A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR
IT WAS EARLY EVENING, and Yisrael Harel was driving home from Jerusalem. Since the outbreak of riots in the West Bank and Gaza—what the Palestinians were calling the intifada, or uprising—that once-routine drive had become a gauntlet. One young man from a settlement near Ofra, whose car was hit by a Molotov cocktail, emerged with a melted face; a boy from Ofra was hit in the head with a rock and became an epileptic. Yisrael drove without a seat belt, in case he had to escape from a burning car. He wore a pistol, just in case.
Yisrael had been stoned several times, but there was no way to prepare for that moment of shattered glass. Like a car crash but worse, because the violence was intentional. Yisrael would often pick up a hitchhiking soldier or settler, and company helped ease the tension. But now he was alone.
Yisrael passed IDF jeeps, whose windshields—and even the rotating blue lights on their roofs—were covered with mesh wire against stones. For Yisrael that protectiveness conveyed an unbearable weakness: Since when did soldiers of Israel fear teenagers with rocks? Why was the IDF allowing itself to be humiliated?
The narrow road approached the village of Baytin. In the fading light, the white stone houses, some with antennae shaped like the Eiffel Tower, seemed to emerge from the hills. Several houses flew Palestinian flags—a defiant gesture, since the red, black, and green colors of the PLO were banned by Israel.
Yisrael turned a bend. Up ahead, a barrier of stones across the road. And behind it, teenagers and children, some with kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces.
Crash: splintered windshield.
Yisrael stepped out of the car. A rock hit him in the shoulder. In the leg. He aimed his pistol at the crowd. A warning: he wouldn’t shoot at anyone unless his life was threatened. Rocks fell around him. He pointed the gun straight up and fired. The young people ran.
Back in the car, Yisrael swerved around the stone barrier, accelerated, and resumed his journey home.
IT HAD BEGUN with an accident. On December 8, 1987, a truck driven by an Israeli hit a car near Gaza, killing four Palestinians. A baseless rumor spread that the attack had been deliberate, revenge for the stabbing murder of an Israeli two days earlier in the Gaza City market. Rioting spread through the Gaza refugee camps, and then into the West Bank. The army expected a quick end to the disturbances. But the violence only intensified into an organized revolt.
Israelis had prided themselves on maintaining a benign occupation. There was, after all, a degree of prosperity, at least in the West Bank; and the army’s presence in the lives of Palestinians had been minimal. Arabs as well as Jews could travel in any part of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. True, there was occasional terrorism and stone-throwing and IDF curfews; still, the territories had been relatively quiet.
But suppressed rage had been released, and the territories were now a low-level battlefield. Palestinians threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets. Black smoke rose from burning tires, white smoke from tear gas. Stone walls in Palestinian towns and villages were covered with graffiti, drawings of swords piercing the map of Israel dripping blood. The Palestinian teenager with a slingshot against Israeli soldiers with M16s shattered a cherished Israeli self-image: Who was David, who Goliath?
The army didn’t know how to cope. Yitzhak Rabin, defense minister in an uneasy unity government of Likud and Labor, told soldiers to “break the bones” of rioters. One commander ordered Palestinian detainees to lie facedown on the ground, then ordered his soldiers to beat them with clubs.
How to control the violence? Some settlers who shot at rioters, or even fired in the air, were detained by Israeli police. A settler was wounded in a stabbing attack in Hebron and managed to shoot his assailant; police seized his weapon, returning it only after a public outcry. “We are prevented from exercising our right to self-defense,” noted a leaflet distributed in Ofra. “Those who rise to kill us are protected by the Israeli government, and we are required to flee.”
Yet for leftists, the problem wasn’t Israeli restraint but brutality. Left and right no longer seemed capable of even perceiving the same reality.
OFRA WAS UNDER SIEGE. School buses were accompanied by armed guards and fitted with plastic windows. On especially bad days on the roads, the army insisted that cars leaving the settlement travel in convoys. A company of soldiers moved in: for Ofra, civilian and military life, always intimate, became inseparable.
To be a settler now meant risking one’s family’s safety on a daily basis. Yet settlers continued to travel the roads; large families crowded into Subaru station wagons, flying Israeli flags as though every day were Independence Day. They continued to hike to biblical sites. The land of Israel is won through suffering, Ofra’s residents quoted the rabbis, strengthening each other’s resolve.
Yisrael and Sarah Harel didn’t try to restrain the movements of their three remaining children. Yisrael was moved by Sarah’s courage: she would stand outside Ofra’s gate and hitch a ride to Jerusalem. We waited two thousand years to come home, she seemed to be saying; do they think they can deter us with stones? Yisrael recalled how, after the death of their son Eldad, he couldn’t bring himself to attend Ofra’s Purim party; but Sarah went, dressed in a lion’s costume.
