THE HANDSHAKE
IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT, August 28, 1993, and Ofra had just experienced the most depressed Shabbat in its history. Its residents had known many traumatic moments—terrorist attacks and the Sinai uprooting and the Jewish underground and the intifada. But nothing like this. The day before, the media had reported on a deal, concluded during secret negotiations in Oslo, between the Rabin government and the PLO. The details were still unclear, only that Israel and the PLO had agreed to recognize each other and enter into formal negotiations. And as a show of goodwill, Israel would turn over most of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho to Arafat. In Ofra the news was greeted like a death sentence.
Yisrael Harel was waiting outside his house when the black government car, accompanied by a jeep with border police, appeared. The call had come from Motta Gur just as Shabbat ended: at a time like this, explained Motta, he wanted to be with his friend Yisrael. Motta felt a debt to Yisrael. As chief education officer of the 55th Brigade, and then as head of the paratroopers’ commemoration efforts, Yisrael had helped preserve the legacy of the battle for Jerusalem.
“How is everyone?” Motta asked, resting his hand on Yisrael’s shoulder, just as he had when he last visited Yisrael’s home, during the mourning for his son Eldad. “Lousy,” said Yisrael, managing a half smile.
Yoel Bin-Nun saw the vehicles parked outside Yisrael’s home and hurried over. Others did too, until Yisrael’s living room was crowded with neighbors.
Motta listened silently to their rage and grief. Had the government lost its mind? Did Motta really think we could make peace with an archmurderer whose life’s purpose was to destroy the Jewish state? How could you, liberator of Jerusalem, be part of a government that endangered Israel’s hold on Jerusalem, to say nothing of the lives of thousands of Israelis in Judea and Samaria and Gaza? In the end the PLO wasn’t interested in Ofra, it wanted Tel Aviv. Nothing would come out of this pretend peace except blood.
“Friends,” said Yisrael, seeking calm, “Motta has come on a private visit.”
Motta, now deputy defense minister, was pale and very thin. Yisrael knew Motta’s secret: he was fighting a rare cancer known as carcinoid, which spreads with agonizing slowness. Motta asked Yisrael to take him and his secretary to an inner room. There, she gave him a shot of morphine.
Motta returned to the salon. Looking around at the angry, anxious faces, he said, “I’m here as a friend. I know you are in pain. But I want to be clear: I support the agreement. I think this is a good strategic move for Israel. This can save the state from demographic disaster and raise our status around the world.”
Yoel could hardly control himself. How could Rabin, of all people, have legitimized Arafat? Had he been wrong about Rabin all along? For months Yoel had been trying to get settler leaders and Rabin to reach a compromise over building in the territories. In a meeting with Rabin, Yoel had warned him that there would be no peace between Arabs and Jews without peace among Jews.
And Motta: just recently Yoel had gone to see him and pleaded, Don’t surprise us. At the very least give us, the settler leaders, some warning if you are about to radically change the status quo. Work with us; we can help control emotions among our people.
Yoel said now, “You promised me, Motta: no surprises. Instead you’ve left us with the phone dangling in the air and you’ve cut the cord. What am I supposed to say now to my community?”
“Look, Yoel, I’m here,” Motta replied. In fact Motta too had been taken by surprise by the Oslo agreement. “Whatever problems come up, I will be your address,” he promised the settlers.
Yoel of course had his own address. However heartbroken, he resolved not to give up on Rabin just yet. Perhaps that connection could help contain the damage.
ARIK ACHMON WATCHED the TV broadcast from the White House as President Clinton nudged a reluctant Yitzhak Rabin to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat, and thought, We can do business with him. Of course Arafat is detestable, but he’s no fool. He understands that America is the only superpower and that he has no choice. If we compromise, so will Arafat.
Arik had met Rabin on several brief occasions, in the army and then in Labor Party circles, and each time confirmed the same impression: Rabin is the best of us. Modest, awkward in the spotlight, he placed the nation’s interests before his own. Like the best army officers, he was open to change, curious about opposing opinions. When elected prime minister in his first term, in 1974, he’d been the first sabra—native-born Israeli—to lead the country; now, nearly twenty years later, he was still Israel’s only sabra prime minister. Unlike the prime ministers born in Eastern Europe, Rabin wasn’t haunted by anti-Semitism, and rarely spoke of the Holocaust. He took the ability of the Jews to defend themselves as a given. Only a leader with that kind of self-confidence, believed Arik, could make peace.
In his inaugural speech as prime minister, Rabin presented a vision of the Jewish state integrated into the family of nations, fulfillment of the Zionist dream of normalization. The old order was changing, Rabin had said then, and Israelis had to stop believing that the whole world was against them. Challenging the biblical saying of Balaam, Rabin declared that the Jews were not fated to forever dwell alone. If Israel was to find its place in the new world, it had to abandon its psychological ghetto.
Seeing Rabin and Arafat together at the White House ceremony signing the Oslo Accords, Arik felt that vision was about to be fulfilled.
YISRAEL HAREL WATCHED Rabin shake Arafat’s hand and thought, They’ve lost it. Israel’s ruling elite, the children and grandchildren of the pioneers, had lost their socialism, and now they were losing their Zionism too. All that remained for Israel’s elite was an ideology of peace. A false peace. A peace of fools.
Normalization, Yisrael feared, was happening prematurely, before the Jewish state had been accepted as normal. How would this people continue to make sacrifices for survival, retain its alertness? Rabin himself had said in a candid moment that he feared an exhaustion among his people. But exhaustion was no basis for policy, not for a people confronting existential threat.
Yisrael was writing a weekly column for Ha’aretz, the left-wing newspaper, as a token right-wing voice. In his columns he bemoaned the loss of pioneering ideals. If leftists opposed settlement in Judea and Samaria, he asked, then why weren’t they settling in the Galilee and the Negev, areas within the borders of pre–’67 Israel that were at risk of losing their Jewish majority?
Yisrael had loved the kibbutzniks from the moment he first encountered them as sailors on the illegal boat that transported his family and other Holocaust refugees trying to reach the land of Israel. The kibbutzniks had carried a broken people on their backs. But now they were depleted, their revolutionary passions spent. Like my friend, Arik Achmon, the kibbutznik of North Tel Aviv—
Yisrael was tormented by a heretical thought: Could it be that the ultra-Orthodox were right? That the secular Zionists were doomed to fail because they had excised the soul of the Jewish people, its religious faith, creating an identity too thin to transmit?
He confided to a journalist: “I used to say that if I had to be confined to a desert island, I would prefer to be with my kibbutznik friends from the paratroopers. But I can’t trust them with the Jewish future anymore.”
Urgent—Personal!
September 29,1993
The Prime Minister
Mr. Yitzhak Rabin
Mr. Prime Minister!
As you know, I have been trying these last years, and investing mighty efforts, to attempt to prevent a dangerous schism in Israeli society, in particular over Jewish settlement.
But how could Yoel continue in that role after Rabin had done the unthinkable and legitimized Arafat?
Soon, if there will not be a drastic change, I will no longer be able to influence [settlers] in a moderate direction.
The letter was replete with exclamation marks, combined exclamation and question marks, underlined words—the sputtering style that Yisrael Harel had tried to erase from Yoel’s writings for Nekudah but which, in his current agitation, Yoel couldn’t suppress.
Yoel took some comfort from the fact that the Oslo Accords didn’t explicitly call for a Palestinian state or the redivision of Jerusalem—both of which, Rabin told the Knesset, he opposed. The only way to prevent the Oslo Accords from leading to a Palestinian state, Yoel insisted, was to recognize the Yesha Council as an official parallel body to the new Palestinian Authority, with control over the settlements. But if Rabin continued on his present course, wrote Yoel, “I fear a great explosion.”
YOEL WAS SHOWN into the prime minister’s office and left alone with Rabin. No aides or note-taker, Yoel noted appreciatively. A gesture of trust—
Yoel had resolved to avoid emotion: his relationship with Rabin, he understood, was based on an exchange of analyses of Israel’s situation. And discretion: aside from his wife, Esther, he told no one about their deepening connection.
