AN EXEMPLARY KIBBUTZNIK
ARIK ACHMON, chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, was at work in the accounting department of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot when the call came from Motta Gur, commander of the brigade: I need to see you now.
The IDF, Motta explained when they met, was planning a preemptive strike in the Sinai Desert. The 55th would be parachuting behind Egyptian lines and taking the coastal town of El Arish, the most fortified position on the way to the Suez Canal. Arik’s job was to write a preliminary assessment of Egyptian strength in El Arish. For now, continued Motta, the plan was to be kept secret, even from Arik’s own intelligence staff. Motta gave him two days to produce a report. “Get to work,” said Motta.
Arik had just experienced the most intense year of his life. He had divorced, assumed care of his two children on weekends, quit his kibbutz for the city, begun full-time studies at Tel Aviv University, and was working half-time. And he was learning how to function as chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, devoting most of the free time he didn’t have to what he called “on-the-job training.” He’d begun studying for final exams in his economics classes, but now that would have to wait.
Arik found a temporary replacement for his job at the newspaper, told his professors he couldn’t take finals—“army matters,” he said, without explaining—and began knocking on doors at IDF intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv. Even an experienced intelligence officer would have had difficulty coping with Motta’s deadline. Though Arik assumed he was as competent as anyone and better than most, he was not experienced. Until ten months ago he’d been a company commander, with no background in intelligence. And now he was about to help Motta plan a war in a matter of days.
ARIK ACHMON HAD been waiting for this moment all his life.
Growing up in the years before statehood on Givat Brenner, a kibbutz south of Tel Aviv, Arik had longed to take his place among the heroes of Israel. Arik and his friends would eavesdrop on the meetings of the commanders of the Palmach, the Jewish community’s elite commando force, young men with careless hair and kaffiyehs around their necks who regularly convened in Givat Brenner (which was named for a Hebrew writer killed in an Arab pogrom). The kibbutz boys would listen to the Palmachniks sing, in Hebrew, the rousing and melancholy songs of the Red Army’s war against Hitler: “Cossack horsemen galloping to battle! Hey hey hey!” “A fire is burning in our land, the enemy is at the gates.” Arik knew their names—Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin—the way teenagers elsewhere followed sports heroes. Afterward, when seven Arab armies attacked the newborn Jewish state, it was largely the Palmachniks who had beaten them back. Many of those young men whom Arik saw in Givat Brenner didn’t return from the front.
Above all, there was Sereni. Enzo Sereni, an Italian-born Jew with a doctorate in philosophy, had left behind a family fortune to become a kibbutznik. It was even rumored that he was an aristocrat, and the soft-spoken Sereni certainly seemed like one among the blunt pioneers from Poland and Lithuania. He had once considered converting to Christianity and becoming a monk; instead he chose to serve his despised people, satisfying his monastic tendencies in the austerity of Givat Brenner. Sereni and his wife, Ada, were the unofficial house parents in Givat Brenner’s children’s home. Arik loved Sereni’s bedtime stories about his travels through prewar Nazi Germany to help young Jews escape and to Iraq to help Jews organize against pogroms. At night in the children’s home—bare walls, bare floor, four iron cots to a room—Sereni would sing, in a rousing voice, the Italian Communist anthem “Avanti Popolo!” (Onward, Masses!), and the children would shout along, leaping on their cots. “Bolsheviks,” he called them tenderly. A pacifist, Sereni refused to carry a weapon or even a stick on guard duty. He walked the neighboring Arab villages, befriending mukhtars and peasants. As a boy Arik had feared the Arabs: one of his earliest memories was of hiding under a bed while Arabs fired at the kibbutz. But, walking with Sereni, he learned that if you looked people in the eye and respected them as neighbors or as adversaries, there was no reason to be afraid.
With World War II, Sereni conceded defeat: it was no longer possible to be a pacifist. At age forty, he volunteered for commando duty with the British army. In 1943, when Arik was ten, Sereni disappeared on his last journey—part of a small group of Zionist pioneers who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in a forlorn attempt to rescue Jews. Sereni and seven of his friends, including the poet Hannah Szenes, were captured. Sereni was sent to Dachau and died there, among the Jews he had tried to save—but of course not quite one of them, thought Arik, because Sereni had chosen his fate, had died a soldier.
With the founding of the state in 1948, Arik, age fifteen, began training to defend his home. As the Egyptian army advanced on Givat Brenner, its teenagers were taught hand-to-hand combat, how to crawl through rugged terrain at night and slip behind enemy lines; at the shooting range, Arik attained sniper level. The young people dug trenches and served as runners between the watchtowers. The barely equipped Israeli army brought three World War I–era cannons on wheels to defend Givat Brenner; the cannons were nicknamed “Napoleonchiks,” little Napoleons, because they were small but bombastic, creating more noise than damage. Tel Nof, the base for the tiny Israeli air force, was near Givat Brenner, and every day Arik would watch the skies as the entire fleet of four Messerschmitts took off, then count them as they returned. Egyptian Spitfires attacked Tel Nof; Israeli soldiers fired back with rifles.