Not only did almost none of Ofra’s five hundred residents leave; but more families were moving in. The settlement population generally—around seventy thousand at the beginning of the intifada—was expanding.
Still, settlers were feeling increasingly isolated. The Ofra newsletter noted the absence of visitors—relatives from the other side of the old border who were afraid to come to the settlement for bar mitzvahs, the mailman who refused to come without armed guard. Only beggars, the newsletter added sardonically, continue to come here. In Ofra they spoke with contempt for the fearful Jews of Tel Aviv, compared to their own children, fearlessly walking the land.
Media hostility intensified the sense of siege. A sticker denouncing left-wing Israeli journalists appeared on settler cars: “The people oppose a hostile media,” with a drawing of a snake wrapped around a microphone. Yoel Bin-Nun argued with his neighbors. It’s our media too, he reminded. If we make our case convincingly, we will be heard.
A JEWISH ARGUMENT OVER LAND
WORKING AT NIGHT, the young men uprooted a part of the fence separating Ofra from several hundred acres of unworked, Arab-owned land. The fence was extended eastward, and the settlement instantly expanded. This was no partisan act: Ofra’s leaders had decided to seize the land for a building extension. After all, they reasoned, the land was all but abandoned; and without expansion, Ofra would not survive.
No compensation was offered the Arab owner, no explanation given to the Israeli authorities. A fait accompli, passed without incident.
Over the years Ofra’s left-wing opponents had accused the settlers of seizing Arab land, but those charges appeared nebulous. The first settlers, after all, had moved into an abandoned Jordanian army camp. The Jordanians had expropriated private land to build the camp and, it turned out, hadn’t observed their own legal requirements. Still, the army camp had remained empty, unclaimed, for nearly a decade after the Six-Day War.
Yoel Bin-Nun tried to convince himself that this new expropriation was legitimate. Necessary. And anyway the land was neglected. No one’s livelihood was threatened. But there are some fig trees—
THE DISTORTION OPENING Meir Ariel’s third album, Yerukot (Yellow Blue), was the first jarring note. Then came Meir’s voice, angry and taunting. The song, “Midrash Yonati”—literally, “Commentary on My Dove,” a rabbinic metaphor for the Jewish people—was a vehement attack on the settlers, who seize land “like a thief in the night.” Invoking a saying of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook about the Western Wall—“There are people with hearts of stone and stones with hearts of people”—Meir lamented, “Stones in the heart of Jerusalem / . . . She doesn’t pursue justice, doesn’t want peace / because there is no peace without justice”—a play on two biblical verses.
Meir’s critique was no mere left-wing polemic but a religious disputation. Meir was insisting that settlers had distorted the Torah he had come to love. He drew on the Exodus from Egypt, the apocalyptic prophecy of Ezekiel, the love between God and Israel in the Song of Songs. Meir’s protest was so layered with biblical and rabbinic references that almost every line required commentary.
“Midrash Yonati” was a philosophical argument for how Judaism understands the holiness of the land of Israel. Just as a Jew relinquishes mastery over the world every seventh day, he surrenders control over his land every seventh year. The laws of shmitta, of leaving the land fallow on the sabbatical year, apply only to the land of Israel, a reminder that one cannot entirely possess holy land.
Meir didn’t minimize the enmity of Israel’s neighbors. The modern exodus of the Jews resembled the first exodus, when the Israelites stood on the shore of the Red Sea, with Pharoah behind them and the unparted waters before them: it was, sang Meir, the same dangerous procession “on the way to the sea.”
But existential threat didn’t absolve Israel from moral responsibility. The generation of Jews privileged to return home must be especially worthy, because they are the repository of the dreams of the Jews in exile: “The lands beyond the sea are behind us / We are their longing.”
THE MOUNTAIN AND THE COAST, REVISITED
GUARD DUTY WAS mandatory for men in Ofra. But not everyone took the responsibility seriously. Ofra’s “security committee” decided to impose fines and publicize the names of shirkers. The protocol of a meeting of the security committee from May 20, 1988, listed the names of four Ofra residents who didn’t appear for their shifts. They included Yoel Bin-Nun, who, the minutes noted, was fined with a double shift. “We apologize about the fines and the publicizing of names—but we have no choice. . . . Shabbat shalom, a peaceful Sabbath to all.”
Yoel was no shirker; he was simply overwhelmed with other responsibilities. Along with teaching at the Mount Etzion military yeshiva and leading hikes from the Ofra field school and training teachers in Bible studies, he was founder and principal of a progressive religious girls’ high school in Ofra. The premise of the Ofra Ulpana was that religious girls should be exposed to no less a rigorous education than boys. If we keep our young women in the nineteenth century, Yoel argued, we will lose the brightest among them. The girls were taught cooking but also how to change a tire. When some girls said they wanted to study Talmud, just as the boys did, Yoel organized a class in his home.
