A BLOW TO THE HEART
AS SOON AS YOEL heard the news, he knew: a Jewish hand had done this.
It was Saturday night, November 4, 1995. Yitzhak Rabin had just left the stage of a peace rally in a Tel Aviv square when a young man waiting in the VIP parking lot rushed from behind and fired twice into his back. The news said only that Rabin was badly wounded. Yoel retreated to his study to pray. Inexplicably, he felt a great calm. Rabin will be okay, he thought. So bound did Yoel feel to Rabin that afterward, when he heard that Rabin had died even as he was praying for him, Yoel wondered whether the calm he’d felt then was the departure of Rabin’s soul.
WHEN SHABBAT ENDED, Hanan Porat set out toward Bethlehem, to Rachel’s Tomb. According to tradition, this night was the anniversary of the death of Mother Rachel, and Hanan intended to join the thousands of pilgrims gathering at her grave.
He turned on the radio and heard the news. Unable to continue, he pulled over to the side of the road. To keep from crying out, he bit his lip—so hard he drew blood. He thought of his last meeting with Rabin, how the prime minister of Israel couldn’t resist the grief of an elderly Jew for Mother Rachel. And now Mother Rachel is weeping for her son, Yitzhak—
THE ASSASSIN, YIGAL AMIR, was an Orthodox Jew, a law student at Bar-Ilan University, one of the major institutions of religious Zionism. Though not a settler, Amir had been active in the pro-settlement movement.
In all the years of war and terrorism, Israel had never experienced such open grief. Thousands of teenagers spontaneously gathered in the square where Rabin had been murdered, lighting candles and singing the old Zionist songs. The radio repeatedly played “Song for Peace,” anthem of the Israeli peace movement, which Rabin had sung with others on the stage just before his murder and whose bloodstained lyrics sheet had been found in his breast pocket. Trauma hotlines were overwhelmed with callers. A sticker appeared on Israeli cars, “Shalom, Haver”—Farewell, friend—quoting President Clinton.
Yoel joined the seemingly endless line passing before Rabin’s casket outside the parliament building in Jerusalem. Some held handwritten signs that read, “Thank You.” A bearded man in a kippah held a sign: “I Am Ashamed.”
Yoel paused before the flag-covered coffin and tore his shirt collar, like a mourner for a close family member.
But he didn’t weep. Grief would come later. First must come the reckoning.
Three young men from West Bank settlements appeared at Yoel’s door. They came separately, yet offered variations of the same story: each had heard a rabbi declare that, under Jewish law, Rabin deserved the death penalty. None of the young men knew Yoel personally, but they came to him because they didn’t know whom else to trust.
Yoel knew that several rabbis had discussed whether, under Jewish law, Rabin deserved the death penalty as a moser, someone who hands over a fellow Jew for persecution or death, or even as a rodef, who actively seeks to kill a fellow Jew. A letter had circulated among rabbis inquiring about the halachic relationship to the Rabin government, and hinted at the possibility of moser. Had the assassin—Yoel refused to say his name, calling him only “the evil one”—received a rabbi’s blessing? And even if he hadn’t, would he have been wrong, given the prevailing atmosphere, to assume that his act would have religious legitimacy? And most terrifying of all: How many more potential assassins were wandering among them?
THE RELIGIOUS ZIONIST COMMUNITY was under siege. Government ministers blamed the entire right, and especially religious Zionists, for creating an atmosphere of incitement that had led to the assassination, as if anyone who had opposed the Oslo process was an accomplice with Yigal Amir. A Tel Aviv bus driver called a young man in a kippah “murderer” and threw him off the bus. At army hitchhiking stations, religious soldiers returning from frontline service in Lebanon were denied lifts. A new sticker appeared: “We Won’t Forgive, We Won’t Forget.”
The emergency meeting of religious Zionist leaders—“Assembly of Self-Reckoning”—began with a minute of silence. Then, facing the packed Jerusalem hall, Rabbi Yehudah Amital of the Mount Etzion yeshiva declared: “We cannot say, ‘Our hands have not shed this blood.’ ” Another speaker, a professor of Jewish thought, wondered whether a return to exile might not be preferable to civil war among Jews.
Others, though, were concerned less with self-reflection than with self-protection.
Yisrael Harel confided to the audience that he had approached left-wing leaders and proposed a joint left-right rally against violence. But the left, he said bitterly, wouldn’t allow the right “to ruin [its] pleasure” in implicating its ideological rival. “Those sitting here—everyone, including Rabbi Amital . . . all sat together this week in the defendant’s dock.”
Yes, he conceded, “we should beat our breasts in remorse.” Not for the murder, but for failing to have the courage to control the “fringe extremists.” But, he concluded, “not only has our way of life not failed, but it is the way. The royal road of Zionism and Judaism.”
Yoel sat in the audience, seething. Even now, with the nation torn and bleeding, Yisrael’s impulse was to protect his camp.
Yoel approached the podium and demanded the right to speak. “If there will be, God forbid, another political murder in the state of Israel, it may not continue to exist,” he said, voice shaking. “At this very moment, while we are sitting here, there are still people speaking about rodef against certain [political] figures. . . . I agree wholeheartedly with all that has been said here about the beauty of the religious community and of religious Zionism and of religious education. . . . But all this depends on one thing: that all those who spoke about rodef, who ruled rodef—and I know that there are, that there were those in the last half-year who spoke about rodef—not fools, not fringe characters, [but] Torah authorities— If they will not resign from all their rabbinic positions until the end of the shivah [the seven-day mourning period]—until the end of the shivah—this is an ultimatum—then I will fight them before the whole people of Israel.”
“Give us names,” Yisrael demanded. “If you have proof, I will go with you to the police.”
“I’ll provide names after the shivah,” said Yoel, and left the hall.
FOR DAYS AFTERWARD, Yoel’s pronouncements made headlines. Journalists waited outside his home. The law of rodef—for most Israelis an obscure halachic concept—entered the national lexicon.
Yoel approached the two chief rabbis—one Ashkenazi, one Sephardi—and confided two names to them. Both were leading rabbis within the settlement movement. Yoel asked the chief rabbis to create an investigative committee. And he asked that they keep the names private. Naively, Yoel hoped that the rabbinic community would purge itself, without police involvement. Yoel, after all, had no hard evidence against anyone.
But one of the chief rabbis leaked the names to the media. When Yoel heard the news, he thought, They’ve buried me—
Now the police felt impelled to act. Humiliatingly, leading rabbis were summoned for police interrogation. An emergency meeting of hundreds of rabbis condemned what it called the “incitement” against the rabbinic community, and everyone understood whom the rabbis meant. The Yesha Council denounced Yoel by name.
Yoel received death threats and began wearing a bulletproof vest. Several young men, reservists from an elite combat unit, volunteered to serve as his bodyguards. On Shabbat they accompanied him to the Ofra synagogue. An outraged Yisrael told Yoel: Now you are turning your neighbors into potential murderers. Yisrael stopped speaking to him.