For all of Arik’s intimacy with the military, he’d remained a spectator. The Egyptian army was stopped several kilometers before reaching Givat Brenner, and the war passed him by. A friend of Arik’s, only two years older than him, joined a rescue patrol setting out from the kibbutz and was killed in battle. Arik wished that he were two years older and able to prove himself too.
MEANWHILE, ARIK TRIED to be an exemplary kibbutznik. As a boy in the children’s house, the parallel communal society where Givat Brenner’s young people were encouraged to run their own lives without adult interference, he had volunteered for every position—the work committee that assigned after-school tasks, the culture committee that planned hikes, the social committee that resolved disputes among children and between children and teachers. At age eleven, Arik had been chosen to work after school in the cowshed, the “commando unit” of the kibbutz workforce, as he proudly called it. While his friends tended the vegetable garden around the children’s house, Arik worked long and unpredictable hours, milking the cows by hand and hauling fifteen-liter buckets of milk, just like an adult. The boy knows how to work, they said of him, the ultimate kibbutz compliment. Arik relished that moment when, straight from the cowshed, still in his dirty khaki work clothes, he made his entry into the children’s dining room in the middle of dinner.
He thinks he’s better than anyone else, some complained. It was true: Arik sensed he was more analytical, less emotional, and calmer under pressure than the others. For all his communal devotion, friends perceived in him an aloofness, the emotional equivalent of ideological heresy. Arik exasperated his friends. He could be so helpful, so dependable. But so damn inconsiderate of others’ feelings! And that look: all he had to do was stare at you with a slight tilt of his head, a corner of his mouth considering a smirk, to leave you feeling worthless. He seemed to gaze at the world from a distance, a wary observer. Friends knew better than to expect sympathy from him. Sympathy, he felt, only nurtured weakness.
Arik’s arrogance was encouraged by his mother. Hannah Achmon was the ultimate kibbutznik, so devoted to the commune’s nursery that she had deferred having her own children until the first of Givat Brenner’s children reached first grade. But she compensated for that selflessness with a fierce possessiveness toward Arik. There has never been, and will never be, a child born who is more successful than my Arik, she announced to the other mothers. When there was a family problem, Hannah turned to her teenage son rather than to her husband, Yekutiel, whom she dismissed as ineffectual. And she encouraged Arik’s three younger siblings to turn to Arik too.
Arik was the most diligent worker among the young people, the best debater in class. Arik sensed he was destined for greatness—not the self-centered fame of the capitalist world, of course, but a greatness drawn from proximity to epic events.
WHEN ARIK TURNED seventeen, the perfect world of his childhood began to devour itself. It was 1951, and Givat Brenner was torn over whether the new state of Israel should align with the Soviet Union or the West. Givat Brenner’s Marxists declared the Soviet Union under Stalin as the hope for world redemption, and demanded that progressive, egalitarian Israel choose the right side of history. The Red Army, some predicted, would soon be marching triumphantly into the Middle East.
Opposing the Marxists was Mapai, the pro-Western social democratic party headed by prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Like his parents, Arik was a Mapainik—a besieged minority in Givat Brenner. At the kibbutz’s weekly meetings, Stalinists denounced them as enemies of socialism, poisoners of the youth. Three years earlier the comrades had been prepared to die together defending their commune from the Egyptian army; now Mapainiks and Stalinists couldn’t even share a table in the communal dining room.
Arik’s class was about to graduate from high school and be inducted, in a public ceremony, into kibbutz membership. No young person had ever refused to participate. But for Arik, Givat Brenner was no longer home. The Mapainiks, including his parents, were openly talking about seceding, a process that was happening on other kibbutzim too.
“So what if it’s a farce?” a friend argued. “Take the membership and leave. That’s what I’m doing. Just don’t break ranks, don’t embarrass the hevreh [the gang].”
“I’m not going to lie to myself and to the whole kibbutz and pretend that everything is fine,” Arik said. “End of discussion.”
ON A FRIDAY EVENING in the summer of 1951, members gathered on the kibbutz’s highest hill for the induction ceremony of the graduates. Past ceremonies were accompanied by an orchestra and choir, a stage covered with blue-and-white Zionist flags and revolutionary red flags. Now, though, with the impending split, the stage was bare, and a lone accordionist tried to rouse the listless comrades seated on folding chairs on the grass.