Yoel spoke of “the living Torah,” relevant not only to religious ritual but to all of life. Mathematics was the code of God’s creation, history the unfolding of God’s plan. Most of all, Yoel stressed love for the people of Israel in all its diversity. On Memorial Day, the girls went to ceremonies on secular kibbutzim; then they spent a Shabbat with ultra-Orthodox families.
Yoel emphasized a religious education based on trust, not fear. A key was left hanging outside the school canteen, and any student could help herself to snacks and be expected to leave the proper payment. Yoel tried, without success, to convince the Ministry of Education to allow matriculation tests in the Ulpana without supervision. He trusted, too, his students’ religious and political maturity. He taught not only Jewish but Greek philosophy. And he invited dovish politicians who explained why they opposed annexing the territories, and a prominent journalist who explained why he didn’t believe in God.
Yoel worked out a compromise with Ofra’s security committee: he fulfilled his guarding responsibilities in the summer. For a full week he sat in the booth at Ofra’s front gate. There he held his meetings—with a journalist seeking out the settlement movement’s most outspoken moderate, with a student confessing a crisis of faith.
A FRIEND WAS driving Yoel home from Jerusalem. As the car entered the town of El Bireh, past Ramallah on the way to Ofra, a rock smashed the windshield. Yoel saw several teenagers running into a school building. One of them, a big young man, was wearing a red sweater.
Yoel entered the school. Meanwhile his friend contacted the army—many settler cars were now equipped with two-way radios—and waited for the soldiers.
Yoel found the principal in his office. “Some young people broke the windshield of my car,” Yoel said, deliberately calm, “and they escaped into this building.”
The principal, an older man with a gray mustache, examined the bearded settler with the large knitted kippah. Yoel’s soft-spoken demeanor reassured him.
“Can you identify them?” asked the principal in Hebrew.
They went from classroom to classroom. The big young man had removed his red sweater, but Yoel easily spotted him. He made no attempt to escape. “Come with us,” the principal ordered, and the offender passively complied. “He’s not one of our students,” the principal told Yoel, as if in apology.
They waited together until soldiers came. Yoel felt appreciation toward the principal, a fellow educator trying to protect his community from the consequences of its rage.
IN HIS LATE-NIGHT PACING, Yoel was reaching heretical conclusions about the future of Judea and Samaria. The intifada, he knew, was a turning point. The settlement movement, Yoel was now saying, had succeeded in settling on the ground, but it had failed to settle in the hearts of the Israeli people. Peace Now, Yoel conceded, was partly right: the settlers had never seriously thought about the Arabs living in the land. The Yesha Council had opposed every peace plan, but never offered a realistic plan of its own.
Desperate plans were being promoted by the settlers’ radical fringe—the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the territories, even creating a “state of Judea” that would secede from the state of Israel. Since the withdrawal from Sinai, and especially since the outbreak of the intifada, it was no longer unusual to hear some religious Zionists proclaim their alienation from the secular state they once revered. If the secular state, heralded by Kookians as the carrier of redemption, was now betraying the messianic process, then religious Zionists needed to present an alternative to the state.
Yoel was rethinking one of his most cherished metaphors, the relationship between the mountain and the coast. He had taught a generation of young religious Zionists that the responsibility of those who lived on the mountain—in Judea and Samaria—was to bring spirituality to those who lived on the coast—greater Tel Aviv. In ancient Israel, he’d noted, prophecy had come from the people of the mountain, aimed at the mercantile people near the sea.
But even as the Israelis of the coast were drifting away from their Jewish roots, the Israelis of the mountain were retreating into a self-enclosed provinciality. Religious Zionism had been founded as a mediation between modernity and tradition, but parts of the religious Zionist community were adopting ultra-Orthodox ghettoization. And they were replacing the messy engagement with reality—the essence of the Judaic approach to life—with a purist ideology that bypassed historical process. If the alienation between the mountain and the coast continued, Yoel now taught, Israel would, God forbid, face hurban, destruction. “The body pulls to excessive materialism, and the soul to detached spirituality,” he told a journalist. “For the people of Israel, there are always two trends competing: holiness, and an openness to the world. The question is: What is the relationship between the two?” The coast needed the mountain to remind it of Israel’s spiritual destiny; but the mountain also needed the coast, to remind it that redemption must happen in the real world. Judaism could work only through balance between reality and dream.