When no indictments resulted, Yoel publicly apologized to “all those innocents who were hurt.” Still, Yoel insisted that, for all his tactical missteps, he had achieved his goal. As a result of his public challenge, even extremist rabbis had been forced to disavow the political relevance of rodef. Yoel was convinced he had prevented the next assassination.
In turning himself, a rabbi from Ofra, into a symbol of the nation’s grief and rage, Yoel helped religious Zionism return to the mainstream. Israel’s healing began with Yoel’s torment.
“IS CIVIL WAR POSSIBLE?” read the banner hanging in the auditorium of the high school on Kibbutz Ein Shemer. The several hundred students who had gathered to hear Yoel Bin-Nun address that question all wore the uniform of Hashomer Hatzair—blue work shirt with white shoelace crisscrossing at the neck. But the austere socialism of Hashomer Hatzair was gone. Instead there were boys with shaved heads and earrings, girls with jeans torn at the knee.
Yoel stood before them: long graying beard and paunch, white knitted kippah, long fringes of tzitzit extending beneath bulky gray sweater. Deep lines marked his forehead, and his eyes were wide with sleeplessness.
“No enemy from without can endanger us more than the split from within,” he began. “The first and second temples were destroyed because of internal conflict. Our responsibility is to emphasize the commonality of the people of Israel and to push the fanatics of all sides beyond the pale. I don’t want to belong to a camp but to the [whole] people of Israel.”
Suddenly Yoel paused. Smiling widely, he gestured to a middle-aged man sitting among the young people. “My comrade in arms!” exclaimed Yoel.
Avital Geva looked away, embarrassed by the attention.
Over a decade had passed since they’d seen each other last, in a Lebanese village on the edge of besieged Beirut. Now Yoel told the audience how during reserve duty shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Avital had demanded that Shabbat rest be granted to secular soldiers too. “Don’t think that Avital and I don’t have arguments,” he said. “But there is friendship. We’ll argue forever, but democratically.”
“How does democracy go with annexing the territories?” a teacher called out.
“Good,” Yoel replied, like an officer speaking to a new recruit. “I don’t believe we can or should rule over the Palestinians, even though I think that the people of Israel has an exclusive right to the land of Israel. After Oslo, settlement no longer means ruling over the Palestinians. They now have self-rule. But settlements will prevent a Palestinian state, which would endanger Israel’s existence.”
“So what status will Palestinians have?” pressed the teacher.
“The solution is cantons—Jewish and Arab areas. It’s not the ideal solution, but since the Palestinians aren’t ready to accept our existence, it’s the only solution.”
Yoel returned to the question of Jewish identity. “You aren’t new creatures called Israelis but a continuation of the Jewish people,” he said pointedly to the students. “You don’t have to be religious to know the Jewish tradition. I talk with Maimonides; he’s alive for me.”
“If I don’t study Torah, then I’m responsible for the schism?” a girl called out.
“The sad answer is yes,” replied Yoel.
“Come here and eat pork and there won’t be a schism,” a boy called out.
Yoel smiled, tried to be patient.
Avital said, “Yoel, you’ve done more to bring us together than anyone else in this country. You’ve stood against your own camp. What do we need to do from our side?”
“Break the stigma that Judaism belongs only to a certain kind of people,” replied Yoel.
Afterward they embraced. Avital held Yoel’s shoulder and didn’t let go, as if to give him strength. “Ya Allah, Avital Geva!” said Yoel, sounding like Avital. For the first time since the assassination, Yoel seemed happy.
They walked around the kibbutz, the earth moist with the winter rains. Avital spoke about his sons. One was a combat pilot, another an infantry officer.
“I have three Golanis at home,” Yoel said, referring to an infantry unit. “They tell me that the paratroopers philosophize, while Golani does the real work.”
They laughed.
ELECTIONS WERE CALLED for May 1996. Yoel endorsed Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, despised on the right as initiator of the Oslo process.
At a meeting in a synagogue in a town near Tel Aviv, Yoel declared that the peace process was the will of God. “Who appointed you a prophet?” one man demanded. “How do you know the will of God?”
“Just as I knew when I went up to Ofra twenty years ago,” said Yoel.
A young man asked quietly, “What went wrong?” Yoel replied, “We didn’t listen to the moral arguments of the left.”
Shortly before the elections, as the country was still grieving for its fallen leader, for itself, Hamas terrorists resumed suicide bombings. Israeli intelligence determined that Arafat was secretly encouraging Hamas—and then presenting himself as the moderate alternative whom Israel needed to strengthen with additional concessions. On car bumpers appeared a new sticker, “Shalom, Haverim” (Farewell, Friends)—all those killed as a result of the Oslo process promoted by Rabin.
Both the right-wing dream of greater Israel, and the left-wing dream of Peace Now, Yoel concluded, were delusions. Instead, Israel needed to seek consensus, source of its spiritual strength, and from that political center manage an insoluble conflict. Just as Rabin would have done.
The suicide bombings destroyed the vast lead the Labor Party had held in polls after the assassination, and the Likud, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to power. For some on the left, it was the final betrayal.
The Likud government ended the partial freeze on settlement building that Labor had imposed, and resumed large-scale construction in the territories. But a majority of Israelis continued to support the Oslo process. Netanyahu’s mandate from the public was to negotiate more toughly than Labor, but to continue negotiating. More and more Israelis, including many Likud voters, were concluding that there was no alternative to a two-state solution.
THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF YISRAEL HAREL
YISRAEL’S CLANDESTINE MEETINGS with members of the PLO continued. He even succeeded in involving several hard-liners from the settlement community.
Inevitably, though, in an intimate country with few secrets, the Israeli media discovered the improbable dialogue. When the story appeared, the Yesha Council convened in an emergency session. Yisrael was accused of betraying the trust of his colleagues, of legitimizing terrorists. “This is one of the most important steps I’ve taken as head of the Yesha Council,” he countered.
The council condemned those of its members who had met with Palestinians without its approval. But despite calls for Yisrael’s resignation, a majority backed him.
Still, when his term as head of the Yesha Council ended, Yisrael didn’t seek reelection. He needed change, sought a wider scope of influence. His ambitions had always been greater than the religious Zionist community.
Yisrael had an idea: to bring together leading figures from across the political and cultural spectrum to devise solutions to Israel’s internal conflicts. Boldly, the former head of the Yesha Council approached the Rabin Center—founded to preserve the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin—and suggested that it sponsor his initiative. The center promptly hired Yisrael to establish the Forum for National Responsibility.
After a yearlong deliberation, members of the forum released the Kinneret Covenant, which offered a shared vision for a Jewish and democratic Israel. But when the final document was released, Yisrael’s name wasn’t among the impressive list of signatories. He had resigned, following a personal dispute.