The graduates mounted the stage, girls in white blouses and blue skirts, boys in embroidered collarless shirts. Barefoot, paired, boys holding girls by the waist, they leaped to the songs of the pioneers, rousing songs of determination and hope, subverted by a melancholy minor key.
Arms folded, Arik stood to one side. From here he could see the kibbutz spread below, receding in the darkness. Spread on the slopes were the houses of the veterans, long concrete buildings with four doors leading to four identical one-room apartments. And beside them, outhouses and public showers. Farther down the hill, the children’s houses with red-shingled roofs. And the wheat fields and orange groves. And the cowshed, whose odor permeated the kibbutz, carried even now by the night’s cool breeze. And just behind where Arik stood, Sereni House, holding the hero’s archives.
A kibbutz veteran addressed the graduates. “You now face the challenge of continuing our path,” he said, “of ensuring the very existence of the collective.” He read out the names of the new members, pausing after each to allow the audience to affirm the young person’s candidacy. Arms that in previous induction ceremonies had been raised like flagpoles were now limp. “There remains a shadow of doubt concerning . . . Arie Achmon,” he continued, invoking Arik’s formal name. “I hope the situation will be clarified soon.”
Arik felt all eyes against him. Mapainik, secessionist. Was he imagining it, or was there hatred in their stares? He told himself he didn’t care. And, no, there was no “shadow of doubt,” no situation awaiting clarification. For the first time in his life, Arik Achmon had stepped out of line.
ON THE BORDER
TWO MONTHS LATER, Arik was drafted. He returned to Givat Brenner during leaves, but that arrangement was temporary. Givat Brenner was heading for a split, and Arik’s parents would soon be leaving.
Like most kibbutz recruits, Arik assumed he would join Nahal, the unit that combined military training with agricultural work on the border. But the kibbutz movement had other plans for him. In every draft, the movement chose three of its most promising young people to help infuse the kibbutz spirit among the new immigrants in the Golani infantry brigade. The movement chose Arik. He was mortified: What did he care about immigrant absorption? I’m a soldier, not a social worker. Still, he didn’t challenge the order: He had been raised to serve. Humiliated, he went to Golani.
In Golani, Arik encountered the new Israel that was rising in the immigrant camps, Jews from Yemen and North Africa who had never heard of a kibbutz and who couldn’t understand what Arik meant by communal property. How could everyone own everything and no one own anything?
And then there were the other refugees, Holocaust survivors. Sabon, “soap,” Arik and his friends called them, after the rumor that the Nazis had made soap out of Jewish flesh. Arik felt little connection to what had happened to Jews in Europe. Almost all of his family had come to the land of Israel before the war; they had intuited the flood, built their ark. As for those who had drowned: well, they too could have saved themselves. There had to be something wrong, he thought, with so many people who allowed themselves to be killed so easily.
IT WAS A time of crisis. The new state was overwhelmed with Jewish refugees from Europe and from the endangered diasporas of the Arab world, crowding into tent camps and shantytowns. Meanwhile Palestinian refugees slipped across the open border, killing and wounding. We promised the Jews a safe refuge, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared, and we must keep that promise.
But the IDF, which hadn’t recovered from its devastating losses in the 1948 war, wasn’t coping. In one border skirmish, seven Israeli soldiers were killed and one Jordanian soldier wounded, a disastrous ratio for a vastly outnumbered nation; as an added humiliation, the Israeli bodies were seized and dismembered. Hundreds of Palestinian infiltrators—many unarmed, who came to steal, not kill—were shot by IDF soldiers and by farmers, but that too failed as deterrence.
Desperate, the army tried to impose a nightly curfew on Palestinian villages across the border in Jordan from which infiltrators had emerged; anyone leaving their homes would be shot.
On a moonless winter night in 1952, Arik and six other soldiers, under the command of a corporal with no combat experience, set out from their base in central Israel and crossed the unmarked border into the West Bank.
After four kilometers they came to a village. They took cover on a hill overlooking the dirt road and lay there in the cold. After perhaps an hour they heard men’s voices, loud and joking. “Fire!” said the commander. Prematurely: the targets were out of range. A soldier threw a grenade; it didn’t explode. “Move out!” shouted the commander.
Why weren’t they charging? But the order was given, and Arik joined the others in humiliating retreat. As they entered the gate of their base, the soldiers sang an improvised ditty, “We went out to fight, we ran in flight.”
“You should be thrown out of the army,” the base commander said to the squad leader at the debriefing. Turning to Arik and his friends, he continued, “It’s a shame that this is the example you’ve gotten of an IDF commander. Your mission was to kill anyone who broke curfew. Instead, you fled.”
