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Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation
Interweaving the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who liberated Jerusalem, the acclaimed international journalist traces the history of Israel from the Six Day War to the present
In June 1967, Israel won a swift and decisive victory in the Six Day War. Many of the soldiers responsible for that triumph would become the nation's future leaders, including the young paratroopers of reservists' Brigade 55, the unit responsible for restoring Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem. Yet within a few years, these brothers in arms found themselves heading conflicting political movements that would shape Israeli society and its politics.
Through extensive reporting, Yossi Klein Halevi explores the lives of seven members of Brigade 55- a popular songwriter, a soldier-turned-radical, a brilliant economist, and religious revolutionaries-and traces their evolving beliefs. Emerging from a religious Zionist background, one group became founders and leaders of the West Bank settlement movement. The other-peace activists who grew out of the world of secular agrarian communes known as kibbutzim-rose in opposition to the settlements. Both groups agreed that Jewish statehood was a powerful, transformative event: For the founders of the kibbutz-based peace movement, Israel would become the laboratory for democratic communism. For many religious Zionists, Israel would become the catalyst for the messianic era.
With a supporting cast of family members, politicians, and rabbis, Halevi captures the urgency of a victorious nation determined to define itself. Following the men of Brigade 55 over four decades, he adds a human dimension to the divergent movements that have had a major influence on this country and this volatile region, and provides a fascinating, in-depth portrait of modern Israel itself.
In June 1967, Israel won a swift and decisive victory in the Six Day War. Many of the soldiers responsible for that triumph would become the nation's future leaders, including the young paratroopers of reservists' Brigade 55, the unit responsible for restoring Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem. Yet within a few years, these brothers in arms found themselves heading conflicting political movements that would shape Israeli society and its politics.
Through extensive reporting, Yossi Klein Halevi explores the lives of seven members of Brigade 55- a popular songwriter, a soldier-turned-radical, a brilliant economist, and religious revolutionaries-and traces their evolving beliefs. Emerging from a religious Zionist background, one group became founders and leaders of the West Bank settlement movement. The other-peace activists who grew out of the world of secular agrarian communes known as kibbutzim-rose in opposition to the settlements. Both groups agreed that Jewish statehood was a powerful, transformative event: For the founders of the kibbutz-based peace movement, Israel would become the laboratory for democratic communism. For many religious Zionists, Israel would become the catalyst for the messianic era.
With a supporting cast of family members, politicians, and rabbis, Halevi captures the urgency of a victorious nation determined to define itself. Following the men of Brigade 55 over four decades, he adds a human dimension to the divergent movements that have had a major influence on this country and this volatile region, and provides a fascinating, in-depth portrait of modern Israel itself.
608 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 174 reviews
June 30, 2016
An exceptional piece of non-fiction, history, political science, and sociology, ... this may be the best -most balanced, nuanced, thought-provoking - book I've read about the modern State of Israel.
OK, OK, it's a hefty book, it's not light reading, it's not necessarily entertaining - indeed, much of the book's content is maddening, frustrating, profoundly depressing, sad, and, at times, heart-breaking - and it's not going to please or placate anyone with regard to who is right, who is wrong, or what the solutions there might be for lasting peace in the Middle East. But nor is that the book's aim.
Rather, and I have no doubt others will describe it differently, my sense is this is a painstakingly researched personal history of a very small group of very young, incredibly diverse, soldiers thrust together at a remarkable moment in time, the Six-Day War (in which, for the younger set, Israel fought Egypt - to the West - and Jordan and Syria - to the East and North, resulting in Israel capturing/seizing the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, including Jerusalem). The book then tracks the lives of these - again, diverse - individuals whose paths intersect (for better or worse) as the State of Israel evolves into the New Millennium. It's a story of lives lived, endured, and adorned with the messy reality of one of the most troubled spots on the planet.
But what a story! And kudos to the author, not only for exhaustive research and a mind-boggling number of interviews, but for his ability to make each of the various perspectives come alive, appear not only reasonable, but compelling, and to avoid any attempt to take sides or align himself with the multitudinous factions or beliefs.
And the range of topics - yikes - a literal cornucopia: military history, religion and biblical history, settlement, politics, immigration, music, geography, business and privatization, poetry, farming, art, criminal justice and rehabilitation, terrorism, community, journalism and correspondence, relationships, family, belief, hope, disappointment .... and, well, you get the idea.
If you're interested in a meticulously researched and brilliantly crafted serious examination of an incredibly complex issue, I can't recommend this enough.