“The premise of the peace process is wrong,” Yoel said to Rabin. “Fatah is not more moderate than Hamas. They share the same goal. There is a division of labor between them: Hamas continues with terrorist attacks while Fatah pushes for diplomatic gains. Strategically they are working together.”
“Nonsense,” retorted Rabin. “They are divided by an abyss of hatred.”
Yoel mentioned a slogan he had recently seen on a wall near Ramallah: “Fatah and Hamas Together until Victory.”
“It’s just a slogan,” said Rabin, waving his hand in dismissal.
Then he said, “We’re not here to convince each other about the things we don’t agree on, but to find those things that we do agree on.”
They agreed on this: no withdrawal to the 1967 borders, an undivided Jerusalem, a security border along the Jordan Valley. No settlements, said Rabin, would be moved in the interim stages of an agreement.
If Rabin remains committed to an interim rather than a comprehensive approach, thought Yoel, we can work together.
“I will continue writing to you,” said Yoel, “but I absolve you of any responsibility to reply. You are the prime minister, you will make the decisions. I only ask that you read what I write.”
Rabin nodded and offered his limp handshake.
THE TRAITOR AND THE PROPELLERS
THOUGH THE CRUCIAL details had yet to be negotiated, many Israelis reacted as if the war was over. At a progovernment rally in Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, young people released balloons and danced with giant Israeli flags and leaped ecstatically into a pool of water. State schools were instructed to offer education for peace. Army Radio played peace songs.
With rare exceptions, the Israeli media uncritically embraced the Oslo process. Newspapers assured readers that they would financially benefit from peace; on the cover of the financial section of Yediot Aharonot appeared a drawing of a dove with a hundred-dollar bill in its beak. A Yediot reporter was dispatched to Tunis to write about Mr. and Mrs. Arafat at home; Yasser, the reporter noted, personally served his guests soup.
A majority of Israelis supported the Oslo Accords. Partly the changing mood was a result of the intifada: a growing number of Israelis had concluded that the price for absorbing the territories was too high, that occupation undermined Israel’s Jewish and democratic values, that the Jewish people hadn’t returned home to deprive another people of its sense of home. And so if the right’s policies had led to the intifada, then the left’s policies ought to be given a try. The 1970s and ’80s had been the decades of Greater Israel, and the ’90s seemed about to become the decade of Peace Now.
There was also, as Rabin noted, the changing international atmosphere. During the Sebastia showdown of 1975, much of the public had supported Gush Emunim as an expression of its contempt for the UN’s Zionism-racism resolution. But Israel was no longer being instantly demonized, and Israelis responded with a readiness to take risks for peace.
Israel was once again reinventing itself. For the first time in almost twenty-five years, inflation dropped below 10 percent. Thanks largely to Russian immigration, the economy was expanding by about 6 percent a year. Though the population had grown by 10 percent in four years, the threat of mass homelessness passed. Instead, Russian families doubled up in small apartments, worked at two or more jobs, and quickly entered the middle class. It was Israel’s most “normal” immigration: most Soviet immigrants had come to be part of not a Jewish state but a western state; Israel was simply as far west as they could reach. Yet they were also becoming Israeli. In Russia, families tended to have a single child, an expression of uncertainty about the future; now hopeful immigrant parents were risking a second.
Foreign investors, Michelin-star chefs, California winemakers—all were discovering this new Israel. Israelis were traveling the world and returning with a longing for the civility of abroad. There was less pushing in lines at the bank and at bus stops. The claustrophobic sensation of too many survivors from too many traumas pressing against each other in too little space was easing. Once, when the six beeps announced the hourly radio news, bus drivers would turn up the volume and passengers fall into communal silence; now, on days when there were no terrorist attacks, drivers and passengers ignored the news.
Privatization of government companies, first tested by Arik Achmon a decade earlier, was on the agenda. The miracles of capitalism: instead of the two-year wait for a telephone under the old system, the wait was now a matter of days and dropping. Even the notorious government bureaucracy wasn’t immune to the new spirit: one could now get an Israeli passport in one day, delivered to your door. A new commercial TV channel easily overtook the government channel. Then came cable: twenty channels, two hundred channels! Products from around the world appeared on supermarket shelves—Italian pasta replaced the local noodles made bright with yellow dye. McDonald’s opened with celebratory media coverage: Israel was truly becoming part of the world.
THE SETTLERS AND their supporters reacted to Oslo just as Yoel had feared. The end of Zionism, they were calling it. One protest poster read: “For sale: Used State, 1948 Model, in Good Condition.” In opening the way to an Israeli withdrawal, Rabin, some said, was leading the Jews to another holocaust: after all, even Labor Party dove Abba Eban had once called the pre-’67 lines “Auschwitz borders.”
The attacks against Rabin turned brutal. Posters of his face wrapped in a kaffiyeh appeared on the streets of Jerusalem. Graffiti declared him a traitor. Stickers demanded, Oslo Criminals to Justice. In the magazine Nekudah, a settler leader compared Rabin to Philippe Pétain, the French general who collaborated with the Nazis. In an editorial, Yisrael Harel denounced “the government of evil.”
Rabin reciprocated the contempt. He compared antigovernment protesters to “propellers,” spinning pointlessly. “They don’t affect me,” he said dismissively, using a Hebrew phrase which could also be interpreted as “I couldn’t care less about them”—which is exactly how the right understood it. He compared the Likud to Hamas and labeled both the enemies of peace, outraging his opponents by implying that the chief democratic opposition was no better than a murderous fundamentalist group committed to Israel’s destruction.
How were Israelis to argue with restraint when both right and left were convinced that if their opponents prevailed, the state would be not merely diminished but destroyed?
Terrorism intensified. The stabbing sprees in Israeli cities continued; dozens of Israelis were killed and wounded after the signing of the Oslo Accords, more than in the year before the peace process began. Rabin noted that the attacks were initiated by Hamas, which opposed the agreement, and called the new terrorism victims “victims of peace”—a phrase that further outraged his opponents. Arafat, Rabin insisted, would control Hamas more effectively than Israel ever could because he would be operating without the constraints of the rule of law—“without the Supreme Court and B’tselem,” an Israeli human rights NGO, as he cynically put it.
Yoel watched with horror as his community and the leader he loved turned against each other. How could students of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, the camp that had consecrated Jewish unity and the Jewish state, speak with such contempt for the government of Israel—for the man who brought the victory of the Six Days?
But Rabin too, Yoel believed, was hardly blameless. How could the man who had given the people of Israel its moment of greatest unity initiate a process that was leading to its unraveling?
Every few weeks Yoel would sit up late at night and write another letter in longhand to Rabin. The prime minister’s bureau chief, Eitan Haber, would include Yoel’s latest fax in Rabin’s weekend reading package. In one letter Yoel pleaded with Rabin to reach out to the settlers: “Most settlers are not personally hostile to you, the relationship can still be salvaged.” He urged Rabin to be firm in negotations with the Palestinians, berated him when Yoel sensed weakness, praised him—grudgingly—when Yoel sensed strength. “Congratulations (for now?) on your firm stand,” he wrote Rabin. He offered the prime minister political advice: the Israeli public doesn’t want a leader perceived as desperate for peace at any price. He signed one letter “with respect and anxiety,” another, “with pain.”
The letters contained urgent requests. Ofra needed a bypass road around Ramallah. The Gaza settlements needed access to the Mediterranean shore. Settlements needed land on which to expand, otherwise they would become isolated islands. Only the IDF, and not Palestinian police, must be responsible for security on roads leading to settlements. Yoel challenged Rabin: If we share the same goal of preventing a PLO state and an Israeli withdrawal to the ’67 borders, then you have no choice but to strengthen the settlements.