Yoel stopped writing his rebuttal to The Yellow Wind. Though he still believed that David Grossman had wronged the settlers, Grossman had anticipated the intifada while Yoel, who prided himself on his farsightedness, had not. Yoel’s grievance toward Grossman now felt to him petty. I can’t write propaganda—
“[WE MUST] REDEEM the Mount from its shame,” Yehudah Etzion told a small group of followers, and pointed toward the golden Dome of the Rock rising across the valley. He was standing on the Mount of Olives, near the spot from which Motta Gur had surveyed the Old City walls just before ordering the paratroopers to move toward the Lions’ Gate.
It was January 1989, and Yehudah had just been released from Tel Mond Prison, after serving five years for plotting to destroy the Dome of the Rock and for participating in the terrorist attack against West Bank mayors. Instead of going directly home to Ofra, though, he had walked seventy kilometers from the prison gate to the Mount of Olives, carrying a silver-rimmed flag embroidered with the verse from Isaiah, “For Zion’s sake I won’t be silent.” At thirty-seven, his curly red hair was thinning, his beard turning gray.
The people aren’t ready for the Temple, Yehudah told his supporters. And so he was founding a new “redemption movement” to educate the people about the need to re-create the Jewish state, freed from westernization and run according to the laws of Torah, updated to the conditions of modern sovereignty, and with a rebuilt Temple at its heart.
In Ofra, Yehudah’s neighbors greeted him with the traditional welcome of bread and salt. Not that they agreed with Yehudah’s politics; they were simply embracing a friend who had made a mistake, paid for it, and returned home. Only Yoel, who lived at the other end of the street, kept away. When the two former friends happened to meet, Yoel greeted him perfunctorily and quickly moved on. And Yoel removed from his living room wall the photomontage of the Second Temple imposed on the Dome of the Rock.
SURROUNDED BY HIS Ulpana girls in sandals and denim skirts and yoga-style pants, Yoel read from the small, heavily annotated Bible that had accompanied him on treks across the land. It was a bright spring afternoon in the Arab village of Silwan, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls. Rising in the near distance were the domes of the Temple Mount. The group stood on a hilltop overlooking Hezekiah’s Tunnel, built by the Judean king Hezekiah in 701 BCE to provide water for Jerusalem in preparation of an anticipated siege by the Assyrian king Sennacherib. Since the intifada, few Jews ventured into Silwan. But Yoel was adamant: We are not abandoning Hezekiah’s Tunnel.
“[Hezekiah] appointed battle officers over the people,” Yoel read aloud. “Then, gathering them to him in the square of the city gate, he rallied them, saying, ‘Be strong and of good courage, do not be frightened or dismayed by the king of Assyria or by the horde that is with him, for . . . with him is an arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God.’ ”
And then Yoel saw them: a half dozen young Arab men, pointing at him and the girls and whispering. “Stay here,” he told his students.
Slowly, he walked toward the young men. A pistol was tucked in the back of his pants, concealed by overhanging shirt.
Yoel noted that one young man appeared to be the leader. “Salaam alaikum”—Peace be with you—Yoel said in Arabic. “Alaikum salaam,” the young man responded, then added in Hebrew, “Aren’t you afraid?”
“La, min Allah bas,” replied Yoel in Arabic: I only fear God.
“Ah, good,” the young man said.
Yoel didn’t know much more Arabic, and the conversation turned to Hebrew.
“It’s good you came without a weapon,” the young man said. “Otherwise there would have been a balagan here.”
“Why should we fight each other?” said Yoel. “Muslims, Jews, we all believe in God.”
They parted with a handshake.
THE INTIFADA WAS radicalizing not only part of the right but also part of the left. Peace Now was now advocating a Palestinian state—another Jewish fantasy, said Yoel, as if Yasser Arafat and the PLO were prepared to live in peace beside a Jewish state in any borders. The Jews, so long without the responsibilities of sovereignty, were reverting to the temptation of magical politics. Instead of tearing the nation apart between two unrealistic visions—annexation and land-for-peace—Israelis needed to reestablish a politics of realism, of consensus.
Writing in Nekudah, Yoel suggested some elements of that elusive consensus: no annexation and no withdrawal, while conditioning any major initiative in peace or war on a solid majority. Yoel called for dividing the territories into Jewish and Arab cantons: Jews would vote in Israeli elections, Arabs in Jordanian elections. Yoel acknowledged that there was in his plan a measure of injustice for Palestinians, who would be denied national sovereignty, but there was no perfect justice in this world—especially given Palestinian rejection of Israeli sovereignty.
The search for a politics of realism and consensus was, for Yoel, a theological imperative. That was the audacity of Yoel’s new theology: political pragmatism as precondition for redemption. In lectures to students he repeatedly returned to June 7, 1967, when he had stood on the Temple Mount with atheist kibbutzniks. That is how redemption comes: through unity, not through the purist separatism of Yehudah Etzion.