Two nights later, Arik’s unit hiked up Mount Gilboa, on the Israeli side of the northernmost border with the West Bank. They waited through the night. Just before dawn, they heard sheep. Then a shepherd’s voice. Perhaps five hundred meters away, within range. Arik pointed his light machine gun down the slope and emptied four cartridges. It was still too dark to see whether he had hit the shepherd, but Arik was a good shot, and he assumed that he did.
THE CURFEW POLICY wasn’t working. A young couple was shot dead in a farming community, a girl was murdered by seven terrorists in her home in Jerusalem.
Arik was sent for officers’ training. His commanders noted his steadiness under pressure, his insistence on accurate reporting, even when that reflected poorly on his performance. He was named an outstanding graduate, pinned in a ceremony by the IDF chief of staff. A natural soldier: as if Arik, born in the portentious year of 1933, had intuited his responsibility to undo Jewish helplessness.
In the fall of 1953, toward the end of Arik’s service, Commando Unit 101 was formed by a twenty-five-year-old major named Ariel Sharon. At a time when three out of four of the army’s retaliatory missions were failing, Unit 101 intended to operate with a spirit of mad daring. Sharon drove across the country handpicking 101’s members from kibbutzim and private farms, as if only men who worked the land were able to defend it. The new unit’s missions almost always succeeded. On incursions into the West Bank and Gaza, its members ambushed Palestinian raiding parties and blew up houses in villages that assisted terrorists. One night, three 101 commandos slipped into a Gaza refugee camp, dynamited a terrorist headquarters, and shot their way out against hundreds of armed opponents. Take the war into enemy territory, insisted Sharon: the border was permeable in both directions. One unit member took friends on hikes into Jordan and Syria, a native son’s revolt against siege. For the Jewish immigrants crowding into Israel’s uncertain refuge, 101 confirmed Zionism’s instinct: if you realigned the people of Israel with the land of Israel, the ancient archetypes would reemerge.
Arik, now an instructor at officers’ school, watched 101’s war with longing. It wasn’t only the glory he was missing but a chance to prove his worth as a soldier. What was he doing training cadets when the guys were out on nightly raids, establishing Israel’s deterrence? Joining 101 was by invitation only; unit members voted on each candidate. Many of the unit’s members were Arik’s friends. They sent word to him: What are you waiting for?
But when Arik asked the kibbutz movement for permission to extend his army service and join 101, he was told to demobilize. Kibbutz Givat Brenner had formally split, and its several hundred Mapainiks, including Arik’s parents and three siblings, had found a new home in a kibbutz called Netzer Sereni—literally, “Sereni’s young shoot”—named for Arik’s childhood hero. The kibbutz had been founded by Holocaust survivors in their twenties, and the survivors and the Givat Brenner expatriates were struggling to create a coherent society. The movement needed Arik.
Demobilized with the rank of lieutenant, Arik reluctantly returned his gun and kitbag, packed all his belongings into a small knapsack, and hitched to Netzer Sereni.
KIBBUTZ BUCHENWALD
WITH ITS PALM TREES and sand dunes and red-colored earth, Netzer Sereni, just south of Tel Aviv and not far from Givat Brenner, was a familiar landscape for Arik. Netzer, as members called it, was sparser and poorer than Givat Brenner. But Arik relished the challenge of building a new community. He was appointed manager of the cowshed, and introduced an automated milking system that boosted Netzer’s output to among the highest in the kibbutz movement.
Netzer’s founders had planned their kibbutz while still inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Collectivized for death, they dreamed of starting a commune in the land of Israel. Weeks after liberation, they formed “Kibbutz Buchenwald” and set up a training farm in Germany.
Arik heard their stories late at night in the cowshed, where he was the only native Israeli among survivors. The details were conveyed matter-of-factly, with black humor, like the way they identified themselves as “graduates” of a particular camp. Young people exchanging stories: Arik told them about Givat Brenner, they told him about Buchenwald.
Arik had never shown the slightest interest in the Holocaust. But now, among his new friends, he needed to know every detail of the destruction: How did the system work? How had the Germans managed to deceive the Jews? At what point had the victims realized what was happening? How many guards were there at the entrance to the ghetto, in the camp? The questions weren’t emotive but technical, the probings of a one-man commission of inquiry. He was curious, fascinated. He imagined himself there, at every stage, calmly assessing his options, how to slip out, save his family, hit back.
The guys in the cowshed, Arik discovered, were the opposite of the cowardly survivor stereotype. They’d survived through not passivity but constant alertness. Even in Buchenwald they had functioned as a collective, sharing what food they could and hiding sick friends from “selections” to the gas. And then, barely a month after liberation, they were already functioning as a kibbutz. Sabon: what jerks we were—
ARIK MARRIED HIS GIRLFRIEND, Rina, daughter of a writer whose realistic novels about kibbutz life scandalized his fellow kibbutzniks. Arik and Rina celebrated in the Netzer dining room. The entire kibbutz, some three hundred people, danced the hora into the night. It was Netzer’s first wedding, a sign of hope.