Rabin treated Yoel’s requests seriously. Yoel wrote Rabin about ensuring Israeli control over an ancient synagogue in Jericho, where settlers were praying and studying. “As far as I know there were no provocations there,” Yoel wrote. “And if there were—let’s deal with it together.” Rabin’s office wrote back, saying that religious life in the synagogue would remain under Israeli control. Construction began on a bypass road between Ofra and Jerusalem. And the Gaza settlements were given access to part of the coast.
Yoel had no official standing among the settlers; many considered him an irritant or worse, a virtual sellout. Yet Rabin devoted hours to conversations with him. The requests were all one-way; Rabin never asked Yoel to convey a message to settler leaders, never urged him to try to temper settler opposition. For Rabin the meetings were an end in themselves. He needed to know how his policies were perceived by a worthy opponent.
Yoel tried explaining the settlers to Rabin: “You must understand our situation,” he wrote. “On the one hand Hamas has declared open war on us. . . . On the other hand, the PLO is fighting against Jewish settlement in Yesha on the diplomatic front. . . . Even angels would be hard-pressed to remain steady under such pressure.”
And Yoel tried explaining Rabin to the settlers: He isn’t our enemy! When the Yesha Council invited a pyschologist to suggest ways of unnerving Rabin, Yoel was outraged: We are pouring oil on the fire! Yoel reminded settler leaders that, as prime minister during his first term, Rabin had withdrawn from parts of Sinai but, unlike Begin and Sharon, hadn’t uprooted a single settlement there. So who was left, who right?
Yoel had resolved not to divulge his meetings with Rabin to settler leaders. But he did confide in Yisrael Harel.
“You’re naive,” said Yisrael. To himself he added: Rabin gets thousands of faxes, and Yoel thinks he has a personal relationship with him. Yoel always has to imagine himself at the center. Now he’s adopted Rabin as a father figure.
A SETTLER NAMED Chaim Mizrahi was murdered while buying eggs in a Palestinian village. The killers turned out to be members of Arafat’s Fatah. Only after intense pressure from the White House did Arafat condemn the killing—by fax.
“During our [last] meeting,” Yoel wrote Rabin, “you repeated two or three times the sentence: ‘As long as the Shin Bet tells me that it is Hamas [that is behind the terrorist attacks]—it’s Hamas!’ Two days later it was revealed that the murder of Chaim Mizrahi, may God avenge him, was carried out by Fatah!”
Rabin, warned Yoel, “was trapped in a conceptual failure”—a charged term that evoked the behavior of Israeli leaders who, in the days before the Yom Kippur War, ignored approaching danger because they believed the Arabs were incapable of attacking. Like Golda Meir, Yoel was implying, Rabin was ignoring reality.
And yet, continued Yoel, astonished, Rabin was intent on transferring guns to Fatah—weapons that would sooner or later be turned against Israel. “Until now I thought I knew where you want to go, and I knew we disagreed. Now, though, I don’t know where you are leading us! Do you know??”
Yoel was warning of two approaching disasters. The first was external: after winning territorial concessions from Israel, Arafat would betray the peace process and return to terrorism. The other threat, though, would come from within. Growing despair among the settlers and their supporters would lead to “acts of desperation.” The result, he wrote Rabin, would be a tragedy for them all.
DESECRATION OF GOD’S NAME
SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN on February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a physician in the town of Kiryat Arba near Hebron, put on his reservist uniform, though he was not on reserve duty, loaded the Galil assault rifle he kept in the closet, and put another four bullet clips in his pockets. He moved quietly, so as not to awaken his wife and children. Then he walked toward the Tomb of the Patriarchs, burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah.
It was the holiday of Purim, which celebrates the undoing of Haman’s plan to destroy the Jews of ancient Persia. And the thirty-five-year-old physician was on his way to write the next chapter of Jewish triumph over their enemies.
Tall, soft-spoken, with long beard and sidelocks, the Brooklyn-born Dr. Goldstein was noted for his piety. Every morning he immersed himself in a mikveh, a ritual bath. Often, when his busy schedule permitted, he would join the dawn prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. His neighbors could call the doctor at any hour, and he made house calls. He had treated hundreds of Israelis wounded in terrorist attacks; whenever an attack occurred in the Hebron area, the army immediately beeped him.
Even in hard-line Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein was considered extreme. He was a disciple of the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane, who had been assassinated by an Arab terrorist in New York in 1990. Kahane created a Jewish theology of vengeance and rage. The purpose of the Jewish people, he had preached, was to defeat Amalek—the biblical tribe that attacked the Israelites in the desert and whose evil essence passes, in every generation, into another nation seeking to destroy the Jews. When Jews erase Amalek, God’s name will be glorified and the Messiah will come.
The ultimate Kahanist holiday was Purim. Haman, as the Scroll of Esther pointedly notes, was a direct descendant of the king of Amalek. The holiday is the story of triumph over Amalek.
Kahane’s minuscule movement, Kach, was banned from the Knesset for racism. And Kahanism was marginal among the settlers. But not in Kiryat Arba. Its town council even had a Kahanist member—Dr. Goldstein. Kahane had loved his doctor disciple: “There is no one like Baruch,” he’d said, no one so willing to sacrifice.
Lately Goldstein was in despair. He’d been treating too many terrorist victims; a close friend had died in his arms. Goldstein blamed the government and the IDF for weakness, for desecrating God’s name in its war with the new Amalek, the “Arab Nazis,” as he called them. Interviewed by a journalist, the doctor had said, “There is a time to kill and a time to heal.”
Baruch Goldstein approached the entrance to the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
“Purim same’ah”—happy Purim—he greeted the Israeli guards. They assumed that Dr. Goldstein was on his way to morning prayers.
As he walked the worn stone steps that led up to the sand-colored, fortresslike building, Goldstein carried with him the accumulated humiliations of Hebron. The Jewish pilgrims confined by Muslim rulers to the seventh step of this building. The massacre of Jews in 1929. The terrorist attacks that embittered the Jewish return after 1967.
He entered a small room with a high domed ceiling, the shrine of Abraham and Sarah. Two stone cenotaphs behind bronze gates marked the graves in the cave below. Jewish prayer books and Bibles crowded the shelves: this was the building’s synagogue. An adjacent hall, marking the graves of Isaac and Rebecca, was the mosque. A green metal door separated the two rooms. Goldstein opened the door. From the hall came chanting: “Allahu akbar,” God is great.
He entered the hall and hid behind a pillar. Men were bent on embroidered prayer rugs. Kerchiefed women were grouped along a wall. The hall was especially crowded: it was the Muslim fast of Ramadan.
He fired.
Panicked men ran for the door, directly into the line of fire, trampling those still prone on prayer rugs. “They’re killing the men!” a woman screamed.
He ran out of bullets. Reloaded. Emptied the second clip and loaded a third. A fourth. He was firing not at men in prayer but at Haman and Hitler and Arafat, at Amalek.
As he paused to load his fifth bullet clip, he was overpowered. By the time soldiers arrived, twenty-nine worshippers were dead, dozens more wounded. There was blood on the prayer rugs, on the stone floor and walls. The murderer, beaten to death, lay in his own blood.
AS SOON AS the morning reading of the Scroll of Esther ended in Kfar Etzion, Hanan Porat headed toward Hebron. Hanan was a father figure to the settlers, and today his place was among his people in Kiryat Arba. Reporters would soon be descending on the town; left-wing politicians would be demanding a government crackdown on all the settlers, not just on their extremist minority. Hanan intended to strengthen the settlers’ spirits, and urge them, too, to condemn the massacre, not to allow the left to taint a whole community with the act of a renegade.
Before leaving home Hanan assembled a plate of hamantaschen and other sweets, a symbolic offering for the holiday. He put on a peddler’s cap, a kind of joke: on Purim it was customary to dress up, enhance the merriment. All the more important, given the gloom of this day, to push back with the spirit of Purim.