OK, OK, it's a hefty book, it's not light reading, it's not necessarily entertaining - indeed, much of the book's content is maddening, frustrating, profoundly depressing, sad, and, at times, heart-breaking - and it's not going to please or placate anyone with regard to who is right, who is wrong, or what the solutions there might be for lasting peace in the Middle East. But nor is that the book's aim.
Rather, and I have no doubt others will describe it differently, my sense is this is a painstakingly researched personal history of a very small group of very young, incredibly diverse, soldiers thrust together at a remarkable moment in time, the Six-Day War (in which, for the younger set, Israel fought Egypt - to the West - and Jordan and Syria - to the East and North, resulting in Israel capturing/seizing the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, including Jerusalem). The book then tracks the lives of these - again, diverse - individuals whose paths intersect (for better or worse) as the State of Israel evolves into the New Millennium. It's a story of lives lived, endured, and adorned with the messy reality of one of the most troubled spots on the planet.
But what a story! And kudos to the author, not only for exhaustive research and a mind-boggling number of interviews, but for his ability to make each of the various perspectives come alive, appear not only reasonable, but compelling, and to avoid any attempt to take sides or align himself with the multitudinous factions or beliefs.
And the range of topics - yikes - a literal cornucopia: military history, religion and biblical history, settlement, politics, immigration, music, geography, business and privatization, poetry, farming, art, criminal justice and rehabilitation, terrorism, community, journalism and correspondence, relationships, family, belief, hope, disappointment .... and, well, you get the idea.
If you're interested in a meticulously researched and brilliantly crafted serious examination of an incredibly complex issue, I can't recommend this enough.
December 26, 2014
Like everything I have read about the history of modern Israel, it has been a difficult book to read. This book tells the story of Israel’s history by following the lives of soldiers in the 55th Paratroopers Brigade, the soldiers who liberated Jerusalem in the 6 day war. As the subtitle suggests, they “reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation.” Members of the paratroopers started as typical and diverse Israeli young men. Some were kibbutzniks, some just secular Jews, some sabras, some the children of immigrants, and others religious to one degree or another. They all worked together and fought together in 1967, and some again in 1973 and then the war in Lebanon, but over time they each went their separate ways.
Avital Geva, a conceptual artist and kibbutznik, and his friends go on to found “Peace Now” an Israeli political movement willing to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and to give up land for peace. Yisrael Harel and Yoel Bin-Nun became ardent religious Zionists and settlers, whose willingness to ignore the rights of Palestinians allow them to take land and create Jewish settlements in the captured territories. Udi Adiv, considering himself a disciple of Che Guevera, believed so strongly in Marxism, from his socialist kibbutznik background, that he ultimately questions the legitimacy of the entire Zionist enterprise and is arrested and sent to jail for treason after he meets with Syrian agents in Damascus. From the opposite side of the spectrum, one of Yoel Bin-Nun’s students is arrested for a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the mosque which sits on top of the ancient temple mount in Jerusalem!
Mer Ariel, a singers of songs, Avital Geva, an artist, and Israel Harel, a journalist, all influence and reflect Israel public opinion for the next 2 generations. Arik Achamon, the units Intelligence Officer, a kibbutznik, seemed to be everywhere and know everyone. He saw the difficulties that would come from the settlements right away but was powerless to stop them. He questions what it was they liberated in 1967.
Religious or secular, kibbutznik or immigrant, capitalist or socialist, the forces they aligned with challenged their faith and the country they loved. Throughout my reading of the book, the question hung out there: will there ever be a way to reconcile all these diverse and strongly held beliefs and opinions? The divisions between these men, these citizen soldiers who lived a common experience and then separated to live in a confused and challenged common country, were as great as the divisions between themselves and the Palestinians and Arabs who fought against them.
I despaired for Israel as I read. Then it occurred to me that the personal stories were just that, personal. When you look closely at the deeply held beliefs of people in a democracy, where their opinions can be expressed and nurtured, it may seem to be chaotic with irreconcilable differences. It is no different in the United States, where we have our equivalent of the religious settlers and the idealistic kibbutzniks and socialists. The challenge of democracy is to find a way for millions of people with diverse interests to come together to govern themselves. The United States has been doing it for over 200 years. Israel is the same. The one giant difference is that Israel is small, surrounded by enemies and shunned by other nations. For such a small country, the diversity of its people is amazing .
For the Jewish people, history is the work of God. The history of Israel has much more to come. I feel much better able to understand the country now that I have had the opportunity to learn about it’s citizens, those named above, and many more, from this well written and engaging book, and I can now put that history in much better perspective.