Yisrael’s weekly column in Ha’aretz brought him a measure of satisfaction. As the token right-winger, he enjoyed scandalizing the leftist elite. Yisrael’s columns bemoaned the decline of secular Zionism, and especially the kibbutzim. The children’s houses were all closed; even kibbutz dining rooms, center of communal life, were being abandoned. Since childhood Yisrael had venerated the kibbutz. Yet he also resented kibbutzniks for opposing the settlers, for mocking their pioneering credentials. In his mourning and longing for the vanishing kibbutz was also a taunt: Look at the vitality of my camp, and look what’s become of you.
Yisrael found his vindication in the growing influence of religious Zionist youth in the IDF. In Yisrael’s generation, few paratrooper officers had been religious; now, though, Orthodox recruits were forming a new sacrificial elite. On Shabbat mornings in Ofra, young men in small knitted kippot precariously pinned to military haircuts gathered outside the synagogue exchanging army stories, while their younger brothers eavesdropped.
Still, the settlements also threatened the place of religious Zionists in the IDF. If a future government gave the order to evacuate settlements, would Orthodox soldiers obey? And if many refused, how would the army be able to trust its religious recruits? Yisrael understood: the settlements that had empowered a generation of religious Zionists could also destroy them.
A HOLISTIC UNIVERSE
THE GREENHOUSE WAS THRIVING. The young people who came here to learn how to raise fish with minimal water and how to grow lettuce without soil now included girls in kerchiefs from neighboring Arab Israeli villages, Russian immigrant boys from a drug rehabilitation center, shy Ethiopians with few words. The whole people of Israel, as Avital put it. For Avital, everyone was hevreh, even the donkeys and the fish. Two dogs were squabbling in the greenhouse; Avital chided them, “Hevreh, calm down.”
But how much longer could he maintain this vision of a pluralistic Israel imbued with the old kibbutz values of work and improvisation and cooperative effort?
So far Ein Shemer remained true to its egalitarian essence. But even in this strong kibbutz, some were saying they were tired of being an idealistic elite: we’re normal people, just like other Israelis, we don’t wake up in the morning thinking of the big issues anymore, just of how to get through the day. The direction was clear. Other kibbutzim were moving toward private ownership and differential salaries. Privatization: how Avital detested that word! Hurban habayit, he called it, literally destruction of the home, but with a historical resonance recalling the destruction of the Temple. The god of money was penetrating even here. The temple of the kibbutz was falling.
The settlement movement had tried to inherit the kibbutzim as the pioneering avant-garde, but it had only divided the nation. Where, then, would the next vision come from?
Hevreh, this isn’t America, Avital admonished his young people. This land of light and stone would yield blessing only if it was cherished, nurtured. Materialism was as much an existential threat—more!—than all the wars and terrorism. If the Jews lost their narrative, forgot the dreams that had brought them home, how would they survive in the Middle East?
Late at night, kept awake by anxieties, Avital sought comfort in the greenhouse. He sat there with eyes closed, listened to the drip and flow, the sprinklers forming mist across the lotus-covered pool, the rusty fans swaying thickets of reeds. And Avital one more organism in a mutually sustaining whole.
FAREWELL TO OFRA
WITH NEARLY THREE THOUSAND RESIDENTS, Ofra was thriving. There were three elementary schools, three synagogues, the girls’ high school founded by Yoel Bin-Nun, a field school and even a center for cave studies, an art gallery, a library, a supermarket.
But for Yoel and Esther, Ofra no longer felt like home. Yoel’s neighbor Yisrael Harel had resumed speaking to him, but some others continued to shun him. Yehudah Etzion, Yoel noted bitterly, had long since been forgiven, even though his mad plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock would have endangered the very existence of Israel; yet Yoel was despised as a heretic.
Three years after the assassination, the Bin-Nuns left Ofra. They moved back to Alon Shvut, the settlement in the Etzion Bloc that Yoel and Esther had helped found nearly three decades earlier. Back to the national consensus: even left-wingers acknowledged that the Etzion Bloc, close to Jerusalem, would remain part of Israel in any future agreement with the Palestinians.
The Bin-Nuns settled in a modest white stone house, the end of a row of attached single-family homes, with a strip of yard in the back. Hundreds of families now lived in Alon Shvut; thousands filled the neighboring Jewish towns and villages spread among the Etzion hills. Here at least, in its birthplace, the settlement movement had won. Yoel was grateful for what his generation had achieved. Wisdom, he said, required knowing what to leave for future generations to complete.
True, Yoel hadn’t imagined, as a student in Mercaz, being confronted with the unbearable choice between preserving the intactness of the people of Israel and the intactness of the land of Israel. The cruelty of the dilemma: to be the generation entrusted with the wholeness of the land, only to be forced by circumstance to leave it again. But in the hierarchy of Jewish values—people, Torah, land—peoplehood came first. After all, Yoel argued, the Jews had been a people before they received the Torah and possessed the land.
In the patch of garden at the entrance to his home, Yoel planted a willow tree. Long ago he had learned from Rabbi Zvi Yehudah to love the willow, which lacked flavor or scent and symbolized the Jew without redeeming qualities—no less than the fragrant and tasty citron, symbol of the saintly Jew. Every autumn, before the holiday of Sukkoth, when blessings were recited over the four species—palm branch, citron, myrtle, and willow, evoking the unity of Israel—Yoel hung a sign outside his door, urging passersby to help themselves to branches of the willow tree. It was his way of spreading love among Jews.
HOMECOMING
UDI ADIV COMPLETED his doctorate at the University of London. His subject was how Israeli historiography turned Jewish trauma into Zionist myth.
He moved back to Israel. England was cold, he said, its people distant. Udi missed the Israeli landscape, even the intense Israeli temperament. “I’m married to this place,” Udi told a friend. “A Catholic marriage.”
Leah had returned to Israel six months before. The Adivs had adopted a two-year-old boy from São Paulo, and Leah had gone there without Udi, who’d stayed in London to finish the doctorate. Alone, Leah had brought their son back to Israel.
Leah had tried to understand Udi’s need to withdraw, had hoped he would change. But Udi remained distant. Evenings he would leave the house without explanation and return late at night. They shouted at each other more than they spoke. Finally, Leah filed for divorce.
Udi got a job teaching political theory at the Open University in Haifa. He was a popular lecturer, encouraging students to call him with problems. One student was shocked to discover his past. “But he’s so nice,” she said.
He moved into a small apartment in a working-class block near the Haifa shore. Perhaps for nostalgia, he kept his old revolutionary books, like a collection of Castro’s speeches. On the wall hung a satirical poster of Karl Marx as a construction worker, leaning against a rail and smoking a cigarette. The kitchen table was crowded with piles of books, Arabic newspapers, and Palestinian nationalist memorabilia, like a key chain with the Palestinian flag.