Hanan loved Purim. For Jewish mystics it was a day to transcend this world of duality and taste the world to come, where there is no evil, only good. According to one tradition, a Jew was supposed to get so drunk on Purim that he couldn’t distinguish between Haman and Mordechai—Amalek and Israel. Evil as illusion, a foil to invigorate the good, as Rabbi Kook taught.
Purim was a time of wildness, of rupture in mundane reality. And now Hanan had to deal with the consequences of a madman who had distorted the holiday’s redemptive meaning.
Hanan wasn’t surprised to learn that the murderer had been a follower of Meir Kahane. Hanan had long regarded Kahane and his misfits with an almost aesthetic distaste. Outsiders. Not part of us— In Brooklyn Kahane had organized vigilante patrols to protect Jews in urban neighborhoods, and he had tried to do the same in Judea and Samaria, as if the Jews were a besieged minority in their own country. Hanan despised Kahane’s thuggish style, his apocalyptic messianism, so unlike the optimistic messianism of the Kookians. Hanan had always dismissed Kahane’s followers as mere nuisance, best ignored.
A crew from Israel’s Channel 2 TV was waiting at the entrance to the Kiryat Arba town council. Hanan ignored the crew and greeted friends standing inside the doorway. “Happy Purim!” he called out, smiling. “Happy Purim, hevreh!”
“Are you happy, Hanan Porat?” the reporter asked.
“We’re happy because today is Purim,” Hanan replied. “On Purim you must be happy even if there are crises. I came to strengthen the people here. But I consider what was done terrible.”
He entered the office and forgot about the interview.
That night Channel 2 news showed Hanan, in peddler’s cap, smiling and wishing his friends happy Purim. “We’re happy because today is Purim,” he told the camera. “On Purim you must be happy even if there are crises.”
And that was it. Without his condemnation of the massacre. As though he were indifferent. Happy.
For many Israelis, the enduring image of the Hebron massacre became a grinning Hanan wishing Baruch Goldstein’s neighbors a happy Purim.
THE SHOCK AND REVULSION among Israelis toward the massacre were profound. Dozens of rabbis, among them those from settlements, signed a letter stating that “there can be . . . no forgiveness for the murder of people at prayer before the Creator of the world.” Speaking to the Knesset, Yitzhak Rabin excommunicated the mass murderer from the community of Israel.
In Kiryat Arba, opinions were divided. Some residents hailed Goldstein as a savior. Rumors spread that the Palestinians had been planning a massacre of Jews and that Goldstein had preempted them—a Purim miracle. A thousand mourners walked in a muddy field in a drenching rain to bury Dr. Goldstein, beside a park dedicated by the town council to Meir Kahane. Yisrael Ariel, the former rabbi of the destroyed town of Yamit, eulogized Goldstein and compared him to Rabbi Akiva and other martyrs.
In his lead editorial in Nekudah, Yisrael Harel denounced the massacre as a “repulsive act . . . that should shake the soul of every person created in God’s image. . . . We are not part of the same camp [with those who support the massacre]. . . . Our camp . . . will continue to be built with holiness and purity.”
Then, in a second editorial appearing just below the first, he abruptly changed tone: “The attacks against us have been so relentless, so hateful, that we were tempted to wonder whether the tragedy that happened in Hebron—and it was great, but fateful especially for us, the settlers—was greater than the Holocaust.” The two sides of Yisrael Harel: Humane and empathic, mocking and self-pitying.
Hanan Porat had feared that the settler mainstream would be blamed for Goldstein, and that was precisely what happened. The symbol of that convergence was Hanan himself.
Columnists accused Hanan of rejoicing despite the massacre, and wondered whether he would have shown any less enthusiasm for celebrating Purim had there been Jewish victims. “Haman Porat,” taunted Labor Knesset member Haggai Merom. The beautiful boy of religious Zionism, leader of the orphans of Kfar Etzion, wounded paratrooper, hero of Sebastia: the gloating face of the Hebron massacre.
It’s a lie! Hanan told friends, journalists, colleagues in the Knesset. They edited out my condemnation! They’re trying to destroy me, and through me, the settlement movement! I, Hanan Porat, a supporter of mass murder? I, who denounced the Jewish underground, including some of my closest friends? Who insisted on coexistence with our Arab neighbors in Kfar Etzion and sought no revenge for the murder of our parents? When a friend was killed by terrorists a few years ago before Purim, I still said, “Happy Purim,” because that is what a Jew affirms!
The denials scarcely helped. Israelis recalled not only Hanan’s “Happy Purim” but the smile that went with it.
Yoel Bin-Nun was furious with Hanan. He had desecrated God’s name: Yoel knew of no more damning indictment. So what if they edited his condemnation? That was no excuse! Who knew better how to manipulate the media than Hanan Porat? He should have known how his comments, his demeanor, would emerge on TV.
For Yoel, the incident was an expression of Hanan’s long pattern of denial. Like reassuring protesters in Yamit that the evacuation wouldn’t happen because, according to the logic of redemption, it couldn’t happen. Or refusing to offer a realistic plan for the Palestinian problem. Of course Hanan hadn’t celebrated the massacre. He was only trying to do what he always did, encourage the people, impart a bit of light. But his behavior revealed that he hadn’t absorbed the severity of the moment. Hanan’s inexhaustible optimism, his faith in imminent redemption, were both strength and fatal weakness. Redemption was an opportunity, not an excuse to deny reality.
Yoel decided there was no point in arguing with Hanan. And that decision, he knew, marked an ending between them.
Personal Only!
March 25, 1994
Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin
Shlomot!
There is a vast and worrying gap between you and the public at large. . . . The public doesn’t trust the PLO, and rightly so, and continues to see it, and ongoing Palestinian terrorism, as an existential threat. . . . There is wide popular support for Jewish terrorism! . . . If you won’t understand this, and if you won’t insist on an end to [Palestinian] terrorism as an absolute pre-condition for negotiations [with Arafat], you are likely to forfeit both the peace process and the prime ministership. . . . The key is in your hands!
Even as he warned Rabin of the consequences of his ill-conceived policy, Yoel warned the settlers of the consequences of Jewish terrorism.
The next victim of right-wing violence, Yoel predicted in Nekudah, would be a Jew. “The murder of gentiles [by Jews] ends with the murder of Jews. . . . The threats are already being heard, the justifications are already being written. . . . Words that are spoken don’t remain in the air. There are those who absorb the message and rise up and act.”
DESPITE THE OSLO ACCORDS—because of them, said critics—Palestinian terrorism reached its highest level in years. Hamas sent suicide bombers into markets and onto buses. Left-wingers blamed Baruch Goldstein for provoking Palestinian revenge; right-wingers countered that Hamas needed no pretext to kill Jews. Rabin declared that the best answer to Hamas terrorism was to strengthen the peace process with Arafat. But many Israelis now blamed Arafat himself for encouraging terrorism. Rabin’s assurance that Arafat would suppress terrorism wasn’t happening. Arafat speaks about the “peace of the brave” on CNN, Israelis noted bitterly, but preaches holy war in Gaza.
Ariel Sharon compared the left’s faith in peace with Arafat to its old infatuation with Stalin—a fatal inability to distinguish enemy from friend, mass murderer from peacemaker. And he warned that handing over control of most of Gaza to Arafat would lead to Katyushas on neighboring Israeli towns like Ashkelon and Ashdod.
Arik Achmon laughed when he heard that one. Katyushas on Ashkelon! The right knew only how to frighten. What did they think, that the government would allow Katyushas to fall on Israeli cities? That the IDF was incapable of dealing with a few rockets?
In a speech in a Johannesburg mosque intended to be off-limits to the press, Arafat argued that his peace overtures were merely tactical. He recalled that the prophet Muhammad declared a cease-fire with an Arabian Jewish tribe and then, when he became strong enough, broke the cease-fire and destroyed the tribe. A reporter smuggled out a tape recording, and the speech made headlines in Israel. Even many Israelis who had supported the Oslo process concluded, We’re being played for fools.