Yoel discerned one leader capable of re-creating a national consensus: Defense Minister Rabin. True, relations between Rabin and the settlers were often strained. Rabin had outraged settlers by calling them a “burden” on the IDF—to which Yisrael Harel had responded in Nekudah that the state of Israel is also a burden on the IDF.
But Yoel sensed that Rabin, unlike fellow Labor leader Shimon Peres, understood that a peace agreement with the Palestinians was impossible, and that only interim arrangements aimed at daily coexistence could work. Yoel noted that in 1975, when Rabin was prime minister, he had concluded an interim agreement with Egypt, in which Israel withdrew from part of the Sinai Desert without uprooting settlements. Gush Emunim, and Yoel too, had bitterly opposed Rabin then. But, Yoel now argued, we had failed to understand Rabin’s intentions. Unlike the Likud, Rabin had no illusions about genuine peace with the Egyptians, and so he’d preferred a nonbelligerency arrangement that was less than formal peace and wouldn’t require total Israeli withdrawal. And nonbelligerency, after all, was all that remained for Israel of its cold peace with Egypt.
If we continued to demand Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, Yoel warned, we will end up with nothing, just like in Sinai. But if we separate settlement building from annexation, we might find Rabin our most effective ally.
YITZHAK RABIN OFFERED his usual limp handshake to the two men in knitted kippot who had come to his office at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. The message of that perfunctory handshake was, Let’s dispense with protocol and get straight to business.
Rabin gestured to the two settlers to sit and prepared himself for an unpleasant conversation about the IDF’s lack of resolve toward the intifada.
“We’re here to encourage you to run for prime minister,” Yisrael began.
Rabin raised his eyes from the desk. His long and dour face showed surprise. “I assumed,” he said slowly, in his deep monotone, “that you were here to talk about settlement issues.”
For all his anger at Rabin, Yisrael sensed that the greatest danger to the settlements came, paradoxically, from the right—that only a right-wing leader would have the credibility among the public to withdraw.
What prompted their private initiative, Yoel explained to Rabin, was the nation’s demoralization. The intifada showed no signs of easing, a no-win war with the Shiite Hezbollah militia was dragging on in the “security zone” in southern Lebanon, and the unity government was faltering. We need a leader truly committed to national unity, said Yoel. “All of Zionism’s historic accomplishments were achieved when the nation was united. Like the Six Days. And our failures happened when we were divided. If we tilt too far right or too far left, the ship will be destabilized.”
Despite himself, Rabin was intrigued. He had surely never expected to hear any of this from settler leaders. Still, Rabin was careful not to reveal his political ambitions, and shifted the conversation to the security situation.
Later, Yisrael would say that they had wasted their time, that Rabin was no different from other Labor politicians blinded by the illusions of the left. But Yoel disagreed. The abrupt and strangely shy defense minister, he insisted, represented the best of the historic Labor Party. Yoel didn’t know it then, but the respect he felt toward Rabin was mutual.
WHAT’S WITH THE ADIV FAMILY?
AT 9:00 A.M., on September 9, 1988, two men and two women were led handcuffed into the Jerusalem District Court. The defendants, Jewish members of a Trotskyite faction called Derekh Hanitzotz, Way of the Spark, were accused of belonging to a Palestinian terrorist organization. Among them was a thirty-four-year-old with graying hair named Asaf Adiv. His older brother, Udi, sat among the defendants’ relatives and friends.
More than any other family member, Asaf had been traumatized by Udi’s trial and imprisonment. Asaf joined a Trotskyite faction that even others on the Israeli far left regarded as a cult; he worked in factories to rouse the workers to revolution. Udi had tried to reason with him: Yes, socialism, but scientific socialism, not the Trotskyite fantasy of a workers’ revolution—let alone in Israel, where workers tended to vote Likud. Asaf had responded angrily when Udi, as precondition for release from prison, had repudiated his underground activities, and finally stopped speaking to him altogether. Asaf hadn’t even come to his parents’ house to welcome Udi back from prison.
On a visit to London, Asaf and his friends had contacted a representative of the Marxist PLO faction, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP)—the group responsible for one of the worst terrorist attacks, the Ma’alot massacre in a high school in northern Israel in 1974. (Udi, before his arrest, had hoped to contact the DFLP.) The Israeli Trotskyites were given underground aliases: Asaf was “Nasser.”
Back in Israel, though, their activities hadn’t gone further than publishing an anti-Zionist newspaper. Unlike Udi before his arrest, Asaf and his friends had no intention of supporting the Palestinians with violence.
