A RECKONING WITH HISTORY
ARIK ACHMON MADE the rounds of the wounded, and sought out Avital Geva. Though they knew each other only cursorily from reserve duty, Avital was one of the junior officers whom Arik most appreciated—perhaps envied—for his spontaneity, his joy.
As Arik approached Avital’s bed, Avital began to weep.
“Are your wounds so painful?” Arik asked awkwardly.
Avital didn’t seem to hear the question. Still weeping, he said, “Mother Russia. The Second Homeland. How could this betrayal have happened to us?”
Crazy Shmutzniks, thought Arik, even now they still feel betrayed by the Soviet Union.
But Arik had misunderstood Avital’s anguish. Avital wasn’t mourning the betrayal of the Soviet Union, for which he cared nothing. He was, instead, grieving for Hashomer Hatzair’s betrayal of itself. Hashomer Hatzair had prided itself on its ability to understand the inner meaning of history but had missed the most obvious truths, had mistaken enemies for friends, mass murderers for saviors. How would his beloved movement survive the shame?
AVITAL’S HOSPITAL ROOM filled with family and friends. “Hevreh? Not to worry,” he reassured well-wishers. “It looks worse than it is.”
The bandages over his face were removed, but mortar fragments remained in his shoulders and legs.
Avital transformed his ward into a kind of kibbutz where no one was a stranger. He introduced his visitors to his fellow patients and joked with the nurses and doctors. Relieved friends told each other that nothing had changed: Avital remained Avital. The Ein Shemer newsletter downplayed his wounds: “Luckily for all of us, Avital was only lightly wounded. He is receiving excellent care. The nurses constantly hover around him, and were it not for a little pain, he might even be enjoying himself.”
But as Avital had revealed in a rare moment to Arik, he was quietly grieving. One of his closest friends from Ein Shemer, Amnon Harodi, had been killed in the battle for Jerusalem, his body blown in half by a mortar shell. Avital kept recalling the image of Amnon saying good-bye to his pregnant wife as he went off to war. With his goatee and ironic expression, Amnon had been a farmer intellectual, suspecting every dogma. It was Amnon who, in Ein Shemer’s May Day symposium just before the war, had dared to publicly say what so many of the young people were thinking: that working-class solidarity and loyalty to the Soviet Union and even the red flag were illusions, an embarrassment.
And now the Soviets, having armed the Arabs and encouraged them to war, had helped kill Amnon. How could we have been so stupid—
THE SUMMER OF ARIK ACHMON
FOR ARIK, IT was a time of vindication. At a postmortem gathering of IDF intelligence officers, Arik was treated with special respect, recognition of his effectiveness during the war despite the handicap of poor intelligence. On a visit to Netzer Sereni, he ran into his paratrooper buddy Aryeh Weiner, who had mocked him for not being a war veteran. “Weiner,” said Arik, dryly, “I’ve now heard bullets over my head.” There were benefits, he discovered, to being part of an epic. Seeking a waiver for exams, he put on a dress uniform, red beret tucked under his epaulet, and drove in a confiscated Jordanian jeep to the campus of Tel Aviv University; when he happened to mention that he’d been among the liberators of Jerusalem, his request was readily granted.
Arik knew that Yehudit wasn’t interested in his war stories, so he kept those to himself. Yehudit hadn’t even known to what unit he belonged: when she heard on the radio that “Arik,” the chief intelligence officer of Motta Gur’s brigade, had raised the flag over the Temple Mount, she hadn’t realized it was her Arik. Yehudit resented the paratroopers for competing for Arik’s time. All the other reservists had been demobilized; why was Arik still in uniform? So what if he had an obligation to Motta, what about his obligation to her?
ARIK AND MOISHELEH Stempel-Peles, Motta’s deputy commander, stood outside the little whitewashed house in Rishpon, a farming community near the sea. Naomi Mizrahi opened the door. When she saw the two men in uniform, she wept.