Udi regarded the Oslo process as a personal vindication. Not for his radical excesses—he had long ago repudiated the trip to Damascus—but for his insistence that Israel accept Palestinian nationalism. That view was hardly peripheral anymore. Growing numbers of Israelis were accepting the once-daring notion that the conflict with the Palestinians was between two legitimate national narratives. Even Udi’s critical approach to Israeli historiography was becoming mainstream. A new generation of Israeli historians was examining the most basic premises of the nation’s identity; after all, in the era of peace, it was now safe to dismantle myths that had sustained the nation under siege.
Even Udi’s anti-Zionism was no longer taboo. Though the radical group Matzpen had long since dissolved, its antipathy to Zionism was embraced by some Israeli intellectuals. In falling out of love with the Israeli story, Udi had been a kind of harbinger.
On a trip to London, while waiting in Heathrow Airport for a return flight to Israel, Udi was approached by a stranger. “Do you remember me?” the man asked. Udi didn’t. “I was one of your interrogators,” he said. “So where are you in life?”
Udi gave him a terse summary of life since prison.
“Listen, Udi,” the man said, “all of us are for an agreement with the Palestinians.” By “all of us” he meant the Shin Bet.
Udi took it as a kind of apology.
ARIK ACHMON REBUKES MEIR ARIEL
IN MAY 1997, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the Reunification of Jerusalem, Channel 1 TV filmed Meir Ariel returning to the scene of the 1967 battle. Meir was accompanied by an army buddy, Yechiel Cohen, a cameraman for Channel 1 who had since become bitterly anti-military. The two men turned the segment into a cynical critique of the consequences of the Six-Day War and of the Israeli ethos.
Channel 1 invited Yisrael Harel to respond. Yisrael was head of the Association of Paratroopers Who Liberated Jerusalem and Crossed the Canal, custodian of the legacy of the 55th Brigade, charged with organizing the annual commemoration of the battle for Jerusalem and ensuring that the brigade’s ethos was taught to a new generation of soldiers. But Channel 1 intended to screen the segment on a Friday evening, and Yisrael, an observant Jew, couldn’t come to the studio. And so he asked his friend Arik Achmon to appear in his place.
Sitting in the Jerusalem studio of Channel 1, Arik watched the film segment with growing outrage. In one scene Meir and Yechiel wander the Arab market of the Old City. Meir says: “We returned and reunited and liberated. It’s all a lie. For a lie of words people are dying.”
Referring to the waiting period in the orchards before the Six-Day War, Yechiel says, “They brainwashed us. ‘Jerusalem, the Wall—Hevreh, three thousand years, the land of our fathers! In another two weeks, hevreh, you’re going to bring salvation to the people of Israel.’ What salvation?”
Meir demurs. “There was a feeling of a war of survival, no?”
In another scene Meir sits under an olive tree, plays the guitar, and sings, “Jerusalem of iron, of lead and of blackness.” Yechiel, overcome, covers his eyes.
The interviewer asks Meir if he ever brought his children to the Old City. “Never,” Meir says emphatically. “To educate my children that I was part of the battle and to force Jerusalem on them when I myself didn’t know what to do with this? . . . I didn’t liberate anything.”
Arik loved Meir, felt himself at least partly responsible for Meir having become a paratrooper in the first place. But this time, Meir had gone too far. He and Yechiel are desecrating the memory of our fallen friends—
Mustering his self-control, Arik said in a measured voice: “I’m not sure that they represent what they thought then. . . . Meir’s song expresses totally different feelings. . . . They don’t, at least, represent me.
“What the fighters of Jerusalem all share in common is pain. We had many, many casualties; the price was very high. Ninety-seven dead . . . four hundred wounded. Some are still severely handicapped. [But] I also feel deep satisfaction. Under nearly impossible conditions . . . we fulfilled a mission—a mission of rescue. . . . We didn’t set out to restore the sacred sites of the nation. Central command didn’t order us to liberate the land of our fathers.” Instead, the paratroopers had been sent to Jerusalem to stop the Jordanian attack on West Jerusalem. Quoting a famous Hebrew phrase, Arik said, “‘If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.’”
Arik concluded: “Maybe it’s not popular, but I feel honored to be part of a group—in which Meir and Yechiel are also very respected members—that is the true elite of the people of Israel.”
“I GIVE THANKS”
ON SUKKOTH, MEIR ARIEL built a big wood shack in his yard near the Tel Aviv beach. He covered the roof with palm branches, from which hung tinsel and colored glass balls. Musicians, kibbutzniks, religious penitents, dropped in at all hours, singing around long, white-cloth-covered tables to Meir’s accordion. Meir offered each guest a pomegranate that, in his chivalrous way, he peeled himself. One Sukkoth he sat through the night arguing with a friend about the words in Ecclesiastes, “vanity of vanities.”
Meir stopped performing on Friday nights. His Torah learning deepened. He kept a detailed journal of his daily studies—mostly Talmud but interspersed with Zionist history and Greek philosophy and Israeli literature—written in tiny script, two sentences squeezed into a single line. Meir often dedicated the day’s learning to a friend who needed healing or the uplift of a departed soul. “To the loving memory of Hussein ibn Abdallah, King of Jordan, who went to the world of his fathers today.” “For the souls of the three IDF soldiers killed yesterday.” “For the success of the children of Israel in the European soccer championship.” He argued with the rabbis: Why shouldn’t a non-Jew be allowed to become a nazir, an ascetic? He compared Jewish thought, which he called time-dynamic, to spatial thought: the latter, he wrote, fears death and so battles the concept of time. But Jewish thought accepts death as natural.
The wild years were ending. Meir craved home, stability. He was writing some of his most beautiful love songs, and they were about Tirza. Every morning he woke her with coffee and cake in bed. Afternoons they took beach chairs and went to the sea. Fridays, he brought her flowers.
Still, hurts lingered. Meir wrote a song called “Get Into the Car Already,” which depicts a weeping Tirza and an impatient Meir, who has exhausted his capacity for apology.
In an interview, Meir admitted a psychological addiction to drugs. “I need hashish to exist and be a pleasant person,” he said.
Meir earned his first gold album: a collection of greatest hits. A poster of the album hung, along with strips of Indian cloth, in his living room. Life was better than he ever could have imagined. He was beloved by almost everyone who knew him, from the country’s leading singers, for whom he wrote hits, to Zion the owner of the fast food place across the street from Meir’s house and whom he celebrated in a song. Meir, said a friend, was the happiest sad person he knew.
AND THEN CAME THE INTERVIEW.
Meir hated giving interviews to the media. He hated the simplistic questions and even more his answers, which seemed to him either too glib or too emphatic. Still, interviews were part of the music business. And now that he had his own independent label, as Tirza reminded him, he couldn’t afford to pass on the publicity.
“Meir Ariel Goes Wild,” read the headline of the interview that appeared in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot on August 12, 1998. Russian immigrants, declared Meir, should be denied the vote until they’ve learned Israeli reality. The host of the Israeli version of the Candid Camera TV show was a “human monster.” West Bank settlers were the “Chippendales” of Zionist pioneering. And homosexuality was deviant, and gays responsible for spreading AIDS.