Yet shortly after his arrest Asaf pleaded guilty to charges of subversion. That was because his interrogators, he explained in court, had threatened to arrest Udi if he didn’t cooperate. But now he was rescinding that guilty plea. Udi was touched by Asaf’s loyalty.
Udi got a call from a radio interviewer. So what’s with the Adiv family? the interviewer asked.
We’re very political, Udi replied.
Udi was relieved that there was one detail of the family’s politics that the media didn’t know. For the last five years, Sylvia’s father and Udi’s former father-in-law had been held incommunicado in an Israeli prison for spying for the Soviet Union. Dr. Marcus Klingberg, former deputy director of the Institute for Biological Research, Israel’s top-secret research center for nonconventional warfare, had handed over Israel’s most sensitive data to the patron of Israel’s Arab enemies. Israel’s security establishment regarded Klingberg as the most dangerous spy in the country’s history—so dangerous that even his warders weren’t told his true identity.
Sooner or later the public would learn about Klingberg, and then, Udi knew, the phone calls would come. His one consolation was that he was no longer married to Sylvia. Imagine what the media would do to me if I hadn’t divorced her—
THE TRIAL OF ASAF and his friends ended with a plea bargain. The defendants confessed to membership in a terrorist organization and received relatively lenient sentences. Asaf was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.
In contrast to the rage and fear around Udi’s trial, the atmosphere this time was relatively subdued. No taunting crowds outside the courtroom, no hysterical headlines. The circumstances were different, but so was Israel. The country seemed to want to exonerate its wayward children. We accept the plea bargain, a Shin Bet official told a reporter: “These are people who were innocently manipulated by a terrorist organization.”
UDI’S WIFE, LEAH, was frustrated. Udi preferred privacy to intimacy, seemed more interested in reading than in talking. As if he were still in prison, holding off the outside world. She tried to give him space, not rebuke him when he abruptly walked away mid-conversation. She told herself to be patient, that old prison habits would eventually pass.
They tried to adopt a child. But the authorities turned them down. The couple sued, and the judge declared: Udi Adiv is unfit to be the father of an Israeli child.
We need to get out of here, Udi said to Leah. Go somewhere where no one knows the name Udi Adiv.
In June 1989 he received a BA in philosophy and Middle Eastern studies from Tel Aviv University. He was accepted by the University of London for a doctoral program in political science.
At Ben-Gurion Airport Udi was called aside. He was frisked, his suitcase searched. An agent opened a tube of toothpaste and squeezed. Toothpaste dripped. Udi laughed.
ARIK ACHMON REINVENTS HIMSELF AGAIN
ARIK WAS MANAGING a subsidiary company for one of Israel’s wealthiest men, shepherding packages from abroad through customs, and he’d had enough. He had helped found Israel’s domestic aviation industry, commanded a brigade, overseen the country’s first experiment in privatization. What was he doing trapped in a dead-end job, a cog in someone else’s ambitions?
On January 1, 1990, Arik made a new year’s resolution: he would quit his job and become a management consultant. He assumed he needed no formal education in management. He had, after all, spent most of his life trying to make systems more efficient, from the Netzer Sereni cowshed to his logistics brigade in the IDF.
And so, at age fifty-seven, Arik Achmon was starting again. He put out word that he was available for consultations. Weeks passed, then months, and no one called. Arik was patient. “I’m halfway there,” he joked with Yehudit; “the consultant is ready, he just doesn’t have any clients.” She bought him a computer. “Meanwhile, learn how to use this,” she said.
THE FIRST CALL came from the director of the industry department of the national kibbutz federation. “Arik, we have a problem on Ein Gev,” the director, an old friend, said.
Kibbutz Ein Gev was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Until the Six-Day War, its farmers and fishermen had lived under Syrian guns on the Golan Heights just above. Now the kibbutz was trying to cope with growing debt. One kibbutznik had an idea for an improved electric blanket, Arik’s friend explained, and he’d convinced the kibbutz to set up a factory. But the factory was faltering, and the inventor, who was also the CEO, refused to step aside. “He comes from a powerful family on the kibbutz and no one can stand up to him. He thinks he can conquer the world with his electric blanket. Meanwhile the kibbutz is pouring money into a black hole. You’re a kibbutznik, Arik, you understand the sensitivities. Plus he’s a fighter pilot, a war hero.”
“Kibbutz politics don’t worry me,” said Arik. “And taming pilots is my second profession.”
“I want you to become the company’s chairman. Do what you can to control him.”
After a month with Arik, the CEO resigned. For the next two months Arik ran the factory alone. Then he hired a new CEO. Soon afterward the factory shut down and the pilot left the kibbutz.
OTHER JOBS SOON FOLLOWED.