Naomi’s husband, Yirmi, had headed the machine gun unit of Company A, which Arik had commanded before becoming the brigade’s intelligence officer. Arik had felt close to the good-natured Yemenite, one of the first Sephardim to break into the paratroopers’ club of kibbutzniks. Yirmi had been hit with shrapnel in his hand in the first hours of the battle for Jerusalem, but he’d refused to be evacuated and led his men across no-man’s-land. He was killed by a sniper shortly afterward.
Naomi had been left with two young children and a patch of field. What was Arik supposed to say? What comfort could he offer that wouldn’t sound perfunctory?
Moisheleh unbuckled his belt and sighed as his ample stomach expanded. “How are the children coping?” he asked Naomi. “What about your financial situation? Is there a will?”
Naomi stopped crying and started talking. Moisheleh retrieved a notebook and wrote. His tone remained matter-of-fact, businesslike. As if to say: This happened to you, but it could just as well be my wife sitting in your place. No awkward words of consolation, no false pieties, only offers of practical assistance. Arik watched with admiration. Here was a form of condolence he could manage.
“This isn’t a one-time visit, it’s a connection,” Moisheleh said as they left. “You’ll be hearing from us.”
A SHATTERING IN GAN SHMUEL
IN THE HUMID JULY NIGHT, Udi Adiv paced the paved paths of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, lined with little red-roofed houses shaded by cypresses and fig trees. Sprinklers rotated across the lawns, bright green even in summer. On a hill in the distance were the rooms of the children and the teenagers, a self-contained youth collective with its own dining room, responsible for its own rules. Paradise, thought Udi with contempt.
Udi had returned home a hero. Old-timers pressed his hand, slapped him on the back. “Glad you made it back safely,” one said, offering a kibbutznik’s version of effusiveness. The teenagers of Gan Shmuel regarded him with awe: not only a star of the kibbutz basketball team but a liberator of Jerusalem.
He looked the part: tall, broad-shouldered, square jaw, deep-set eyes. But the edges of his mouth were often downturned, so that even when he laughed he seemed to be grimacing.
In the dining room, Udi exhorted friends to confront the truth about “Zionist imperialism.” He’d seen too much in the war, they told each other; one friend was convinced that Udi was suffering from shell shock. How, they wondered, had he so mistaken Israel’s fears for arrogance? His body broke out in rashes, and no medication could ease the unbearable itching.
Yet several young people did gather around Udi. After work in the cotton fields, dragging pipes across the field while standing ankle-deep in brackish water, they smoked hashish and listened to Udi denounce Hashomer Hatzair and the fiction of “progressive Zionism.” The Jews, he said, weren’t a nation but a religion and so had no right to their own state. The occupation didn’t begin in 1967 but in 1948, with the creation of Israel.
Suddenly the legitimacy of Zionism was being debated in Gan Shmuel, where everyone read the newspaper of Hashomer Hatzair and young men kept their hair hardly longer than army regulation. There were no more diligent workers than the kibbutzniks of Gan Shmuel. Members often waived their Shabbat rest to work a few hours in the fields or the canning factory. Comrades told the story of how, during the British Mandate, when soldiers searched the kibbutz for illegal weapons, a kibbutznik was asked to identify himself. Responding in precise English, he said, “I am a gentleman of potatoes.”
But another, more restless Gan Shmuel was emerging from the war. The collapse of faith in the Soviet Union that had occurred on nearby Ein Shemer had happened here too. The few remaining true believers were taunted by their comrades as traitors—“You and your Soviet Union”—as if they hadn’t been, until several weeks earlier, pro-Soviet too. In this breakdown of old certainties, everything was suddenly open to question.
Especially the fate of Cherkas. Near the cotton fields of Gan Shmuel were the ruins of an Arab village called Cherkas. As a child Udi and his friends had gone there to pick mulberries; Udi had feared being stranded among the abandoned stone houses without roofs, as though its ghosts would possess him. Cherkas had been destroyed in 1948 by the Israeli army, concerned that the village could become a hostile base overlooking the road to Nazareth. Cherkas’s residents were resettled in Israeli Arab villages a few kilometers away. The army offered the fields bordering the road to Gan Shmuel; the kibbutzniks voted to accept the offer. They had just emerged from a war of survival; if the army said there was a threat to keeping that land in Arab hands, they weren’t about to argue. And if Cherkas’s residents were moved just up the road, well, worse things happened in war.