Most of those barbs went unnoticed. But the outrage—and hurt—among gays was profound. Meir Ariel, of all people? The humane kibbutznik, troubadour of bohemian Israel? Columnists denounced him as a bigot; passersby spat at him on the street. Gay activists poured water on him as he emerged from a concert. “Meir Kahane, Meir Ariel!” they chanted, comparing him to the far-right rabbi.
A friend from the paratroopers said, “Meirkeh, let’s get the hevreh together and we’ll stop the harassment.”
“God forbid,” said Meir.
Meir and Tirza fled Tel Aviv. They moved to Pardes Hanna, the village bordering Kibbutz Mishmarot. They rented a stucco house with a red roof and a dirt yard, a larger version of a kibbutz house.
Meir stopped performing. I’ve been silenced, he told a reporter.
Shalom Hanoch, Meir’s childhood friend and musical collaborator, pleaded with him to apologize. You’re a poet, not a man of proclamations, Shalom argued. They should apologize to me, Meir countered, with unusual vehemence.
But then, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Meir wrote a letter to the gay newspaper in Tel Aviv, Hazman Havarod (The Pink Time), apologizing for what he called his ignorance, and affirming his abhorrence of stereotypes. He asked forgiveness “for hurting you, dear homosexuals and lesbians.” He added: “Don’t be surprised if I call you ‘dear,’ because you are dear to me as human beings.” The association of gays and lesbians accepted the apology.
But when Meir began appearing again in clubs, few came. One night Tirza drove him to a performance in a pub in Jerusalem; four people were inside. Tirza forbade Meir to play.
Meir’s smile turned sad, weary. One friend detected in him an exhaustion with life. Mornings, Meir sat in prayer shawl and phylacteries, praying and writing songs. Sometimes he spent a whole morning that way, bound in devotion.
The songs he was writing were now openly, unapologetically, spiritual. One song was based on the prayer Modeh Ani (I Give Thanks), with which a traditional Jew begins the day. Meir’s version is a modern Israeli’s attempt to claim the tradition on his own terms. “I give thanks before Thee,” he wrote, quoting the prayer, and then added his own words, “and to You.” Even as he respected the formal language of the prayer, Meir needed to speak to God the way he spoke to everyone: intimately, as a friend.
Meir further expanded the prayer, giving thanks for “all the good and the bad and the good” that God has done for him, his family, his people, his land, and all of humanity—a circle of blessing that emanated from the particular to the universal.
Welcoming a new day also brought an awareness of mortality: “Slowly, silently / the future creeps toward us.” But anxiety gave way to gratitude as he noticed Tirza beside him in bed. “It will be good, better than good, very good / It’s starting this morning, this morning / You laugh toward me / from your sleep.”
Meir had always seen the skull behind the face; now he was also glimpsing the soul.
IT BEGAN WITH what seemed like the flu. Take aspirin, said the doctor. But Meir’s fever only rose.
When rashes appeared on his back and stomach, Tirza took him, against his will, to the hospital. After examining Meir, the doctor asked Tirza, Do you have children? They’re abroad, she said. Tell them to come home, he said.
The illness was called Mediterranean spotted fever, caused by a tick and easily cured with antibiotics. But Meir had been diagnosed too late.
Tirza, dazed, accompanied Meir into intensive care. Meir smiled at her and said, “I’m under hashgaha,” a Hebrew word that could imply medical care or divine protection.
Meir was connected to a respirator, a dialysis machine, a catheter, three IVs, four monitors. He lost consciousness.
Meir died shortly before dawn. It was July 18, 1999. He was fifty-seven years old.
Tirza held his face, swollen and blackened from cortisone. What have they done to you, Meirkeh, she repeated over and over, what have they done to my beautiful boy.
MEIR WAS BURIED in the little cemetery of Kibbutz Mishmarot, shaded by pine trees, near the cotton fields where he had spent much of his life. The greats of Israeli music gathered; Shalom Hanoch appeared stunned.
A kibbutznik eulogized: “Meir lived, suffered, and sang his loves. . . . One was Tirza, the one and only . . . to whom he dedicated his songs, whom he longed for and returned to from his wanderings. . . . She was the source of inspiration, the model for all the women he loved—and he loved all the women in the world. . . . His second love was . . . Mishmarot . . . whose lawns were planted by his father . . . Meir lived for many years outside of Mishmarot, but he never left the kibbutz and the kibbutz never left him. On holidays and on days of mourning a place of honor was reserved for him, the place of the tribe’s storyteller.”
Then everyone sang: “There’s a pile of hevreh on the grass . . .”
A newspaper eulogy celebrated Meir as the greatest Hebrew poet since Alterman. A leading entertainer said that Meir’s largely ignored album, Charcoal Sketches, should be included among the books of the Prophets. A gay music producer who had bitterly attacked Meir now urged Israelis to remember his “wonderful writing,” rather than “a few words in the newspaper.” Meir, wrote one critic, was the link between the rock music of Shalom Hanoch and the poignant songs of old Israel.
In death Meir became something more. Many young Israelis saw in his spiritual path a role model for a new Israeli Judaism, rooted in tradition but open to change. The kibbutznik bohemian turned religious Jew became a beloved and unifying figure, embraced by secular and religious alike, as if Meir had intuited a future healing of Israel’s cultural divide.
TIRZA CHOSE a large, rough stone for Meir’s grave, unique among the flat white stones that surround it. The epitaph is a line from one of Meir’s songs: “I stepped out to breathe some wind.” Meir inhaled not merely air but wind. Like so much of his work, the line is also a wordplay: the Hebrew word ruah means both “wind” and “spirit.”
THE OPTIMIST
FOR ARIK ACHMON, life had never been better. He was doing what he loved best, advising leading companies and government ministries on strategy and reoganization, helping Israel become more efficient, more rational.
He was still stubborn, insulting on occasion, maddeningly self-confident. (Was it his fault if his opinions were almost always right?) But Yehudit knew how much he had grown. Arik learned how to say, “I love you,” and came close to tears when he spoke of her. They took trips abroad together. On a cruise in Russia, a band played Soviet songs from World War II—“Cossack horsemen galloping to battle!”—and Arik and Yehudit happily sang along in the Hebrew translations of the Red Army anthems on which they’d been raised. (When they came upon a statue of Stalin in a village square, Yehudit felt an involuntary warmth, then immediate horror. How, she mentally berated her father, could you have taught us to venerate a monster?)
Yehudit’s own career was thriving: she was recognized as one of Israel’s leading experts on ethics in psychology. Between Yehudit and Arik there were five children, eight grandchildren.