One night, after listening to Arik on the phone with a client, Yehudit said, “All you did was tell him what’s wrong with his company. You didn’t ask him what he thinks.”
“He’s not paying me to hear his own ideas,” Arik said.
“Arik, you have to learn to listen to people. You act like you know better than anyone.”
“But it so happens that in this case I do know better.” He was genuinely perplexed.
“Arik, how do I put up with you? You’re dealing with human beings, not abstract systems.”
Listen to the client, she says. What am I, a psychologist? Who knows: maybe it’s worth a try—
TEL AVIV UNDER SIEGE
THE SIREN, RISING AND FALLING, came at 2:00 a.m. Arik and Yehudit slept through it.
But the explosion, which sounded as if it were coming from down the block and shook the windows of their house, did wake them. “Yehudit,” Arik said laconically, “it seems that something is happening.”
It was January 18, 1991. The Americans were bombing Iraq, and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who had vowed to burn half of Israel, had just fired the first Scud missile at Tel Aviv, which fell about a kilometer away from the Achmons’ home. In the weeks leading up to war, every Israeli citizen had been given a survival kit for nonconventional warfare, including gas mask and atropine injection against nerve gas; families with small children were given plastic cribs to encase them. Arik had dismissed the preparations as a kind of hysteria. “Saddam won’t dare attack us with chemical weapons,” he’d said to Yehudit. And even if he did attack, Arik continued, his warheads held barely enough chemicals to affect a few buildings in the vicinity of a fallen missile—a fact that failed to calm his wife.
“Arik, what do we do?” Yehudit, nervous, asked now.
“Let’s set up the sealed room,” he said. It will help calm her—
Yehudit retrieved the supplies she’d bought for a “sealed room” as precaution against nonconventional attack—plastic sheets to cover windows, first aid kit, canned food and bottled water, wet towel to place under the door against chemical penetration.
More explosions.
Eight missiles—all with conventional warheads—fell that night on the Tel Aviv area. A few people were lightly wounded from the blasts, but four died from their gas masks, including two elderly women who suffocated because they forgot to remove its seals and a three-year-old girl who was strangled when her panicked father pulled the straps on her mask too tightly.
The next day Yehudit’s daughter, Amira, and her two small children moved in. When the siren sounded, they rushed into the sealed room and put on gas masks. Arik, though, refused to wear his. “I’ll join you in the sealed room, but there are limits,” he said.
“You’re undermining the family’s morale,” Yehudit complained. “If you’re joining us you should wear a mask.”
“I’ll solve the problem for you,” he said.
When the next siren sounded, he sat in the living room, watching TV.
FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life, Arik found himself useless during war. Retired as commander of the logistics brigade, he had asked to continue serving in some capacity and been assigned to a unit attached to the general staff, whose mission was to plan logistics in real time if an unexpected front—say, against Egypt—opened during war. But there was nothing for the unit to do now: this was a missile war, and there was no tangible front.
Instead this turned out to be Yehudit’s war. She joined a team of psychologists treating Tel Aviv residents—like the man who’d left his armchair when he heard a siren, and seconds later the tail of a Scud crashed through the ceiling, sending fragments into the chair.
The Scud attacks were a reversal of the wars Israel had known. The home front was now the battlefield. This was also Israel’s first war that wasn’t a communal experience. Each family was on its own, in its sealed room: an atomized war for a postcollectivist Israel.
And for the first time in its history Israel was under attack and wasn’t hitting back. The government acceded to American requests for Israeli restraint, to maintain Arab support for the war against Saddam. But the government lacked an adequate missile shield and couldn’t even protect its people. The Americans delivered Patriot missiles against the Scuds, but those were experimental and often inaccurate.
With every siren Israelis repeated their ritual of confinement, waiting in sealed rooms for the soothing voice on the radio to tell them when they could remove their gas masks. They listened skeptically to the reassurances of their leaders and to military experts who had insisted before the war that Saddam wouldn’t dare attack.
Every afternoon there was an enormous traffic jam on the Tel Aviv highway heading south. Scud attacks usually happened at night, and Tel Aviv residents were abandoning the city.
Many of the Achmons’ neighbors fled. Arik and Yehudit stayed. After each missile attack, Arik went to the scene to survey the devastation—partly out of curisiosity, partly out of instinct.
Some Tel Aviv residents temporarily relocated to settlements in the West Bank and even Gaza. The territories were the safest place in the land: clearly Saddam wasn’t going to risk killing Palestinians. The Yesha Council instructed settlements to turn schools into shelters for the Tel Aviv “refugees.” Yisrael Harel noted a certain grim satisfaction among his neighbors: after three years of intifada, Tel Aviv was seeking refuge in Ofra.
