’s red-roofed houses rising with the hills. Against all odds, he and his friends had built a thriving community in the land of Israel.
Yisrael turned onto his street, lined with identical two-story houses, the bottom facade white stone, the top dark wood. He came to a sudden halt: his way was blocked by cars parked across the length of the road.
His neighbors were waiting for him.
Yisrael slowly got out of his car. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Who gave you the authority to speak in our name?” one man demanded.
Yisrael replied deliberately, controlling his anger. “If we are against the people of Israel, then the people of Israel will be against us. We’ve lost their support.”
“We have a right to defend ourselves!”
“We have to live with the Arabs,” Yisrael said. “We can’t be a private army.”
“All you want to do is appease the left!” someone shouted.
“You shut up,” Yisrael said.
It was the same accusation he had made against Yoel.
TWENTY-SEVEN PRISONERS—knitted kippot, sandals, ritual fringes hanging from untucked shirts—entered the Jerusalem District Court, smiling and waving. Of course we’re guilty, they seemed to be saying: guilty of love for our homeland, guilty of trying to protect our people. Family members, including a young woman in a white kerchief on which the word “Yamit” was embroidered, quietly read Psalms.
It was the largest trial of Jewish terrorist suspects in Israel’s history. Six members were charged with murder at the Islamic College. Others were charged with attempted murder, or membership in an underground.
Defendants ignored the pleas of their guards and sat among their families, even left the courtroom at will, without permission or escort. One defendant blatantly ignored the procedings and studied Talmud.
Around the Friday-night family table, on Shabbat morning in synagogues, on Shabbat afternoon in Bnei Akiva meetings, the religious Zionist community confronted itself. In the pages of Nekudah, settlers and their supporters confessed and accused. Religious education was to blame for emphasizing ritual practice more than morality, wrote one. The government was to blame, wrote another, for not defending the settlers more vigorously against terrorist attacks. Whoever wants to fight the enemies of Israel, countered Hanan Porat, should join an elite unit of the IDF or the Shin Bet.
On the streets of Jerusalem teenage girls in long skirts and sandals collected money for the defense fund of the underground members—“the best of our young men,” as supporters called them.
Rabbi Levinger was detained, suspected of providing halachic justification to underground members. At a demonstration outside Jerusalem police headquarters, Levinger’s wife, Miriam, declared, “We always have to think about being moral! I’ve never heard anybody, any politician, Jew or Arab, say the Arabs must be moral.” This, from an Orthodox Jew who routinely recited prayers affirming Jewish chosenness.
IN THE DESERT
ON JULY 22, 1985, fifteen months after the exposure of the underground, all twenty-seven defendants were sentenced to varying prison terms. Three defendants accused of murder were sentenced to life. Yehudah Etzion received seven years.
And now, Yisrael wrote in a Nekudah editorial, it was time for a pardon. The defendants had already served over a year in prison; all expressed degrees of regret. Yisrael noted a recent prisoner exchange in which over a thousand Palestinians, many of them convicted terrorists, had been released for three Israeli POWs held in Lebanon. “Failure to temper the verdict [against the underground members] will vindicate those who claim that the Israeli government acts cruelly toward its most faithful sons while revealing weakness toward its cruelest enemies.”
Yisrael and Hanan and other settlement leaders visited the prisoners. Yoel, though, maintained an implacable distance. But his boycott didn’t extend to the prisoners’ families: every Friday night Yoel and Esther hosted the wife and children of an Ofra resident imprisoned with the underground; Yehudah’s wife, Chaya, attended Yoel’s Torah classes, even though he often used those as a platform to attack political zealotry.
Some neighbors accused Yoel of betraying his comrades. In the synagogue several refused to greet him. They had built Ofra together, shared guard duty, prayed and studied and mourned together. And now Yoel was regarded by a few of his neighbors as virtually a traitor. He could never know, when he set out to attend the wedding of a student or a meeting of rabbis, whether he would be welcomed or berated or shunned. Even in Mercaz, whose rabbis had passionately condemned the underground, Yoel was regarded warily. His opponents understood what he himself did not: that he had begun to look at his own community from a distance.
Under pressure, Yoel became even more vociferous—arrogant, some said. At meetings of the Yesha Council he shouted, pounded the table. Listen to him, opponents mocked, he’s even begun quoting himself: “As I said five years ago . . .” At a Yesha Council meeting, Yoel declared, “I’m ready to carry the people of Israel on my back for forty years.” Who did he think he was, Moses?
Our kibbutznik friends in the brigade think of Yoel as a model of tolerance, Yisrael thought. They should see how he speaks to his own community.
“There is no longer a unified camp,” Yoel told Esther. “I feel as if my own body is being torn apart.”
“Maybe we should move,” Esther suggested.
“Under no circumstances,” said Yoel.