The wounds of the past, though, remained. Arkia Airlines had become a major company, thanks in large part to the changes Arik had brought as CEO, for which he had gotten no credit. And he could have been a millionaire. When he’d left Arkia, he’d sold back his stocks—7 percent of the company. Now those stocks were worth millions.
“I have only myself to blame,” he told Yehudit.
“Losing Arkia was the best thing that ever happened to you, Arik,” she said. “You were so arrogant.”
“I thought I could do anything,”Arik agreed.
“And then you came down to earth. You learned to tolerate weakness.”
“I wouldn’t have forfeited that experience for anything. True, I lost millions of dollars.”
“It’s only money,” said Yehudit.
“And what I got in return was priceless.”
IT WAS EARLY JULY 2000, and President Bill Clinton had just invited Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat to negotiate a peace agreement at Camp David. According to Israeli press reports, Barak intended to offer a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. For the first time, an Israeli prime minister was committing to Palestinian statehood. Perhaps for the first time in history, a nation was voluntarily offering to share sovereignty over its capital city.
And Arik Achmon, a liberator of Jerusalem, was ready for the deal. He would celebrate the peace of Jerusalem, not mourn its redivision. He of all people wouldn’t allow emotion to confound Israel’s good. Israel would do what it had to do, in peace as in war. That, for Arik, was the meaning of Zionism: to take responsibility for one’s fate in the circumstances that fate presented.
No, Arik knew, it would not be an easy or a happy peace, but a Middle East peace. Israel of course would have to remain vigilant. Arafat had disappointed, hadn’t stopped the terrorism and the hate. Still, Barak was about to offer the Palestinians a state, just as they had demanded. Surely Arafat would agree. In exchange he would have to abandon the dream of destroying the Jewish state demographically by overwhelming it with the descendants of refugees from 1948. But what choice did he have? To go to war against Israel? That was laughable. Even Arafat no doubt realized that the Palestinians couldn’t afford to reject another offer of statehood, as they had in 1947 to disastrous results. Say what you wanted about Arafat; he wouldn’t subject his people to another catastrophe when the alternative was a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Arik’s greatest anxiety for the future of Israel was focused not on external threats—Israel, he was convinced, could defend itself against any enemy—but on what Israel was doing to itself by building settlements in the West Bank. In his systematic fashion, Arik listed the ways in which settlements threatened Israel. Rather than contributing to Israeli security, as settlers claimed, their communities were a burden on the IDF. Economically, the settlements were a black hole, devouring billions in government subsidies that should have gone to education and infrastructure. Socially, settlements were dividing Israeli society into two warring camps. Politically, settlements were undermining a two-state solution, which alone could save Israel from the demographic threat and an impossible choice between the two essential elements of its identity, as a Jewish and a democratic state. Diplomatically, settlements threatened to turn Israel into a pariah. And the occupation, which settlement building would make irreversible, was morally corrupting young Israelis, who were drafted into a system that gave them power over helpless civilians. If historian Barbara Tuchman were to add a chapter to her book The March of Folly, concluded Arik, it would focus on the settlements.
The depth of Israel’s dilemma: for one part of the nation, remaining in the territories was an existential threat; for another part, the existential threat was withdrawing. How could Israel determine its relationship with the territories won in the Six-Day War without tearing itself apart?
But if the Palestinians accepted the historic compromise that Ehud Barak was about to offer, Israel, Arik was certain, would confront the settlers, uproot dozens of Jewish communities, and end the threat to itself.
Of course Arik was an optimist. To be an Israeli meant knowing that, with enough determination, any obstacle, any trauma, could be overcome. He didn’t believe in God; Israel was a gift the Jews gave to themselves. Still—he felt a sense of awe at how much had been accomplished, in such short time, against such odds.
He had grown up with the state, had been present, one way or another, at every major moment in its history. He had seen Israel evolve from agrarian backwater to world-class economy, from a country fighting for its life with imported carbines to the military power of the Middle East. How many times had he been saved from death, had he and his friends helped save the state? The impossible victories, the self-inflicted defeats: How much history had been compressed into a single generation! If Arik were a religious man, he would have called his life a miracle.
WHO OWNS THE MEMORY?
JULY 11, 2000. President Clinton, Israeli prime minister Barak, and Palestinian leader Arafat secluded themselves at Camp David to negotiate a peace agreement.
Yisrael Harel initiated an ad in the newspaper Ha’aretz opposing the redevision of Jerusalem. The ad quoted a speech by Motta Gur to the veterans of the 55th Brigade: “And if someone will come who will try to take away Jerusalem, he will not, because you will not allow it. You will not allow it because it is ours by right. Because there is no justice in giving it away. . . . Jerusalem is ours—forever.” The ad was signed by dozens of veterans of the 55th Brigade, including Yoel Bin-Nun. “We, paratroopers who fought in the battle for the liberation of Jerusalem, are committed to Motta’s testament.”
“By what right?” Arik Achmon demanded when a friend of Yisrael phoned, asking him to add his name to the ad. Motta, after all, had made that speech in 1995, shortly before his death; since then, nearly five years had passed, and the political situation had changed drastically. Who knew what Motta would say today?
Arik thought: Yisrael has used us all along, annexed the paratroopers’ legacy to his settler agenda, to say nothing of advancing his own career. But this was one step too far.
When Yisrael heard Arik’s reaction, he was unrepentant. He had used Motta’s own words; what more did Arik want?
Yisrael thought: Arik presents his position as a matter of principle, but he’s really just bitter because his camp has lost its preeminence to my camp.
Arik resigned from the board of the paratroopers’ association headed by Yisrael. And he kept relations with Yisrael to a formal minimum.
A NEW CENTER
THE CAMP DAVID negotiations failed. Israel had endorsed a Palestinian state and offered to withdraw from about 91 percent of the West Bank; the Palestinians rejected the proposal but made no counteroffer. In September Ariel Sharon, leader of the Likud opposition, walked on the Temple Mount, accompanied by a large security contingent, to protest the construction work of the Muslim Waqf, which was destroying ancient Jewish artifacts on the holy site. Palestinian riots broke out in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian leaders cited the Sharon visit as the trigger for the second intifada, as it came to be called. Mere pretext, countered Israel; the violence had been planned long before, to coincide with the scheduled conclusion of the Oslo process in September 2000.
Two Israeli reservists who took a wrong turn on the way to their base and ended up in Ramallah were lynched by a mob—inside a Palestinian police station. The next day Israeli newspapers featured a large photograph of a young man holding his bloodied hands up in victory for the cameras. For the Israeli public, that was the moment when the peace process with Arafat died. A lynching inside a police station became the symbol, for Israelis, of Arafat’s real intentions toward peace.
In December 2000 Clinton presented his vision of a final status agreement: almost all of the West Bank and all of Gaza would be Palestine, with land swaps between Israel and Palestine to compensate for “settlement blocs” that would remain under Israeli control; Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem would stay part of Israel, Arab neighborhoods would become part of Palestine. Prime Minister Barak said yes, Arafat effectively said no. President Clinton blamed Arafat.