Netzer was beginning to thrive. Its metal shop produced the spring cots the government distributed to new immigrants, and its factory for flatbed trucks was the only one in Israel. Lawns spread against the sand dunes. The former Brennerites, with their work experience, and the survivors, with their determination to prove themselves, made a formidable team.
Yet the more Arik got to know survivors, the more he despaired of creating a common society with them. The survivors had their own codes, and Arik could never be sure what they were really saying. They were either not speaking to each other because of some obscure insult or else ready to die for each other. A kibbutz was supposed to be a place of trust; who could build a commune with such people?
One survivor sifted through the garbage for food. Another stole bread from the dining room. When bottles of wine intended for a kibbutz party went missing, Arik suspected one of the survivors. He searched the young man’s room as the suspect hugged himself and whimpered. Finally the real culprit was found. Afterward, whenever he passed the young man he’d falsely accused, Arik averted his eyes.
When tensions emerged between the survivors and the veterans of Givat Brenner, Arik tried to mediate. But the differences in mentality were too vast. Brennerites tended to be relaxed about egalitarian infringements, like receiving outside gifts, while survivors regarded infractions as a threat to the kibbutz. As kibbutz veterans, Brennerites dismissed the socialist passion of survivors as exaggerated. What do they know about kibbutz life? Brennerites complained. Among survivors, the “experience” of the Brennerites became a bitter joke: Nu, really, what do we know about life? We don’t have their experience.
Survivors noted with resentment that when Brennerites visited Tel Aviv, they were entertained by relatives and even taken out to restaurants, while the survivors wandered Tel Aviv’s streets. Some survivors demanded a stipend for outings to the city. But no compensation could redress the gap that separated those who had come to the land of Israel before the Holocaust and those who had come afterward.
With the best intentions, survivors and Brennerites had tried to form a kibbutz together. But each group retreated into itself. The founders of Kibbutz Buchenwald had survived apocalypse and aspired to utopia; now they were being defeated by ordinary life.
ARIK DIVIDED HIS LIFE into what he called “missions.” There was the kibbutz mission, the army mission, the family mission. In precisely that order.
Arik and Rina were drifting apart. Arik never put his arm around Rina, one friend noted; Rina would hug Arik’s friends, but not Arik. When they weren’t making arrangements, they didn’t know what to talk about.
Arik sought respite in reserve duty. As an officer, deputy commander of an infantry company, he was frequently called up for maneuvers and planning sessions. But reserve duty too wasn’t satisfying: his unit was mediocre, and in time of war unlikely to see frontline duty.
In those rare moments when Arik looked at himself objectively, he saw a cowhand, without prospects for real intellectual growth, caught in an emotionally dysfunctional marriage and kibbutz. He would quickly dispel that image. How many young people were given his responsibilities? So Netzer had problems; true service meant doing your best in whatever conditions fate had placed you. Arik intensified his commitment to the kibbutz. At age twenty-four, he was elected Netzer’s work coordinator, a position usually reserved for a veteran comrade.
In his annual report to the Netzer community, Arik wrote that the cowshed had yielded a good profit and that its cows continued to produce beyond the national average. We have much to be proud of, he noted. But then he warned: those achievements, “won at great effort, can be squandered if, heaven forbid, we allow our striving to flag.” It was, perhaps, a warning to himself.
IN AUGUST 1956 Arik received a note from Aharon Davidi, commander of the IDF’s lone paratrooper battalion, and Arik’s former commander in officers’ school. “Achmonchik,” the note affectionately began, “we’re starting a reservists’ battalion. Come.”
Unit 101 had been absorbed into the paratroopers, now the army’s elite combat force. The merger happened after 101 was implicated in a massacre. A Palestinian had thrown a grenade into a home in Yehud, near Tel Aviv, killing an immigrant mother from Turkey and her two young children. Unit 101 retaliated by blowing up dozens of houses in the West Bank village of Qibye, killing some sixty civilians hiding in their homes who had either ignored warnings to flee, not heard the warnings, or not received them at all.
The purpose of the merger was to rein in 101 while infusing the paratroopers, until then a lackluster unit, with its fighting spirit. Paratroopers so thoroughly internalized the 101 ethos that one recruit escaped a hospital bed to join his friends on a mission.
Arik went to see Davidi, whose interests included Chinese philosophy and playing mental chess against himself. They met at paratrooper headquarters in the Tel Nof air force base near Givat Brenner. The paratroopers, explained Davidi, were being expanded into a brigade: two battalions of draftees and a third battalion of reservists, to be known as the 28th. Arik was being appointed a platoon commander in Company A, 28th Battalion.