GRADUALLY, LIFE FOR Yisrael Harel appeared to return to normal. The media moved on to other scandals. New settlements were built. Yisrael continued to divide his time between his two offices, preparing the next issue of Nekudah while running the Yesha Council.
But, Yisrael knew, nothing would ever be the same again. The trust of many Israelis toward the settlers as the new pioneers was gone. Yisrael had devoted his life to turning religious Zionists from a defensive and peripheral community into the avant-garde of the Israeli ethos. But for all their attempts to appropriate the symbols of Zionist legitimacy, the settlers would likely remain an embattled group, damned by the cultural elite and confounded by their own limitations. There were moments when Yisrael suspected he had tied his life to a failed mission.
And everywhere there were reminders of his lost son, Eldad. In the young men in uniform returning on Shabbat leave to Ofra, in the Bnei Akiva kids going off to discover a well or an ancient ruin. Yisrael had rarely allowed himself to feel joy, but he had known satisfaction; now, without Eldad, carrier of his ethos, even that was denied him.
In a rare moment, he confided his despair to one of Nekudah’s young staff writers. “I’m finished,” Yisrael said.
“WAITING FOR MASHIAH”
THE WAR IN LEBANON went on. A poster at the Peace Now vigil outside the prime minister’s residence recorded the growing casualty rate—by 1985 nearly six hundred Israelis. The nation lost faith in the possibility of victory, or even in the ability to define victory. Israeli soldiers, targets of roadside bombs and suicide attacks, traveled through Lebanon in convoys. But how to withdraw without leaving the towns and kibbutzim in the north exposed again to Katyushas?
Inflation reached over 400 percent. Israelis rushed to spend their paychecks. The government printed a five-thousand-shekel note. Pickpockets, Israelis joked, kept the wallet and threw away the money. The Israeli tendency to improvise, expressed on the battlefield as daring, was exposed as mere recklessness in civilian life.
The radio played a song by Shalom Hanoch, mocking the Likud’s Israel of instant money and messianic politics. The song was called “Waiting for Mashiah” —a Sephardi family name but also Hebrew for Messiah. There’s a big deal in the offing, and a group of anxious investors are waiting in the offices of “Artzi-Eli”—Hebrew for “My land, my God”—for the wheeler-dealer Mashiah. But “Mashiah hasn’t come, and Mashiah isn’t calling.” A policeman appears, informing the men that the stock market has crashed and that Mashiah has jumped off the roof. In a sneering voice, Shalom delivered the line that became the motto for this time: “Mashiah won’t be coming, Mashiah won’t be calling.” It was an anthem that could have been written for Yehudah Etzion.
STILL, HOWEVER FITFULLY, the country was evolving. National elections brought a stalemate between Likud and Labor, and the two parties negotiated a national unity government, the first since May 1967. Shimon Peres, talented and vain, became prime minister for a two-year period, to be followed by the grim and unmovable Yitzhak Shamir.
The unity government withdrew from most of Lebanon, leaving a “security zone” in southern Lebanon along the Israeli border, to be defended by a pro-Israel Lebanese militia. Israeli casualties declined, and in northern Israel air-raid shelters were gradually turned into storerooms.
The unity government took on inflation too. The shekel was devalued, wages frozen, the budget cut, the public sector trimmed. Inflation declined from 400 percent to less than 20 percent. Once again the abyss needed to be in clear view to inspire the country’s next miracle.
Look what we can achieve when the people of Israel are united, Yoel Bin-Nun told his students. He was speaking not just politically but theologically: Jewish unity—not the fantasies of a handful of fanatics—was the prerequisite for redemption.
ISRAEL’S IMMIGRANT ABSORPTION CENTERS filled with African Jews. They had left their thatched-hut villages in the Ethiopian highlands, partly in response to famine, partly to messianic expectation, and walked through jungle and desert toward refugee camps in the Sudan. There they kept their Jewishness hidden from the Muslim Sudanese soldiers, until Israeli agents smuggled them out and dispatched them to Israel by plane and boat. Thousands died on the road and in the camps; no Diaspora community had sacrificed so much on its way to Zion.
Yisrael Harel, emulating the kibbutz movement of an earlier era, mobilized the Yesha Council, and settlements welcomed Ethiopian immigrants. Dozens of Ethiopian families settled in Ofra. Immigrants became regular guests at the Shabbat table of the Harels and the Bin-Nuns and other Ofra families. Eventually, though, most of Ofra’s Ethiopians left in search of jobs.
The arrival of the Ethiopian Jews, whose tradition identified them as the lost Israelite tribe of Dan, reminded Israelis of the country’s essential purpose of ingathering the exiles. For all the problems facing premodern Africans entering a Western country, their arrival home was, for many immigrants, a sign that Mashiah had called.