No one in Gan Shmuel talked about Cherkas. But now Udi found that silence unbearable. How had their parents simply watched Cherkas vanish without protest? For Udi, a direct line connected the destruction of Cherkas with the destruction of the Arab shantytown at the Western Wall.
FAME DISCOVERS MEIR ARIEL
IN MIDAFTERNOON, AFTER a day’s work in the cotton fields of Kibbutz Mishmarot, Meir Ariel returned to his little apartment with its icebox, its thin-legged couch that opened into a bed, and its olive tree trunk that balanced a small table, and turned on the radio. The songs alternated between the Six-Day War and San Francisco’s Summer of Love. And then suddenly there was Meir, singing through the static from the amphitheater on Mount Scopus: “Jerusalem of iron, of lead and of blackness . . .”
“They’re making me out to be this big hero,” Meir complained to his wife, Tirza.
“Why should you care how you become famous?” countered Tirza.
Yes, of course he wanted to be famous. But not like this, not with a takeoff of someone else’s song. And since when did he represent the paratroopers? He had always been an ambivalent soldier, a civilian in uniform. Borrowed ethos, borrowed melody: a fraud.
Journalists appeared in Mishmarot. Meir dutifully played along, giving reporters quotable one-liners. I had to write an alternative to Naomi Shemer’s anthem, he explained in one interview, because “the metals got switched,” from gold to iron. But the profiles about the sensitive paratrooper-farmer only deepened his unease. He tried to compensate with irony, telling a journalist that he experienced more fear onstage on Mount Scopus than he had during the entire war. But that only reinforced the endearing image of the shy, stoic paratrooper.
He had intended his song as a protest against sentimentality, myth; yet the song itself had become absorbed into the national mythos, one more reason for Israelis to celebrate themselves: Look how conflicted, how humane, our fighters are. A song meant to be shared with friends had somehow been let loose, and now the whole country was peering into his soul.
Shuli Natan, the female soldier with the quivering voice who had popularized “Jerusalem of Gold,” went on pilgrimage to Mishmarot, accompanied by a reporter. Her conversation with Meir was recorded in the newspaper Ha’aretz:
MEIR: The words that gave me the push to sing were the words of Naomi Shemer.
SHULI: I don’t think you can compare the words [of the two songs]. Naomi’s song is a prayer of longing, a hymn. Your words are an exact description of the historic change that happened.
MEIR: Naomi Shemer’s song is more than a passing phenomenon. The words I wrote are just a response to events.
Ha’aretz summed up the encounter with this headline: “Shuli Offered a Prayer—The Paratrooper Ariel Fulfilled It.”
Naomi Shemer wasn’t charmed. She wrote Meir, threatening to sue for plagiarism. The curse of “Jerusalem of Iron”: now he’d made an enemy of Israel’s greatest songwriter. “Why is she so upset?” Meir told Tirza. “I never intended this to get out.” But then he reconsidered: “She’s right. I hitched a ride on her song.”
Shemer agreed to meet Meir. As the date of their meeting approached, Meir became increasingly anxious. Naomi Shemer was, at age thirty-seven, the most beloved composer of Hebrew song. She had written the sound track of the state in its exuberant youth—songs about a soldier returning home from war and a soldier who doesn’t return, about cowboys in the desert and a couple in sandals on a little bridge in Tel Aviv; songs that were sung on school outings and army hikes and in kibbutz dining rooms and even in synagogues, where her melodies were attached to prayers. No song went more deep than “Jerusalem of Gold,” which had been instantly adopted by Israelis, even before the war, as a second anthem. And Meir had violated that song.
Tirza accompanied Meir to the Tel Aviv restaurant where they met with Shemer. “I didn’t intend to hurt you in any way,” Meir said to her. “I’m not chasing headlines. I want to make this right, but I don’t have much to offer. I work in the cotton fields of Kibbutz Mishmarot.”