Then came the suicide bombings. It was the worst wave of terrorism in Israel’s history. The home front became the battlefield. The Palestinians, Israelis said bitterly, weren’t interested in undoing the occupation of 1967 but the “occupation” of 1948—that is, the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. The Palestinian insistence on the return of refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants not to a Palestinian state but to the state of Israel convinced even many Israelis on the left that the real obstacle to peace wasn’t West Bank settlements but Israel’s very being.
Newspapers ran interviews with leading figures of the left who confessed to having been deceived by Palestinian leaders. Our world has collapsed, said journalist Amnon Dankner; the despair among my friends, he added, is similar to the shattering among Communists after Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech in 1956. Yankeleh Rotblit, the lyricist who wrote “Song for Peace,” which Rabin had sung onstage just before he was killed, told an interviewer that he was no longer sure peace was possible.
Yet even as they turned away in disillusionment from the peace camp, most Israelis didn’t turn to the settlers’ agenda. After three decades of vehement schism between left and right, a majority of Israelis now found themselves in an amorphous center. In principle, most Israelis accepted a two-state solution and were prepared to make almost any territorial compromise that would bring peace; in practice few believed that any territorial compromise could achieve that.
ARIK ACHMON HATED to be taken for a fool. And Arafat, Arik conceded, played us for fools. Maddeningly, the settlers had been right, at least about that. The choice, Arik concluded, had never been between land or peace. Israel’s dilemma was far more cruel: it would have to abandon the territories—save itself from the occupation for its own long-term survival—but without getting peace in return.
Arik had a plan. If Israel couldn’t occupy the Palestinians and also couldn’t make peace with them, that left only one option. Israel needed to build a security barrier that would separate most of the West Bank and Gaza from Israel proper, prevent the unbearable ease with which suicide bombers simply walked across an open border into Israeli cities. And then Israel would unilaterally withdraw behind that barrier, and evacuate—forcibly if necessary—all settlers on the other side. Israel needed to stop waiting for the illusion of a negotiated agreement and determine its own security borders.
A Zionist had to believe in a way out, even if the solution was no solution at all.
A DOZEN SOMBER men and women, some of them leaders of the kibbutz movement, some former high-ranking army officers, gathered in the Ein Shemer greenhouse. Avital Geva had been holding weekly meetings among his friends—“the greenhouse parliament,” they called it—to discuss Israel’s future, and today Arik Achmon had been invited to address them about unilateral withdrawal.
The unilateralist idea, hardly Arik’s alone, was gaining ground among desperate Israelis. Arik had helped found a group called Hetz (Arrow) to lobby politicians for unilateralism, and Labor Party leaders were debating it too. Avital had reached the same conclusion as Arik: the left had been correct about the dangers of occupation, but the right had been correct about the chances for peace.
On the plastic walls of the greenhouse were stickers from the left’s old battles. One read: “The Seventh Day: Time to End the Six-Day War.”
Avital, in dark blue work clothes, served chicken soup. “No one should speak,” he said, “before the soup soothes your throats and warms your hearts.”
The members of the greenhouse parliament sat in a circle on armchairs made of rough wood logs. Arik presented them with a map proposing the route of a security fence in the West Bank and Gaza, in effect an interim border. The implications of Arik’s map were clear to these veterans of the left: the fence would be a marker ending the utopian dreams of both greater Israel and of Peace Now.
“Why not build the fence on the green line?”—the old 1967 border—one man demanded.
“That’s a solution for a negotiated agreement,” replied Arik. “The goal for now is to uproot the least number of settlers while keeping out of Israel’s borders the maximum number of Palestinians.”
Avital watched Arik with concern. Arik was red-faced, agitated. Avital had never seen him like this.
“We spent our entire lives defending the state,” concluded Arik. “The danger now is coming from within. We have to separate ending the occupation from making peace.”
Afterward Avital put his arm around Arik’s shoulder and said, “Listen, man, you’re not so young anymore, you have to watch your health. Don’t take this so much to heart.”
“There’s no time for that,” Arik replied. “We have to save the state.”
PILGRIMAGE
IN A CLEARING in a pine grove on Ammunition Hill, near the trenches where paratroopers fought Jordanian soldiers in the toughest battle in Jerusalem, Yoel Bin-Nun, wearing a black suit and sandals, stood in the center of a circle of young people. It was close to midnight on the eve of Jerusalem Day 2004, the holiday celebrating Israel’s reunification of the Holy City in 1967, and Yoel was leading his students, as he did every year on this anniversary, on an all-night walking tour of the battleground. In the footsteps of fighters, he called it.
This year, though, the group included participants from a pre-army leadership program for secular recruits who, like Yoel’s students, were on a track for combat units and perhaps officer training. The young men had ponytails and shaved heads and earrings, and there were a few young women, too, in Indian skirts and kaffiyehs. One young man wore a sweatshirt with the words Tikva LeYisrael, hope for Israel. By bringing together Orthodox and secular, Yoel was honoring what was for him the spiritual essence of Jerusalem Day: the memory of Jewish unity in May 1967, which made the June victory possible.
Yet no date on the official Israeli calendar emphasized the divisions among Israelis as did Jerusalem Day, which was celebrated almost exclusively by religious Zionists. Most Israelis ignored the festivities, many skeptical of celebrating the unification of a city so deeply divided emotionally between its Arabs and Jews.
Hands on hips, as if leading a military briefing, Yoel described the vulnerable Israel of May 1967. “There was widespread unemployment,” he said. “More people were emigrating than immigrating. The joke Israelis told was, ‘Last one out of the airport, shut the lights.’”
Since then, Israel had changed almost beyond recognition. From a country of barely 3 million, Israel was now over 7 million strong, and growing. But in one way Israel had scarcely changed: its people still felt almost entirely alone in a hostile world. Israelis didn’t merely debate the country’s future but its chances for long-term survival. The Six-Day War had created a country caught in paradox: Goliath to the Palestinians but David to the Arab and Muslim worlds; the only democracy that was a long-term occupier, and the only country marked by neighbors for disappearance.
Yoel led his group toward the old 1967 border that had cut through Jerusalem. They came to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of graying stone apartment buildings and half-built yeshivas named for destroyed Jewish communities in Europe. Posters advertised pilgrimages to Hebron and to Rachel’s Tomb and promised “protected buses,” with bulletproof windows. A few men in black rushed through the quiet streets, avoiding eye contact with Yoel’s group.
Yoel told of walking these streets on the night of the breakthrough into East Jerusalem. “I was twenty-one years old in 1967,” he said. “I had just been released from the army, and this was my first reserve duty. I was given the assignment of finding the battalion that was going to break through the lines, and our battalion was to follow them. It was frightening to be running through empty streets and everything is totally black. And then the Jordanians began shelling us.”