THE GULF WAR ended on February 28, 1991, six weeks after it began. Believing Jews noted portentously that that date coincided with Purim, the holiday of Jewish triumph over attempted annihilation. Dozens had been wounded, hundreds treated for trauma. But while thirty-nine Scuds had been fired, mostly at population centers, only one Israeli was killed by a missile. Even secular Israelis spoke of divine protection for Israel.
As the Scuds fell, planes filled with Soviet immigrants were landing at Ben-Gurion Airport. The Iron Curtain had parted and hundreds of thousands were coming home. For nearly three decades Jews around the world had campaigned to “let my people go.” In the 1970s, the Iron Curtain had partly opened, only to be shut again with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the crisis in Soviet-American relations. But now, with the unraveling of the Soviet Union, that final miracle of a terrible and awesome century, the Jews were free to leave.
Israel was facing chaos. The housing shortage was acute. Tent camps were rising in public parks, and there was talk of opening army barracks for temporary shelter. Israel inherited the elite of a failed superpower, but the economy wasn’t absorbing the gift. Classical violinists and cellists filled the streets, playing for coins. Scientists and engineers worked as night watchmen.
Even as straightforward a matter as processing immigrant belongings was overwelming the system. Port warehouses were crowded with crates marked with Cyrillic letters and filled with heavy dark furniture, samovars, pianos (every Russian family seemed to have one). Astonishingly, immigrants had no way of retrieving their crates, which officials had neglected to number or catalog. Outraged immigrants were reporting back to family and friends in Russia that Israel was dysfunctional, that perhaps it was better to wait or even reconsider emigrating altogether.
Arik was hired by the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental organization charged with bringing immigrants to Israel, to advise it on how to streamline the process. Arik was appalled to discover that there was no contact among the half-dozen government ministries involved in processing immigrants. The agency in charge of bringing in immigrants by plane had no relationship with the agency bringing in their crates by ship. No one was dealing with customs.
Arik formed a team that created an interagency computer link, and a one-stop clearing center where the immigrants met representatives from all the relevant ministries. The system began to work. For immigrants it meant the ability to quickly identify and reclaim their crates. For Arik, it was another victory in his war for a rational Israel.
“ISRAEL IS WAITING FOR RABIN”
THE COLLAPSE OF the Soviet Union was one of the great blessings in Israel’s history. The entire former Soviet bloc, whose countries had severed relations with Israel under Kremlin pressure, reopened embassies in Tel Aviv. So did many African countries that had cut relations with Israel under pressure of the Arab oil boycott two decades earlier. China and India established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. The UN formally repealed its “Zionism-racism” resolution, passed in 1975 as a Soviet initiative and the most bitter symbol for Israelis of the renewed pariah status of the Jews. The Zionist goal, so long deferred, of restoring the Jewish people to the international community seemed finally vindicated.
Yet a solution to the Palestinian problem seemed more remote than ever. During the Gulf War many Palestinians had stood on their rooftops cheering as Scuds fell on Tel Aviv, alienating even Israeli leftists. The intifada of mass riots gave way to an intifada of stabbing sprees. A Gazan ran through the streets of Jaffa with a sword, attacking passersby; he was wrestled to the ground by an Arab Israeli garage worker named Abd al-Karim Abd al-Ghani, who was stabbed to death. Another Palestinian stabbed a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl named Helena Rapp so many times that her heart was exposed. An Israeli reservist named Amnon Pomerantz made a wrong turn into a Gaza refugee camp; his car was surrounded and he was burned alive.
Elections were held that spring. In the gap between Israel’s growing acceptance around the world and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, the Labor Party—headed once again by Yitzhak Rabin, to the delight of Yoel Bin-Nun—tried to present voters with a new vision. Let’s take Tel Aviv out of Gaza and Gaza out of Tel Aviv, Rabin demanded. The implicit message was Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and many Israelis were ready to hear it. “Israel Is Waiting for Rabin,” the Labor slogan went, a takeoff on the morale-boosting song from the weeks before the Six-Day War, “Nasser Is Waiting for Rabin.”
Though the IDF had largely defeated the intifada, in fact the intifada won. Many Israelis now understood that the price of maintaining the whole land of Israel was permanent occupation of a hostile people. Decades of war and terrorism had failed to break Israel; but in face of defiant women and children, Israelis felt helpless.
On June 23, 1992, the Labor Party returned to power. It was almost exactly twenty-five years since General Rabin had led the IDF in the Six-Day War. And now Rabin had returned as elder statesman to try to extricate the nation from the consequences of that victory. Watching Rabin’s election-night speech on TV—“I will navigate . . . I will determine”—Yoel thought about how the Commander of History was again about to make His presence known in Israel.