Shemer, herself a former kibbutznik, was gracious. She acknowledged being moved by “Jerusalem of Iron,” praised its language. She paid for the meal.
They settled on splitting the royalties from any future income related to “Jerusalem of Iron.” Meir would have given her all the royalties if she’d asked: as a kibbutznik, he wouldn’t see the money anyway.
MISHMAROT REJOICED IN Meir’s success. Meir had forever linked the little kibbutz with Israel’s greatest moment. The mimeographed newsletter reported on his media triumphs. “We wish Meir success in writing songs in times of peace and tranquillity for our people and our land,” the newsletter wrote. Even Meir’s father, Sasha, the dour principal of the local school, was proud, though of course he didn’t admit it.
At age twenty-five Meir remained a beautiful boy, with high cheekbones and long black curls. Only his almond-shaped eyes, which sometimes seemed to shift between green and blue and with a faraway look that was likewise imprecise, hinted at the torment in his soul.
Meir wanted to be a normal kibbutznik, unburdened by brooding thoughts about death and meaning. But normalcy eluded him. As a boy, he would sleepwalk out of the children’s house, an unconscious protest against separation from his parents, until he was finally allowed to sleep in their apartment. Now he wandered in daydreams. His friends laughed about how he’d run over irrigation pipes while driving a tractor, caught up in a line to a new song or simply in the sound of the wind through the eucalyptus trees.
His struggle for stability left him tender and tolerant, not toward his own weaknesses but toward those of others. Meir, they said on Mishmarot, never got angry; when someone behaved poorly Meir smiled sadly, as if to say, Nu, hevreh, what do you expect, that’s how we are, we human beings.
Meir—“Meirkeh”—was beloved in Mishmarot. He played accordion for the weekly folk dancing, confided his love poems to the Mishmarot newsletter. When there was a death in the kibbutz family, he wrote a rhymed eulogy for the funeral. Meir revered the old-timers who, though barely in their fifties, looked so much older, worn by austerity and labor. What amazing people they were, moving across continents, always just one step ahead of death, creating a new state and culture and way of life. Where did these Jews get the stamina to emerge as victors from the twentieth century?
Yet Mishmarot was different from its two bigger and more successful neighbors, Gan Shmuel, home of Udi Adiv, and Ein Shemer, home of Avital Geva. And not only because Mishmarot had always been anti-Marxist and social democratic. Here young women wore makeup and young men jeans. On Gan Shmuel, foreign volunteers with long hair were taken for haircuts the day they arrived; on Mishmarot, Meir had let his hair grow and no one seemed to mind.
Mishmarot was a small kibbutz, with barely one hundred members, off a back road near the regional cemetery. Little houses with verandas angled along sloping dirt paths. Mishmarot of course had its cotton fields and chicken coops, but its main source of income was the plywood factory, which had scandalized the neighboring kibbutzim by bringing in a capitalist partner.
“You call this a kibbutz?” mocked Meir’s wife, Tirza, who’d grown up in a kibbutz on the Syrian border. “Everyone does what they want. You want to be on a committee? Fine. You don’t want to be on a committee? Also fine. This isn’t a kibbutz, it’s anarchy.” Mishmarot’s anarchic spirit was especially evident in the summer of 1967. During the war, the children had been evacuated from their communal house to underground shelters. But now that the war was over, mothers simply kept their children home. The children’s home, central to kibbutz life, was shut down, without so much as debate at the weekly meeting.
Mishmarot reserved its communal passion for song. Several of Meir’s friends had written songs that made it to the radio; one, about a soldier returning home after battle and unable to readjust to normal life, was a hit that summer. On holidays and at weddings, the kibbutz’s musical group, part choral group, part pop band, sang satirical songs written by Meir and his collaborator, Shalom Hanoch. Shalom was currently concluding his army service in the IDF’s entertainment troupe, and when he finished he intended to become a rock singer.