“Davidi,” said Arik, “I’m a deputy commander in another unit.”
“A technicality.”
He sent Arik to a paratrooper officer named Motta Gur. Arik recognized him: Motta had once come to Givat Brenner to instruct its teenagers in hand-to-hand combat. “Davidi says you’re one of us,” said Motta, “so you’re one of us. We’re starting a three-week parachuting course next week. Can you come?” Of course he couldn’t come: he had responsibilities on the kibbutz and at home. But Motta wasn’t really asking. Of course he would come.
He jumped from a Dakota propeller plane, without a reserve parachute. For a few precious moments, he soared above his life, exhilarated by weightlessness. Landing, he felt the earth rise up to greet him.
TERRORISTS DISPATCHED BY the Egyptian government strafed an Israeli wedding. Three children were murdered in an attack on a synagogue. Other atrocities followed. The IDF prepared its response: an invasion of Egyptian-controlled Gaza and the Sinai Desert, the second Arab-Israeli war.
Arik received two draft calls, one from his infantry unit, one from the 28th Paratroopers’ Battalion. He ignored the first and showed up for the second; technically, he was now AWOL.
The 1956 Suez War confirmed the paratroopers’ preeminence within the IDF. In the war’s most famous battle, paratroopers led by Motta Gur were caught in an ambush in the Mitla Pass near the Suez Canal, and shot their way past Egyptian forces positioned on the hills above.
Yet, maddeningly, Arik wasn’t at Mitla. Instead, his unit had been dispatched to deal with Egyptian POWs. One of Arik’s soldiers, manning a roadblock, radioed him that Egyptians were descending from the hills to surrender, “but I’m going to finish them off.” Arik replied, “If you do that, I’ll finish you off.” The Egyptians were taken prisoner.
Arik couldn’t believe his bad luck. He’d been too young for the Palmach, too obedient a kibbutznik for Unit 101. And now, finally, in the right place at the right time, he’d been cheated again of the chance to prove himself.
THE MILITARY POLICE are looking for you, Arik was told when he returned home to Netzer.
Arik reported to the commander of his former unit. “The only reason I’m not putting you on trial is because you ran off to the paratroopers,” the officer said. “But those adventures are over.”
Arik explained his dilemma to Ariel Sharon. “You’re staying with us,” said Sharon, laughing. For Sharon, Arik Achmon’s willingness to risk prison for the paratroopers was proof enough he belonged.
A week later, a plain IDF envelope arrived in Netzer Sereni: Arik Achmon was officially a paratrooper.
THE PARATROOPERS SURRENDER
ARIK WAS APPOINTED commander of Company A, 28th Battalion.
The eighty reservists of Company A included veterans of the paratroopers’ retaliation raids of the mid-1950s, like Arik’s brother-in-law Yosef Schwartz, known informally as Yoske Balagan (“Yoske the mayhem maker”), who was married to Rina’s sister. The veterans loved to tell Yoske stories, like the time he responded to cancellation of weekend leave by setting fire to a field near the base, forcing the army to send the men home.
Yoske’s buddy in Company A was Aryeh Weiner, a neighbor of Arik’s from Netzer Sereni. Weiner, whose family survived the war in Romania, had come to pre-state Israel alone at age twelve on an illegal immigrant boat running the British blockade. He claimed he’d gotten his father’s agreement to leave, thanks to a card game: If I win this hand, his father had said, you have my blessings. His father won, and Weiner set off for the Holy Land.
Weiner and Yoske wouldn’t let Arik forget that he wasn’t a veteran like them. Who does he think he is, they demanded, this guy who’s never experienced real combat? Who is he to tell us how to be paratroopers?
One day during reserve duty, when Arik was lecturing his men on battle tactics, Weiner called out, “And what do you know about that? Did you ever hear the sound of bullets over your head?”
“I’ve been with the battalion from the beginning,” Arik said.
“And I’m one of its founders,” countered Weiner.
They’re right, thought Arik. He hadn’t paid his dues.
Arik tried to win them over by proving his analytical prowess. But he came across as arrogant. “Arik knows everything,” Yoske said. “An ignoramus like me, what do I know? I barely finished second grade and grew up on the streets before the Irgun gave me a gun and the British put a bullet in my stomach. But Arik? No matter what the subject, he knows.”