Yoel Bin-Nun’s articles in Nekudah were increasingly anguished. Two approaches divided Zionism, he wrote. The first was total: “Everything! . . . This approach swept us all up after the Six Days to the peaks of euphoria—the ‘complete’ land of Israel in our hands—and from there, with prophetic urgency, to sounding the great shofar of total redemption.” The second approach, he added, was that of classical Labor Zionism—gradually building the land and accepting the limits of reality.
“In the storms of my heart I am close to the first approach. . . . And so my criticism and my feelings of pain and rage are directed at myself. But since Camp David and Yamit, I have understood that we need to return in penitence to classical Zionism. That approach, partial and pragmatic, aspires for all [of the land] but builds in small steps. Another settlement, another house and another road. The building of the people of Israel in its land—not as a means of ruling over the Arabs, not as a basis for sovereignty [over Judea and Samaria] and the prevention of withdrawal . . . but as a liberating act of the resurrection of the nation returning to its land.”
As usual, Nekudah was inundated with outraged letters against Yoel. In the magazine’s satirical section appeared this notice: “We regret to inform readers that we can no longer publish any more responses to Yoel Bin-Nun’s article from issue #23”—which had appeared over a decade earlier and was still presumably aggravating Nekudah readers.
Yoel’s own bitter response revealed his sensitivity. “There are some who sit in the safety of Tel Aviv and cancel their subscriptions to Nekudah because of the ‘hostile’ ideas of the man from Ofra,” he wrote. “And they preach . . . love of the land of Israel to those who are sitting in Judea and Samaria for 25 years.”
ILLICIT ENCOUNTERS
FOR A MAN violating one of the deepest taboos of his community, Yisrael Harel seemed surprisingly at ease. Gracious, even smiling, he sat in the garden of a suburban home near Tel Aviv and exchanged small talk with Yezid Sayigh, an Oxford political scientist with a trim beard and a slight English accent who also happened to be part of the PLO’s negotiating team with Israel.
They were meeting to test the possibility of a dialogue between the Yesha Council and the PLO. No less. Not that either man recognized the legitimacy of the other’s political movement. But the Oslo process had forced the PLO and the settlements into a new proximity. Was it now possible to get to know the demonic other as neighbor?
The idea had come from Yossi Alpher, a former senior official of the Mossad who headed a think tank for strategic studies. Until Oslo your Palestinian neighbors were “locals,” without political power, Alpher had said to Yisrael. But now they were represented by the Palestinian Authority. “Since you wish to remain in the territories, you should be interested in seeking some sort of common language with your new neighbor,” said Alpher.
Alpher noted that Yisrael didn’t seem disturbed by the proposal. Though Yisrael wrote editorials in Nekudah insisting that Oslo could be defeated, he sensed that the dream of a complete land of Israel from the river to the sea was over. Perhaps it was easier for him to reach that conclusion because he had never been a messianic determinist. Based on Jewish history, he knew that destruction was as possible as redemption.
Alpher proposed, as a first step, a meeting with a Palestinian academic from abroad. Not a good idea, thought Alpher, to begin with a Palestinian leader from the West Bank whose son may have thrown rocks at Yisrael’s car. Meeting a PLO academic rather than someone with Jewish blood on his hands, as Israelis put it, might also ease settler criticism of Yisrael should the encounter be prematurely exposed. For now Yisrael needed to keep the meeting from his colleagues at the Yesha Council, who would almost certainly respond with outrage, perhaps even demand Yisrael’s resignation. In meeting with a member of the PLO—even a soft-spoken professor from Oxford—Yisrael would be labeled a defeatist, precisely the accusation he routinely raised against Rabin and the left.
“I’m thinking of meeting someone from the PLO,” Yisrael told his wife, Sarah. “I feel responsibility as a leader to deal with the new situation.”
“Is it responsibility or curosity?” asked Sarah.
“You’re right,” said Yisrael, “I am curious.”
Now here he was, on this warm June afternoon, under a lemon tree in Yossi Alpher’s garden, with a gentleman from the PLO.
Yisrael had intended to open with a lecture, asserting that the return to Judea and Samaria was an inevitable consequence of Jewish history. Instead, he found himself talking with Sayigh about their families and professional lives. Sayigh told him that he’d been born in Lebanon, to a Palestinian family that had fled the town of Tiberias in the Galilee during the 1948 war. It was hard to identify the professor with the murder of Israeli civilians.
Alpher suggested that each man present his vision of a final status agreement. Sayigh proposed a confederation of two states without borders between them. Yisrael proposed Jordan as a Palestinian state—after all, a majority of its people were Palestinians, and Jordan was historically part of the land of Israel—with West Bank Palestinians voting in Jordanian elections.
Their differences were unbridgeable. Still, when the meeting ended two hours later, both men said they wanted to meet again.
THE ABYSS DEEPENS
SUNDAY MORNING, JANUARY 22, 1995. The IDF soldiers, many of them paratroopers with red berets in their epaulets, gathered, as they did every week after their Shabbat furlough, at the intersection of Beit Lid near the coastal town of Netanya. There they waited for buses that would take them back to their bases. Many were recent recruits; some had been dropped off by their parents.
A young man dressed in an IDF uniform and carrying a briefcase approached a group of soldiers gathered at a kiosk. He moved into the crowd. The suitcase exploded.
Soldiers and passersby rushed to help the wounded. Three minutes later, another suicide bomber exploded.
Twenty-two dead, sixty-six wounded, almost all of them soldiers.
Israelis don’t regard fallen soldiers as martyrs but as children. And so Israelis went into deep mourning for the children of Beit Lid. Prime Minister Rabin addressed the nation, promising to pursue terrorists despite the peace process—“no border will deter us”—and to pursue peace despite the terrorists. Israel, he declared, would not withdraw to the 1967 borders, would preserve a united Jerusalem “forever” and maintain its security border on the Jordan River. “In this bitter hour there is not right or left, no religious or secular,” he said. “We are all the people of Israel.”
And then he slipped. Explaining why peace was the best guarantee to prevent terrorism, he said, “We don’t want the majority of the Jewish population . . . of whom 98 percent live within sovereign Israel [outside the territories], including united Jerusalem, to be vulnerable to terrorism.”
Was Rabin really making a distinction between a terrorist attack in Beit Lid and a terrorist attack in Ofra? Was the prime minister of Israel telling the settlers that their lives, the lives of their children, mattered less to him than the lives of the “98 percent” who lived in sovereign Israel?
That is certainly how the settlers and their supporters heard those words. Rabin, they accused, was signaling to the terrorists that killing settlers was a lesser offense.
Yoel faxed Rabin: “Is your intention to break our spirit? It won’t succeed!” Then, softening, he added, “There is a deep crisis of faith between a majority of settlers and the government, much more than is warranted, not so much because of your deeds but primarily because of the style of your pronouncements.”
They met soon afterward. Yoel said, “When you speak about 98 percent, how can one expect reactions other than rage and despair?”
“Do you expect me to be attacked and not respond?” demanded Rabin.
“The settlers hear this as abandoning them in the field of battle.” Yoel chose that last phrase carefully: abandoning a wounded soldier was a violation of the IDF’s deepest ethos, which Rabin himself had nurtured.
“I didn’t mean it to be understood that way,” Rabin said.
“I know you, and I know you didn’t mean it. But that is how it is being understood.”
“I won’t apologize,” Rabin said. “But I won’t repeat it.”
RABIN’S OFFICE INVITED Yoel to an Independence Day reception, in the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.
Yoel approached Rabin to wish him a happy holiday. Standing beside the prime minister was Israel’s chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, in gray beard and black fedora.
“If Yoel were the leader of the settlers,” said Lau to Rabin, “it would be possible to reach an agreement with them.”
“I’m not so sure,” Rabin said dryly. “I’m the recipient of some of his love letters.”
Yoel took it as a compliment.
A FRAGILE EMPATHY
IN AN OLD COUNTRY HOUSE in a village near Oxford, three prominent Palestinians and three prominent settlers sat facing each other beside a fireplace. The Palestinians and the Israelis were a long way from home.