As a child, lying forlorn at night in the communal children’s house, wetting his bed and sucking his fingers, Meir would listen to the singing of the grown-ups. Only then, soothed by the hopeful songs of the pioneers, would he fall into restless sleep.
Later, as teenagers, Meir and his friends would sit on the grass with guitars and sing the songs of Elvis and the Beatles that had reached their remote corner, despite the best intentions of the socialist government to censor the 1960s. (The government had once prevented a Beatles concert in Israel, so as not to corrupt the youth.) Meir and his friend Shalom described that time in a wistful song called “Legend of the Lawn,” an ode to teenage romance on the kibbutz, boy and girl awkwardly reaching out toward each other through a tangle of bodies: “There’s a pile of hevreh on the grass / Those kinds of things—I like / girls-boys together, it’s nice that / there’s courage sometimes to mix . . . / Beneath my head lies a thigh / and on my stomach a burst of curls . . . / I can’t tell whose hand is crawling over me / and turning my body into a piano.”
Shalom had written the melancholy music as a parody of an old Zionist song. But the music was so lovely, and Meir’s lyrics so evocative, that Mishmarot’s young people adopted it as an anthem.
A RECORD PRODUCER appeared at Meir’s door with a contract for an album, to be titled Jerusalem of Iron.
“I just wrote that as a parody,” Meir protested feebly, and signed.
In a newspaper interview, he explained why. “After urgent consultations with my wife, I decided first of all to exploit the opportunity given to me; second, to prove to whomever I need to prove to that I can write better songs [than ‘Jerusalem of Iron’]. My own songs. I don’t think that ‘Jerusalem of Iron’ is a good song. It simply belongs to those days. I hate pathos.”
AVITAL GEVA BOYCOTTS THE WALL
AFTER A MONTH in the hospital, Avital returned to Kibbutz Ein Shemer. He gave Ada strict instructions: No welcome-home party.
Instead friends filled their apartment at all hours. They had recently moved from one room to a room and a half, with a private bathroom. The new apartment was on the edge of the orchards, beside two cypress trees with great branches, planted to protect the oranges from the wind. As teenagers, Avital and Ada would meet there secretly, trying to evade the watchful collective. Since Avital’s injury, his relationship with Ada, always close, had become almost telepathic. It was, one friend noted, as if they had become a single being.
IN FLOPPY CONICAL CAPS and wide straw hats and work boots and sandals, with sleeping bags and knapsacks weighted with canned meat and corn and with East German cameras around their necks, the kibbutzniks of Ein Shemer piled into open-backed trucks to discover the restored homeland. After a day of hiking in the Golan Heights, in Hebron and Bethlehem, they would retire to youth hostels or monasteries, twenty to a room, and awaken at dawn for another day of hiking. During one trip they drove to the site, near Ammunition Hill, where Amnon Harodi had been blown apart.
Avital refused to join them. “I don’t want to tour battlegrounds,” he told Ada. And he especially did not want to go to the Western Wall. “Not interested,” he said curtly. He was in no mood for rejoicing or gratitude. I’d give up the whole pile of stones to get Amnon back—
Ada returned from the West Bank disgusted. “You should see our people,” she said, “gloating like conquerors and bargaining over trinkets.”
IN EIN SHEMER there were no more arguments about the Soviet Union. The break with “that bitch,” as Amnon Harodi had called it, suddenly seemed self-evident. The Ein Shemer newsletter even denounced the leaders of the Soviet Union as “red Czars”—a description that not long ago would likely have been condemned by kibbutzniks as fascist.
Avital wasn’t mollified. The ideological shift had happened too abruptly, without introspection. Avital was struggling to understand how a community of decent, even noble human beings had been so blinded to evil and threat. They had behaved no differently from the religious fanatics they loved to despise. Worse, comrades: we turned a mass murderer and anti-Semite into a saint! They had walled themselves off from the rest of the nation, reading only the movement’s newspaper and dismissing all criticism of their ideology as lies. Unless they tried to understand how they had gotten to that point, they could make a similar mistake again.