For all its small torments, reserve duty provided respite from the growing silence between Arik and Rina and the growing estrangement among Netzer’s comrades. He looked forward to the nighttime jumps and sea landings and coordinated infantry and tank assaults in the desert. Often Arik would spend Shabbat, his day off on the kibbutz, touring the border with fellow officers to check the army’s state of alertness. No one asked them to do it. They simply trusted only themselves with Israel’s defense.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1963, the 28th Battalion set up a tent camp in the Carmel mountains near Haifa for a monthlong training exercise. On the first day of mobilization reservists lined up before tables set up in a forest clearing and signed for equipment: Belgian surplus FN rifles, British surplus ammunition belts, American surplus sleeping bags (woolen in the Israeli summer), two-man pup tents, some with missing stakes.
There was a new addition to the battalion: a dozen religious young men in knitted kippot. Graduates of Nahal, they had received some parachuting training. But the paratrooper veterans regarded them as pretend soldiers, better suited for picking tomatoes than commando missions.
“Look at those Nahlawim,” said Yoske Balagan, using a mocking term for Nahal recruits.
“Pathetic,” agreed Weiner.
“They don’t even know how to put up a tent,” continued Yoske. “Imagine going out on a mission with these guys. They’d be more dangerous to us than to the enemy.”
Worst of all were the religious Nahlawim. What, demanded Yoske, were these dosim, these religious nerds, doing in the paratroopers?
When it came to the IDF’s religious regulations, the overwhelmingly secular paratroopers were a law unto themselves. The army insisted that all its kitchens be kosher, so that religious and secular soldiers could eat together; but the paratroopers roasted nonkosher porcupines at their campfires and routinely mixed dairy and meat.
Arik saw the religious reservists swaying together in a tight cluster of prayer and wondered, How were these dosim supposed to become paratroopers?
But the dosim surprised him. He watched them charge and crawl and parachute, and they were as good as any of the other men. If anything, they seemed even more keen on proving themselves. He watched them, too, when they wrapped themselves in phylacteries for dawn prayers, rising a half hour earlier than the others rather than ask for time off from the morning routine—the opposite of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who hid behind their faith to avoid military service altogether.
One Friday afternoon, when soldiers were sent home on leave close to sundown, Arik’s religious soldiers preferred to stay in camp rather than risk traveling on the Sabbath. They didn’t ask to be let out early, Arik noted approvingly.
Arik called together the veterans of Company A. “There are standing orders about keeping kosher in the army,” he said. “From now on those orders are going to be obeyed. No mixing milk and meat utensils. No nonkosher meat in the kitchen.”
“Have you gone totally crazy?” said Yoske. “This is the paratroopers!”
“Yoske, I know you don’t like the way I think or do things generally. But this is how it’s going to be.”
“Since when did Arik Achmon become a friend of the dosim?”
“I’m not going to allow any soldiers under my command to feel uncomfortable. There’s going to be basic respect. You can set up a burner near my tent and do what you want there.”
Arik stopped referring to religious soldiers as dosim. They were people of values. Underneath the kippah, they’re just like us—
ARIK THE KIBBUTZNIK: THE END
ARIK WAS APPOINTED manager of Netzer’s agricultural sector. Unlike previous managers, Arik continued to wear his work clothes, ready to fix a tractor. Once a week he worked in the fields; a manager, he said, should know his organization from within.
When that two-year position ended, Arik was assigned to the cotton fields. What a waste, he thought. How was it possible to advance professionally on the kibbutz when you were removed from a position in which you proved yourself, just because of some ideological principle of rotation? How would the kibbutz be able to hold its most talented people when they felt stifled at every turn? And how much longer could he bear those endless weekly meetings—an ocean of words and a desert of ideas, as he put it, where the decisions of his life were subjected to majority vote, and every nudnik got his democratic say about whether and what Arik should study at university? If I had an honorable way out of here, I would grab it—
And then his marriage to Rina collapsed.
Belatedly, Arik had tried to consider her needs. They divided domestic tasks, and he cleaned the house. When Rina got permission from the kibbutz to study at university, Arik assumed responsibility for their daughter, Tsafra.
Rumors began reaching Arik that Rina had been spotted on campus with a young man. Arik didn’t confront her, hoping it would pass. When they finally talked, he persuaded her to give their marriage another try. In 1964 their son, Ori, was born. But that only created the need for more arrangements.
Arik had tried to change, become a good husband and father. At the beginning, he was sure, there had been love. They still respected each other. But distance had become habit. He had tried too late to salvage the “family mission.”
ARIK WAS CALLED up for reserve duty on the Syrian border. It was early summer 1966. There had been shooting attacks against Israeli farmers, and the IDF had retaliated against Syrian positions. There were fears too that Syria would renew attempts to dry up Israel’s main water reservoir, the Sea of Galilee, whose sources were in the Syrian-controlled Golan Heights. The Middle East seemed to be drifting again toward war.