Wordlessly Yoel pointed to two stone markers, each with the name of a paratrooper killed on this spot.
“Why is Jerusalem important?” asked a young woman.
Yoel explained that Jerusalem had been chosen as the capital of ancient Israel because it was outside tribal borders. Each tribe was allotted its own territory, and Jerusalem united them all. “What unites the Jewish people isn’t any holy place in Jerusalem but Jerusalem itself.”
They came to an empty lot and a scattering of old red-roofed houses: the ’67 border. They stood on the edge of a slope; below them was Road One, built where no-man’s-land had been. Road One connected Jerusalem’s northern and southern neighborhoods. But it also divided: on one side were Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, on the other side, Jewish neighborhoods of West Jerusalem.
Yoel said, “It was a good idea to build a road in no-man’s-land, where there were minefields and barbed-wire fences. To make this a living area. But you can look at this road in two ways. It depends on your point of view.”
They crossed the road, into the silent streets of Sheikh Jarrah, a middle-class Palestinian neighborhood. From the garden of the American Colony Hotel came the scent of jasmine. “Be mindful that we’re passing through a neighborhood,” Yoel admonished. “We’re not a conquering army. Please don’t raise your voices.”
They came to a fork in the road. “My battalion was supposed to go left, onto Salah a Din Street and from there to the Rockefeller Museum. If the battalion had gone that way, it would have encountered very little resistance. Instead our commander turned onto Nablus Road, which faced no-man’s-land, and that is where the Jordanian fortifications were. The result of that mistake was very costly.”
“How could he make such a mistake?” a young woman asked.
Yoel smiled. “I see some of you have trouble accepting human error. We had twelve hours to prepare for war. We were supposed to parachute into Sinai. At the last minute we were sent to Jerusalem. We went in without adequate maps. We didn’t have guides who knew these streets. Mistakes happen all the time in war.”
And what of the mistakes that followed the war? Yoel had come to regard both the peace movement and the movement for greater Israel—the two camps that had tried to determine the results of the Six-Day War—as utopian fantasists. Who more than Yoel had struggled with the illusions and failures of his own camp? And yet each camp had expressed something essential about Jewish aspirations.
Yoel paused before the entrance to an alley. The paratroopers, he explained, called this the Alley of Death. A Jordanian machine gun had been positioned at the opposite end, toward which the paratroopers charged. “Over and over. When one fell, another charged. For paratroopers there is no such thing as not fulfilling a mission.”
They approached the hexagonal tower of the Rockefeller Museum, and entered the courtyard. Yoel pointed to a plaque commemorating three Israeli soldiers killed here by friendly fire.
The group walked toward the Old City walls.
They came to a sculpture of basalt stone, shaped like a massive uprooted tree trunk, a memorial for the Israeli scouts killed on the night before the breakthrough into the Old City. Yoel told the story of how the scouts, veterans of Unit 101 and the most elite commandos of the IDF, had missed the turn toward the Mount of Olives and found themselves exposed beneath the Old City walls. “It was one of the worst mistakes of the battle for Jerusalem,” he said.
But, he continued, the disaster may well have saved hundreds of lives. The plan had been to block the escape route to Jericho; had the scouts succeeded, the Jordanian soldiers would have been trapped in the Old City and forced to fight. “The liberation of Jerusalem could have been a trauma for the people of Israel and for the world. Instead we entered the Old City with hardly a shot being fired.”
Yoel had been careful all night not to preach faith, but now he couldn’t resist. “This is how the Master of History arranges events,” he said.
Rows of dancing teenage boys approached. They wore knitted kippot and white shirts and held each other by the shoulders. Some waved large Israeli flags. “May the Temple be rebuilt quickly in our time!” they sang. They were followed by police cars, army jeeps, and two ambulances. “I’m not so sure they understand what happened here,” Yoel said of the dancing teenagers. “They take united Jerusalem for granted. It’s not so simple.”
Yoel watched them with unease, sadness. Suddenly he seemed aged. Once his place would have been among them. Everything had seemed so clear then, in the summer of ’67, when Israel had abruptly emerged from the nightmare of annihilation into the dream of redemption. And when the settlers’ opponents had raised moral and practical questions—What about the Arabs in the territories? What kind of Israel are you bequeathing us?—Yoel and his friends had responded with faith. Of course it would work out in the end; what choice did we have? Reject God’s gift of wholeness? Return to the terrible vulnerability of May 1967?
They came to the so-called Dung Gate, the entrance leading to the Western Wall. Above them was the Temple Mount.
“When I reached the Temple Mount that morning,” Yoel told his group, “my commander said to me, ‘Nu, Yoel, what do you say?’ I said to him, ‘Two thousand years of exile are over.’ That’s what I felt at that moment. If the Israel Defense Forces are standing on the Temple Mount, it is the end of exile. I admit I was naive. Redemption is a process; it’s complicated.”
One day, he believed, Jews would celebrate the story of modern Israel as they now celebrated the exodus from Egypt. Perhaps with even greater awe: in the ancient Exodus, after all, Jews had left a single country, while in the modern exodus they’d returned home from a hundred countries. A people keeping faith with its lost homeland and returning after two thousand years: impossible. The farther away we moved from the founding of Israel, the more extraordinary the story would appear.
One day, Yoel knew, Jews would look back at this time and wonder: How had they done it? Reclaimed land, language, sovereignty, power? Reversed the destruction of the Jews back to their origin, their vigorous youth? Replaced skeleton heaps in death camps with paratroopers at the Wall as the enduring Jewish image of the century?
As a young man Yoel had wanted it all: redemption now. He had touched the Temple Mount, glimpsed the end of the story. The Jewish reverence for the Western Wall had seemed to him a retreat from the messianic opening back into exile. How to exchange the grandeur of the Temple Mount for a mere retaining wall without intrinsic holiness?
Of course Jews had returned home with vast dreams of redemption. That is who they were: a people set apart by God as a test case for divine intimacy with humanity. But in the tumultuous love story between God and His people, failure was no less instructive than success. And so the new dreams of Zion—socialist perfection, the wholeness of the land, even the seemingly modest dream of normalizing the Jews as a nation among nations—had each successively faltered. The messiah was still tarrying.
In their disappointment, some Jews had forgotten how to celebrate, how to be grateful. It was a recurring Jewish problem, as ancient as the first Exodus. But as Jews sang at the Passover seder, weren’t the dreams that had been fulfilled in some sense enough?
The beginning of dawn appeared over the Mount of Olives. Yoel knew how to evoke drama: He had deliberately choreographed the night to end here, with the first light. The call of the muezzin came from green-lit minarets. Groups of Orthodox young men hurried past Yoel’s mixed, anomalous group.
Yoel’s religious students joined the crowds moving toward the Wall. Yoel took leave from the secular young people, shaking each one’s hand. He retrieved prayer shawl and phylacteries from his backpack and headed toward the retaining wall of the Temple, grateful to be a Jew in this time.