STEADIED BY A cane, Avital shuffled along the paths of his beloved kibbutz, beneath the canopy of ficus trees, through the children’s area where he’d grown up, through the orchards now being irrigated in preparation for the autumn harvest. Then he wandered into Ein Shemer’s greenhouses, which grew roses. Avital hated roses—too pretty, too tame—but the greenhouses intoxicated him. Everything rising, new life breaking through. In the moist density, he felt his own vitality stirring again.
THE SILENCE BETWEEN FATHER AND SON
URI AND TOVA Adiv were worried about their son, Udi. But they didn’t know how to show their concern. As a boy Udi hadn’t been hugged or kissed by Tova, who considered such gestures a form of spoiling. Udi’s father, Uri, a big silent man, found speech almost painful; whatever he had to say he conveyed in practical ways. He had served as kibbutz secretary general and was sometimes dispatched by the movement to help organize a struggling kibbutz. He had little left for his children. Young Udi would fall asleep at night on the windowsill in the children’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father returning from the fields.
Uri had been attracted to Tova in part by her rhetorical eloquence. Tova, a famous beauty in her youth, had been ashamed of her good looks, which made her feel frivolous. Tova was respected and feared in the kibbutz for the same reason: her indiscriminate sense of outrage. At kibbutz meetings, she denounced with equal vehemence the kibbutz school’s insensitivity in dealing with nonconformist children and the Labor government for aligning with the West. Tova remained loyal to Stalin long after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s attack against Stalin’s “cult of personality.” True, she said, Stalin had his faults, but he inspired human beings to fight for justice, just like Moses. Though Uri had doubts about the Soviet Union—his cousin had been imprisoned by Stalin for spreading Yiddish culture—he kept those to himself, not daring to argue with Tova.
The stories Tova told to Udi as a child were about the struggle against oppression, like the three brothers in czarist Russia who led a peasant revolt, just like the Macabees. Udi learned from a young age that the deepest emotions should be trusted to ideology, that the way to win Tova’s affection was by proving his ideological fervor. He adopted Tova’s rhetorical skills, and could recite from memory whole passages of The Communist Manifesto.
Udi longed to ease human suffering. Once, on a bus during a class trip in third grade, Udi stood and offered his seat to an exhausted-looking Arab laborer. Later, in high school, having noticed a bus driver speaking rudely to an Arab passenger, Udi wrote a protest letter to the bus cooperative.
AFTER DINNER IN the kibbutz dining room, Udi went to his parents’ apartment, one room with a wooden partition marking off the bedroom from the salon. As in other Gan Shmuel apartments, there were no mezuzahs on the doorposts, nothing to mark this a Jewish home. On the salon wall hung Pablo Picasso’s Don Quixote.
Udi wanted his parents to understand the changes he was going through as a result of the war. But after a lifetime of silence between them, the best Udi could manage was mockery. “They told us that the state was in danger of destruction,” Udi said. “That we’re about to be thrown into the sea. It was all a lie—war hysteria encouraged by the fascist generals so that they could conquer Rabbi Goren’s holy stones.”
“What are you talking about?” his father shouted with sudden vehemence.
“You talk about the solidarity of workers,” Udi pressed. “But when an Arab wanted to join Gan Shmuel, the kibbutz rejected him. And when the army offered the kibbutz the fields of Cherkas, what did the good socialists of Gan Shmuel do? You took a vote! How typical of Hashomer Hatzair to confiscate land democratically.”
“I’m not saying everything is perfect here,” said Uri, “but you’re going too far.”
“Listen to him,” Tova pleaded with her husband, “he’s speaking from his experience in the war.” Uri glared at her; unaccustomed to his firmness, she demurred.
“There are no bigger hypocrites than Hashomer Hatzair,” Udi taunted. “You wanted to have it all ways: to be anticolonialists and to collaborate with the British. And now the Americans are our big friends. Zionism couldn’t succeed without colonialist support. And Hashomer Hatzair made it all progressive!”