Yossi Alpher asked Yisrael Harel to open.
Yisrael spoke with a frankness that impressed the Palestinians. “How do I listen to the other side without weakening my cause?” he asked. “It’s easier to know your neighbor as a stone thrower.”
It was June 1995. The dialogue was still a secret. Yisrael was waiting for the right moment to tell his colleagues in the Yesha Council, but the right moment never seemed to come. And so Alpher had organized a two-day meeting far from the conflict and the danger of exposure.
Yisrael brought with him two partners, both secular academics who lived in settlements and whose Zionism was tough but pragmatic, without messianism. There was Yosef Ben-Shlomo, professor of Jewish philosophy, and Ozer Schild, former president of the University of Haifa.
On the Palestinian side there were also two academics—Yezid Sayigh was joined by his friend Walid Khalidi, editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. And there was a Fatah activist named Sufian Abu Zaida, popular with the Israeli media because he spoke a fluent Hebrew learned in Israeli prison.
Yezid Sayigh spoke next. “Like Yisrael Harel I have learned that an examination of other people’s views must lead me to look at my own views too,” he said.
Yosef Ben-Shlomo told of being brought as a child to the land of Israel from Poland just before the Holocaust. As a teenager he had been an admirer of Gandhi; after the Six-Day War he signed a petition against Jewish settlement in Hebron. But Arab rejection of Israel’s existence convinced him that Israel had to settle the territories. Though secular, he joined Gush Emunim’s squatting attempts and was evacuated seven times. “They needed eight soldiers to carry me.” But now, he added enigmatically, “I may be on the brink of a third change of heart.”
Walid Khalidi spoke of his family, who had lived in Jerusalem’s Old City for six centuries and had produced judges, scholars, and the last Arab mayor of Jerusalem. “This has always been part of my daily consciousness. This may have in a sense stunted my own growth, since it allowed me little flexibility for alternative development.”
One way or another, they were all admitting that the conflict had not only energized and defined them but also depleted them. They shared a kind of relief: they could see themselves in each other, men whose people’s historical claim totally claimed them, whose people’s suffering denied them peace. But could they really allow themselves empathy, or would the other side exploit that as weakness?
Sufian Abu Zaida insisted on telling his story in Hebrew. He was born in the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza and dreamed of taking vengeance on the Jews. In Beirut he joined Fatah, then returned to Gaza as an operative. Intending to “clean up” the camp, he shot a drug dealer, was caught, and spent twelve years in prison. There he studied Hebrew by reading the Israeli dailies. In getting to vicariously know Israeli society, he found he could no longer hate Israelis. “Yisrael Harel’s articles were the hardest to understand, due to the rich vocabulary he used.”
Abu Zaida spoke about his experiences lecturing to Israeli high school students.
“When will Israelis be invited to appear before Palestinian schoolchildren?” demanded Ben-Shlomo.
“There is no chance today, but it will come,” Abu Zaida replied.
AFTER LUNCH—there was a mix-up with Yisrael’s kosher meals, and he stoically ate salad—the conversation resumed in the salon. They argued, intensely but without rancor, about competing claims and colonialism and morality, even considered keeping settlements intact under Palestinian sovereignty.
Turning to Abu Zaida, Ben-Shlomo asked, “When you say that Palestinians are willing to compromise, does this mean they will acknowledge the Jews’ moral right to a homeland in Palestine, just as the Israeli left recognizes the Palestinians’ moral right to a homeland in Palestine?”
Abu Zaida: “Jews whose grandparents were born thousands of miles away while my brothers in exile have no right to return—we don’t recognize it.”
Yisrael Harel, sarcastic: “When we recognize the Palestinian’s right of return, he will be able to recognize our moral right.” In other words: the right of return will mean the destruction of the Jewish state, and then its right to exist won’t matter.
There was a third option: Palestinians would exercise their right of return in a Palestinian state, not in the state of Israel. That would mean the end of Israeli control over Judea and Samaria, and the end of Palestinian claims over lands that were now the state of Israel. Yet no one mentioned that option.
THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast, Alpher was gratified to see settlers and Palestinians mingling. Yisrael invited Sufian Abu Zaida to address meetings at settlements, as a way of preparing his community for the new reality. Abu Zaida readily agreed.
At the final session the Israelis continued to press for Palestinian recognition of their national legitimacy, and the Palestinians continued to resist.
KHALIDI: We can coexist with a deep moral-ideological abyss. Let’s distinguish between daily life and the political superstructure. . . . This can at least end the bloodshed, and this is the most important moral imperative.
YISRAEL: This isn’t enough. You can’t separate us from our history.
The Jews wanted to talk principles, the Palestinians practical details.
KHALIDI: For nineteen years, prior to ’67, you survived without Bet El [a settlement near Ofra].
YISRAEL: To give up Bet El today is to declare that it was never important to us to return to the land of Israel. It was easier when we never had it. Our real message must be to find a new formula that doesn’t constitute a betrayal of either side.
They were all keen on continuing.
A JEW IN TEL AVIV
YAIR LAPID, the young talk show host who was always ready with a clever rejoinder, seemed perplexed. Why, he asked his guest, Meir Ariel, haven’t you promoted your new album? No media appearances until now, no marketing. You’ve even confined sales to a single music store in Tel Aviv. “It’s as if you’ve said, ‘I’m releasing an album but I’m imposing a blackout.’”
“You’re right,” said Meir, smiling nervously and clutching his guitar. “I tried very hard not to release [the album], but in the end it weighed so heavily on me that I put it out and that’s it. But that doesn’t mean that anyone has to hear it. In all seriousness I say that anyone who wants to do his soul any good shouldn’t listen to this album. It’s a hard album, with hard material.”
The audience laughed.
The album was called Rishumei Pecham (Charcoal Sketches), and Meir was right: these were not songs one listened to for pleasure. One was an apocalyptic vision based on the book of Daniel and sung partly in Aramaic; another was about an old kibbutznik so frustrated by economic failure that he beats his wife and children; another was based on the Talmud’s musings on the varied forms of divine justice inflicted on Titus, the Roman general who burned the Temple, and which Meir turned into an allergory for the fate of material-driven empires. Meir had sent the songs to his friend, Shalom Hanoch, hoping he would produce the album. But Shalom refused: even for Meir, this was pushing the limits of obscurity.
Two years earlier Shalom had produced Meir’s fourth album, Zirei Kayitz (Seeds of Summer), which contained some of his most accessible love songs. Yet the album sold poorly. Meir had long since accepted his place on the respected periphery of Israeli music. But he was tormented by his inability to provide for his family. Defiantly anticommercial, Rishumei Pecham seemed a taunt against the music industry.
Meir produced the album on his own new label, Ariel Productions. The minimalist songs, backed by a plaintive accordion that had lost its Zionist vigor, were all recorded in a single day. Meir’s son, Shachar, a musician in his mid-twenties, was producer, while Tirza ran what business there was. Initially Meir refused to promote the album. Only on Tirza’s insistence did he agree to appear on Yair Lapid’s show.
Rishumei Pecham was Meir’s favorite among his own albums. His only concept album, it was at once a protest against a devouring modernity and a eulogy for the Israel of communal values. Like Avital Geva, he was raising a kibbutznik’s last cry against the new Israeli culture of McDonald’s and cable TV, against the banks to which the kibbutzim were mortgaged and the real estate developers uprooting orange groves for shopping centers.
More than in any previous work, Meir was exposing something of his growing devotion to Judaism and the God of Israel. Much of the language and imagery of Rishumei Pecham was drawn not only from the Bible—a common source of inspiration for Israeli artists—but also from the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries and kabbalah, mostly absent from secular Israeli culture.