At night, looking into the blackness where the hills of Syria and Jordan converged, he realized: It’s over. His marriage, and also his life on the kibbutz. He had given his best to Givat Brenner, and then to Netzer. But in the end the problem wasn’t the Stalinists of Givat Brenner or the survivors of Netzer, but Arik himself—the ultimate kibbutznik, who never missed a weekly meeting, who was always on call for the movement, who always had a rational solution for increasing efficiency in the cowshed and the cotton fields. Yet he had forcibly collectivized himself against his nature. The truth? Communal life was never for me—
Divorce was the one reason for leaving the collective that kibbutzniks accepted. Arik asked for a leave of absence—he would need to keep a room in Netzer to see his two children on weekends—and enrolled in the economics department of Tel Aviv University.
In August 1966, at age thirty-three, with two suitcases containing all his possessions, he headed for the sand dunes of North Tel Aviv, the near-deserted extremity of the city where a new university was rising. He waived the kibbutz’s offer to pay his tuition, which would have obligated him to return to Netzer after his studies. Instead, he received a grant of 1,500 lira for ten years of work, enough to cover a semester’s tuition and two months’ rent for a room near campus.
PREPARING FOR WAR
THE 28TH BATTALION was absorbed into a new brigade of paratrooper reservists, the 55th. It included another two newly formed battalions, in addition to auxiliary units of medics and non-combat logistical staff, some two thousand men altogether. Motta Gur was appointed commander. In the 1950s Motta had formed a unit of new immigrants into one of the IDF’s best fighting forces, proving that not only native-born Israelis could fight. He’d led a raid on a terrorist base in Gaza, and then, with Egyptian soldiers in pursuit, ran several kilometers toward the Israeli border, carrying a dead soldier on his back. He was soft-spoken, calm under pressure, willing to be corrected by his men, ambitious—precisely the qualities Arik valued in himself.
“Arik,” said Motta, “I want an intelligence officer who doesn’t play by the book. Someone capable of creative thinking. I sifted through all the available candidates,” he added dryly, “and you won by default.”
Motta was offering him the position of chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, a leap from company commander to the brigade’s fourth highest position. Arik had no experience in intelligence. And he was trying to start a new life. He had signed up for a full load of courses and was working part-time in the Yediot Aharonot advertising department, spending weekends with his children in Netzer. Motta was asking him to risk stretching beyond his breaking point, to abandon any pretense of a normal life and be on constant call.
“I’m about to begin university studies,” Arik protested feebly.
“With me you won’t do much studying,” said Motta.
Of course Arik could say no: this was the reserves, and he was a civilian. But Motta wasn’t asking for Arik’s consent; he knew Arik wouldn’t refuse.
Arik went to see an old friend who now headed the IDF course for intelligence officers. “How do I do this?” asked Arik. His friend handed him three books on intelligence gathering. “Read these,” he said. “Next week we have a three-day drill in the desert for the graduates of our latest course. Come.” Arik read, then went to the drill. When it ended, his friend said, “Now you are an intelligence officer.”
NASSER’S TROOP BUILDUP along the border intensifed; war seemed inevitable. Motta asked Arik to gather available intelligence for the area around El Arish, the coastal town in Sinai where the paratroopers would land in the event of war. Arik collected maps, aerial photographs, and reports of Egyptian troop movements. Two days after being given the assignment, Arik presented Motta with a ten-page handwritten paper summing up the available data.
Arik said nothing about his war preparations to Yehudit Hazan, the psychology student he was dating. He had met Yehudit at officers’ school in the early 1950s. Fellow kibbutzniks, they’d been part of the same circle. Now they were both in their early thirties, divorced with children. After only a few months together, they were discussing marriage.
Yehudit, who’d been granted study leave by her kibbutz, was the daughter of Yaakov Hazan, the leader of Hashomer Hatzair. She bore that distinction uneasily; Arik recalled how in the army she had tried not to divulge her last name, to avoid the taint of privilege. She was smart, empathic, tough. And she wasn’t intimidated by Arik’s high opinion of his own capabilities. I’m not easily impressed, thought Arik, but with Yehudit I’ve met my match. She’s actually as intelligent and disciplined as I am. My equal in every way, except that she’s a better person—
Nearly thirty-four, Arik was older than most of the reservists of the 55th Brigade. A receding hairline emphasized the proportioned momentum of his face: forehead sloping toward upturned nose, chin repeating that same confident thrust. Sometimes, though, his lower lip would recede behind his upper lip and reveal a boyish hesitation.
There was one complication in the marriage plans of Arik and Yehudit: she didn’t want to leave her kibbutz, Mishmar Ha’Emek, which her parents had helped found. Yehudit was the only one of her siblings who still lived there. “It will devastate my father if I leave,” she said.
“Everything will work out,” Arik reassured her.
He didn’t tell her that there was no way he was returning to the farm.