Uri wanted to ask his son, Who are you turning into colonialists? The impoverished dreamers who created the most egalitarian society in history? Who faced destruction everywhere we turned? We offered our Arab neighbors a hand in friendship. And when we were attacked, we fought well and won. You want me to apologize for surviving? If they had won the war, not a Jew would have been left alive in this land. But all you know is that we took land from Cherkas. Maybe we were wrong. Things happen that one later regrets. But you—you have it all figured out. You want to turn Zionism itself into a crime—
But Uri, unused to argument, couldn’t find those words. Instead, he pounded the table with his big fist and shouted words that formed no coherent argument. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did: father and son weren’t trying to convince but silence each other.
Only when neighbors complained did the shouting subside.
A MODEST WEDDING
MOTTA AND ARIK drove to the Suez Canal, to plan a brigade maneuver: a simulation of an Egyptian crossing of the canal. Before the war, they had routinely spent weekends driving along the country’s narrow borders, and were never more than a few hours from home. But the drive to the canal took ten hours.
They passed lines of charred Egyptian tanks. Atop one tank, Israeli tourists posed for a picture.
Arik had a delicate issue he needed to raise with Motta. Since the war, Motta had initiated an aggressive campaign to commemorate the battle for Jerusalem. He all but ordered reluctant reservists to grant interviews to a journalist writing a book about the war; when Yoske Balagan balked, Motta threatened him with a call-up notice. Motta even organized a filmed re-creation of scenes from the battle, complete with exploding smoke grenades.
“Motta, listen,” said Arik, “the guys are unhappy with all the glorification. It’s not our style.”
“Don’t be such hypocrites,” Motta retorted. “There were other battles in this war that were greater military achievements than ours. Raful [commander of the standing army’s paratrooper brigade, which operated in Sinai] fought a battle that was more impressive. But in thirty years, no one will remember Raful’s battle, and everyone will remember the battle for Jerusalem. And then, when you tell it to your grandchildren, you’ll thank me.”
SOME RESERVISTS WERE grumbling about the battle’s failures. How was it possible, they asked, that we went to war with such little intelligence? And what recklessness for Motta to blindly charge into the Old City in his search for glory: a single sniper could have taken out the whole senior command! And what about the fight for Ammunition Hill, Jerusalem’s bloodiest battle: Why send paratroopers into the trenches, when the position could simply have been circumvented?
Nonsense, said Arik: Ammunition Hill overlooked the road to Mount Scopus, where an Israeli unit was under siege, and the whole length of no-man’s-land. As for Motta charging into the Old City, yes, that was reckless, but Motta was in the grip of history and had no choice.
By rational standards, argued Arik, preparing an urban assault in less than twelve hours and without adequate intelligence was impossible. “But we knew that it had to be done, and so we did it. We didn’t make calculations about expected losses and argue whether the mission would be ‘worth it.’ All that mattered was achieving the objective. That’s what it means to be a paratrooper.”
JUST BEFORE THE holiday of Sukkoth, Arik and Yehudit married. They deferred the question of kibbutz versus city: until they finished their studies, they would live in Tel Aviv, close to the university.
The little wedding party—parents and a few friends—gathered in an office in Tel Aviv’s official rabbinate. Yehudit wore a simple suit sewn by a friend, Arik an open-necked white shirt and khaki pants. No one thought to bring a camera.
The appearance in the Tel Aviv rabbinate of Yehudit’s father, Yaakov Hazan, head of Zionism’s most anticlerical movement, caused a stir. Officials peeked into the room to get a glimpse of the great heretic, dapper in a beret, who good-naturedly greeted the bearded men.
“Do what you have to do, and nothing more,” Arik ordered the officiating rabbi, as though he were one of his soldiers. “No speeches, no circling the groom.”
The rabbi rushed through the ceremony. Arik stepped on the glass, gave Yehudit a chaste kiss. The newlyweds went to lunch at Tel Aviv’s most exclusive restaurant, with white tablecloths and a French menu. At a nearby table, Moshe Dayan was having lunch with his mistress. Then Arik went to be with his two children in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, and Yehudit went to be with her two children in Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Emek.