Meir understood God’s existence partly through language. There are no words for things that don’t exist, he told a friend. And so if there is a name for God, He must exist. Meir found amusing the notion that the world evolved without a creator and that a human being was a material construct without a soul. “The human being is nothing more / than a piece of sophisticated mud,” he sang. “And he has a certain personality / and a perfect shape. And that’s / sophisticated—for mud.” He continued: “Mud that dries up—disintegrates . . . / And a human being who dries up—he too disintegrates / Except that / . . . He has a tombstone, and an address / and that’s—sophisticated.” The proof for Meir of the existence of a soul was its ability to give its incarnation a name.
MEIR WAS INTERVIEWED on Army Radio by his old friend Yoav Kutner. What, wondered Kutner aloud, was Rishumei Pecham actually about?
KUTNER: I’m thinking of your career. . . . You get wonderful reviews, you produce wonderful albums. . . . And yet you still haven’t made it. Not one of your albums has sold.
MEIR: Of course I’d be happy if—
KUTNER: You do everything backwards. Your previous album, Seeds of Summer . . . was, quote, “commercial.” Meaning that it was a less difficult album. . . . With Shalom Hanoch’s help it flowed and was pleasant to listen to. . . . And it didn’t succeed. . . . And instead of trying even harder to do something light, you go and do your least accessible album . . .
MEIR (switching to English): Man, I’m telling you, I’m gonna make it. Not only nationwide, but also— That’s why I’m speaking English! International wild!
Reverting to Hebrew, Meir explained that Israel was such a small market, why not sing in a foreign language?
KUTNER: Chinese is big these days.
MEIR: Chinese, exactly. . . . We need to create in every language. Folk songs in Romanian—in Israel!
“SHALOM ALEICHEM”—PEACE BE WITH YOU—Meir said in archaic Hebrew, and bowed his head in chivalrous greeting. Covering his long graying curls was a beaten black fedora.
“Aleichem shalom,” replied his friend Menachem Regev: And peace be with you.
Every Wednesday evening Meir came to Menachem’s Tel Aviv apartment, where friends gathered to study the Torah reading of the week. Menachem, a graphic artist, had grown up secular, become ultra-Orthodox, left that community, and was now, like Meir, in transit between worlds. Menachem, whose hobby was inventing Hebrew fonts, shared with Meir a love of the resurrected language, a sense of awe simply to be speaking it. On Menachem’s walls were framed album covers he had designed, including some of Meir’s.
The living room filled with a dozen men. There were musicians, former kibbutzniks, a psychiatrist. Someone rolled a joint. A newcomer appeared. “Baruch habah”—Blessed be the one who comes—people greeted him. No one asked how he knew to come; if you found your way here, you belonged.
“Yallah, Meirkeh,” said Menachem, using the Yiddish endearment for Meir’s name, “let’s begin.” Meir read from the book of Numbers, the portion about Balaam the magician, who intended to curse Israel but instead blessed it. Meir read the text like poetry, cherishing every word. Several men put on kippot; others remained bareheaded.
Then the discussion began.
Did Balaam bless or curse Israel when he proclaimed it a nation that would dwell alone? What did it mean to be a chosen people?
The Jews, said Meir, aren’t any better than anyone else; the heart isn’t more important than the brain. But every nation has a unique role. Our role, said Meir, is to remind the world of God’s oneness.
How do we know there is only one God? someone demanded.
Because that’s what’s written, someone replied.
Everyone laughed.
The conversation turned, inevitably, to modern Israel. Could the Jewish state find its place in the Middle East, or was it destined to remain apart, as Balaam seemed to predict? Could Israel trust the Palestinians to make peace? Was Arafat partner or nemesis? Was the return of the Jews home fulfillment of ancient prophecy? And what about the rabbinic establishment and its monopolization of Judaism?
More than the arguments, the gathering itself was the message: Judaism doesn’t only belong to the Orthodox, we too are custodians of the Torah, we too have the right to struggle with the tradition.
Finally, around 3:00 a.m., Menachem turned to his friends and said, “You don’t have anywhere to sleep?”
“Good night, hevreh,” said Meir. And though Friday evening was still two days away, he added, “Shabbat shalom”—Sabbath of peace.
A SOLDIER’S DEATH
SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN on July 17, 1995, Motta Gur, pistol in hand, entered the walled garden of his house in North Tel Aviv. The garden was the place he loved most. Standing near the loquat tree, he pointed the gun at his temple and fired. A preemptive strike: the rare cancer that had been spreading slowly and excruciatingly in his body for nearly ten years was about to reach the brain. In a note of farewell, he told his family that he hadn’t wanted to be a burden.
Arik Achmon got the call shortly after Rita Gur found her husband in the garden. If I’m ever in a similar situation, thought Arik, I hope I’ll have the courage to do what Motta did.
In the last years, as Motta became increasingly ill, Arik would meet him every few weeks in his office at the Defense Ministry, and Motta, one of the strongest men Arik knew, would confide how unbearable the pain was, how humiliating the loss of bodily control.
At the house, Arik found Rita and their four children quietly grieving. Rita said she was at peace with Motta’s choice. “Motta restored his dignity in his own eyes,” she said.
Arik focused as always on the practical questions. What does Rita need, what about the funeral arrangements? Rita asked Arik to be among the eulogizers, representing the family of fighters.
For a brief moment, Israelis united in grief. Motta represented the nobility of the old Israel, its readiness to take responsibility without seeking reward. Commentators recalled how Motta, appointed commander in chief of the IDF after the Yom Kippur War, restored the army’s faith in itself; how he commanded the astonishing rescue of Israeli hostages in Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976, after terrorists had hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv. An elderly woman told a journalist how, during a paratrooper raid against terrorists in Gaza in 1955, Motta had carried the dead body of her son for kilometers under fire. Motta had kept in regular touch with her, inviting her to family events. “Today I lost my second son,” she said.
Journalists described Motta as a first-rate military man but a failed politician, ending his career as mere deputy defense minister. Yet Arik knew another story: Motta had confided that Rabin had offered him the defense ministry, but because of his illness Motta had to decline. Perhaps that was not only Motta’s tragedy but the nation’s: after serving as defense minister, Arik believed, Motta would have become Rabin’s successor as prime minister. And Motta, with his commitment to the peace process and his love of the settlers, could have been a healer.
Thousands gathered in the military section of the Kiryat Shaul cemetery near Tel Aviv. The rows of identical flat white stones, generals buried beside privates, were a last repository of egalitarian Israel. It was a hot July day; pine trees provided patches of shade. The mourners were secular and religious, young paratroopers in red berets and veterans who had fought with Motta in Jerusalem. There were Yisrael Harel and Yoel Bin-Nun and Hanan Porat. Yitzhak Rabin, barely protected, walked among the crowds.
“Motta was our Kotel,” our Wailing Wall, Hanan told a journalist, the one man in this government to whom settlers could confide their trauma. Hanan noted that it was the seventeenth of Tammuz, the fast day marking the Roman breach of the walls of Jerusalem and the countdown to the destruction of the Temple. What does it mean, he wondered aloud, that the commander who proclaimed “The Temple Mount is in our hands” has been taken from us on this day?
The eulogies began with Arik. “Motta’s path in life was to be the first, as a fighter and a commander,” he said in his hoarse soldier’s voice, a permanent reminder of his time in Lebanon. “He was a statesman, a family man, a man of the book. And he was first in almost all those areas.” Motta entered politics without becoming a politician, said Arik, just as he had devoted his life to the military “without taking on military poses.”
Arik recalled how, after the battle for Jerusalem, Motta had wept inconsolably as Arik told him the names of their fallen friends. “That was the real Motta,” he said.
“His family and friends and all of Israel have lost a good and honest man, who loved and was loved. The heart weeps.”
THE PARTNERSHIP
THE RABIN GOVERNMENT was negotiating with the Palestinians over the next stage of withdrawal from the territories, and Yoel Bin-Nun was feeling desperate. The first withdrawal had included most of Gaza but only a symbolic concession in the West Bank, the town of Jericho. The next withdrawal, though, would be more substantive: the IDF would be pulled out of West Bank cities, leaving the settlers far more vulnerable.
Inevitably, Yoel knew, there would be dozens of mistakes in the government map that would jeopardize settlers’ security and other Israeli interests and which a discerning settler eye could easily detect. But there was almost no communication between the Yesha Council and the government; Motta had been Yisrael Harel’s channel. And so, though he held no official position in the settlement movement and no one had appointed him intermediary, Yoel concluded that it was now up to him.
Rabin had come to love Yoel. That was the impression of Rabin’s bureau chief, Eitan Haber. These days, when Yoel faxed Rabin his latest handwritten complaints, Haber would bring the letter directly to Rabin’s attention; Rabin would read carefully, writing notes in the margins. And when Yoel called for a meeting, he was quickly admitted. Now Yoel phoned Haber with a request that, even for Yoel, was impertinent. “I want one of our people to look at the government’s maps” for the next phase of withdrawal, he said. Haber balked: not even the Palestinians had seen the maps yet.
Yoel pressed. “There are problems that can be quietly settled. We have enough disagreements between us as it is. I’m asking for one person from our side to look at the maps before they go to the Palestinians.”
Haber phoned back. “Whom do you suggest?”
Yoel offered the name of a settler leader who was an expert on topography. “Nothing will be leaked,” he promised.
Through the summer of 1995, Yoel pressed Rabin to deal with the corrections Yoel’s colleague had suggested. The isolated settlement of Tekoa needed to be connected to the Etzion Bloc. And what about the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Hebron? And why wasn’t the Ofra bypass road being built more quickly?
HANAN PORAT WAS INCONSOLABLE. How could Rabin be doing this to Mother Rachel? The mother of the Jewish people! Where was his Jewish soul?
As part of the next phase of the Oslo process, the government of Israel was negotiating the transfer to Palestinian rule of Rachel’s Tomb, on the border between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Rachel’s Tomb was among the most beloved places of Jewish pilgrimage, especially for single young women seeking husbands. Jewish women marched in protest from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Right-wing politicians denounced Rabin’s insensitivity as a form of madness.
Sensing a threat to the tomb, Hanan organized a group of Mercaz students to establish a yeshiva in the small domed building. The government body in charge of holy places forbade the group from bringing in books and furniture. But after each visit the yeshiva students “forgot” religious books and thereby created a small library. And then one night students brought in tables and chairs via a back entrance through the adjacent Muslim cemetery. Classic Hanan: create facts on the ground and force the government to live with it.
The growing public protests forced the government to modify its plan: Rachel’s Tomb would remain under Israeli military protection, but Palestinian police would patrol the road leading to the tomb. That arrangement, said Hanan bitterly, was reminiscent of the time of exile, when Jews visited Mother Rachel under foreign rule.
Hanan went to see Rabin. The two men had a complicated relationship. Rabin hadn’t forgiven Hanan for the mass squatting at Sebastia, which Rabin blamed for undermining the stability of his first government. But then, during the 1992 elections, when the Likud made a campaign issue of Rabin’s temporary breakdown on the eve of the Six-Day War, Hanan publicly defended the prime minister, and Rabin’s door was open to him.
While waiting to enter the prime minister’s office, Hanan encountered Rabbi Menachem Porush, a venerable ultra-Orthodox politician with a long white beard. Hanan told Porush that he’d come to plead for Mother Rachel. Porush asked if he could join the meeting. By all means, said Hanan.
Hanan opened by spreading out a large aerial photograph of the area around Rachel’s Tomb. Hanan sensed that the way to reach Rabin was through security rather than historical arguments. Hanan noted the close proximity between Rachel’s Tomb and the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. If Palestinian police controlled the road to the tomb, he argued, they would be within shooting distance of Gilo’s Jewish homes.
Suddenly Porush approached Rabin, embraced him, and began weeping. “This is Mama Ruchel!” he cried out, using the Yiddish for Mother Rachel. “How can you give away her grave?”
Rabin, embarrassed, asked Porush to calm himself. “How can I calm myself?” cried Porush. “The Jewish people won’t forgive you if you abandon our mother’s grave.”
In the presence of the two men, Rabin phoned Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Renegotiate the arrangements for Rachel’s Tomb, said Rabin.
The road to the holy site remained under Israeli rule.
OSLO II—THE WITHDRAWAL of the IDF from West Bank cities—passed in the Knesset, but just barely, 61–59. On this, the most sensitive Israeli issue, Rabin relied on a majority achieved by a political bribe: wooing a right-wing Knesset member, Alex Goldfarb (a former paratrooper, as it happened) with a government position. “Goldfarb’s Mitsubishi,” right-wingers contemptuously referred to the deal and its perks. They were especially outraged by Rabin’s reliance on anti-Zionist Arab parties for his bare majority. On an issue of such fateful importance to the Jewish people, how could Rabin violate the sensibilities of so many Israelis?
Rabin retorted: I will make peace with whatever majority is available.
It was Yoel Bin-Nun’s nightmare: the collapse of the most minimal Israeli cohesion. The passing of Oslo II without a Jewish majority in the Knesset, Yoel wrote Rabin, “is not morally and historically binding on the whole of the people of Israel and surely not on Jewish history.” Still, Yoel pledged to continue to oppose any attempt to undermine the rule of law and to prevent civil war.
But that was not the mood on the streets. On October 5, 1995, tens of thousands of protesters filled Zion Square in downtown Jerusalem. Young men in knitted kippot leaped up and down shouting, “Rabin traitor!” “Rabin Nazi!” One young man burned a poster of Rabin in a kaffiyeh. “Because of this man the state is going to be destroyed!” he shouted.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, and other leaders of the Likud opposition stood on a balcony several stories above the crowds. A banner across the balcony’s facade read, “Death to the Arch-Murderer,” a reference to Arafat. But many in the crowd weren’t interested tonight in Arafat. “Death to Rabin!” hundreds chanted.
A burning torch was propped up on the sidewalk. Beside the torch was a handwritten sign: “A memorial candle for Rabin.”
YOEL WENT TO SEE RABIN.
The rabbi challenged the prime minister over the impending withdrawal. “If this is what you’re giving away now,” demanded Yoel, “what will you have left to offer in a final-status agreement?”
The two were alone.
“Yoel,” said Rabin, looking at him steadily, “there will be no final-status agreement. It is impossible to reach an agreement on Jerusalem. We will continue to manage the interim agreement and to proceed in stages.”
“What does that mean?”
“To expand the Palestinian areas, give them more authority.”
No withdrawal to the 1967 borders; no redivision of Jerusalem. Had Rabin come to regret legitimizing Arafat as a peace partner? Or had Rabin realized all along that only an interim agreement was possible?
“You have unleashed forces you won’t be able to control,” said Yoel.
“I can’t rule out that danger,” acknowledged Rabin. “But we’ll do our best.”
If only the settlers could know that the man they reviled as a traitor was doing all he could to protect them, thought Yoel. But of course they couldn’t know. Yoel’s partnership with Rabin—for that is what it had become—depended on discretion. In the streets they were chanting, “Death to Rabin!” Death to the commander of the Six Days! Yoel’s inability to reveal the truth, to stop the campaign of hate, tormented him.
The greatest threat, Yoel knew, came from within. Only the Jews could defeat the Jews. Yoel had learned, through repeated trauma, that the Jews needed to accommodate each other’s conflicting dreams and fears. Right, left, Orthodox, secular: all would have to live together again as a people in its land.
Yoel got up to leave. “Thank you,” he said.
Rabin tilted his head, as if puzzled by the gratitude. He didn’t need Yoel’s thanks, just as Yoel didn’t need his. They had a job to do together, and they were doing it. For all the differences between them, they belonged to the same elite: those who took responsibility for the fate of the Jewish return home.
Rabin offered his perfunctory handshake. Yoel took leave of his prime minister, his commander. He faced yet another late night of worry for his people and exasperation at their failures, pacing his study until he collapsed into restless sleep.