For general readers, the book might just be interesting and engaging. For anyone trying to figure out the way forward for Israel, the Palestinians and the Jewish people, it is indeed a difficult book, but worth the struggle.
Avital Geva, a conceptual artist and kibbutznik, and his friends go on to found “Peace Now” an Israeli political movement willing to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and to give up land for peace. Yisrael Harel and Yoel Bin-Nun became ardent religious Zionists and settlers, whose willingness to ignore the rights of Palestinians allow them to take land and create Jewish settlements in the captured territories. Udi Adiv, considering himself a disciple of Che Guevera, believed so strongly in Marxism, from his socialist kibbutznik background, that he ultimately questions the legitimacy of the entire Zionist enterprise and is arrested and sent to jail for treason after he meets with Syrian agents in Damascus. From the opposite side of the spectrum, one of Yoel Bin-Nun’s students is arrested for a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the mosque which sits on top of the ancient temple mount in Jerusalem!
Mer Ariel, a singers of songs, Avital Geva, an artist, and Israel Harel, a journalist, all influence and reflect Israel public opinion for the next 2 generations. Arik Achamon, the units Intelligence Officer, a kibbutznik, seemed to be everywhere and know everyone. He saw the difficulties that would come from the settlements right away but was powerless to stop them. He questions what it was they liberated in 1967.
Religious or secular, kibbutznik or immigrant, capitalist or socialist, the forces they aligned with challenged their faith and the country they loved. Throughout my reading of the book, the question hung out there: will there ever be a way to reconcile all these diverse and strongly held beliefs and opinions? The divisions between these men, these citizen soldiers who lived a common experience and then separated to live in a confused and challenged common country, were as great as the divisions between themselves and the Palestinians and Arabs who fought against them.
I despaired for Israel as I read. Then it occurred to me that the personal stories were just that, personal. When you look closely at the deeply held beliefs of people in a democracy, where their opinions can be expressed and nurtured, it may seem to be chaotic with irreconcilable differences. It is no different in the United States, where we have our equivalent of the religious settlers and the idealistic kibbutzniks and socialists. The challenge of democracy is to find a way for millions of people with diverse interests to come together to govern themselves. The United States has been doing it for over 200 years. Israel is the same. The one giant difference is that Israel is small, surrounded by enemies and shunned by other nations. For such a small country, the diversity of its people is amazing .
For the Jewish people, history is the work of God. The history of Israel has much more to come. I feel much better able to understand the country now that I have had the opportunity to learn about it’s citizens, those named above, and many more, from this well written and engaging book, and I can now put that history in much better perspective.
For general readers, the book might just be interesting and engaging. For anyone trying to figure out the way forward for Israel, the Palestinians and the Jewish people, it is indeed a difficult book, but worth the struggle.
June 5, 2017
I originally started this book with the impression that this would be an account of the battle for Jerusalem during the six day war. It was of course so much more. Halevi follows of the journeys of several members of the 55th Parachute Brigade (Reserve) over several decades.
The men come from different backgrounds and each faces ideological and emotional transformations that pit their sense of what Israel should be versus what must actually be done to keep their country united. This dilemma sometimes drives these men to make surprising choices. The men include (but are not limited to):
-Meir Ariel; (also known as “The Singing Paratrooper”) a bohemian singer struggling to survive while pursuing his musical dreams.
-Udi Adiv; A self-proclaimed revolutionary who ends up imprisoned for his role in a joint Arab/Jewish terrorist conspiracy.
-Yisrael Harel; The head of the Yeshe Council (a political organization that coordinates and advocates for settler interests) who struggles to keep his movement in the Israeli mainstream.
-Yoel Bin-Nun; A passionately religious man who struggles to convey to his peers the essential role of Israel’s secular Jews in the country’s spiritual redemption.
The journeys of these men take the reader on a multifaceted yet emotive tour of the schisms within Israeli society. Highly recommended.
The men come from different backgrounds and each faces ideological and emotional transformations that pit their sense of what Israel should be versus what must actually be done to keep their country united. This dilemma sometimes drives these men to make surprising choices. The men include (but are not limited to):
-Meir Ariel; (also known as “The Singing Paratrooper”) a bohemian singer struggling to survive while pursuing his musical dreams.
-Udi Adiv; A self-proclaimed revolutionary who ends up imprisoned for his role in a joint Arab/Jewish terrorist conspiracy.
-Yisrael Harel; The head of the Yeshe Council (a political organization that coordinates and advocates for settler interests) who struggles to keep his movement in the Israeli mainstream.
-Yoel Bin-Nun; A passionately religious man who struggles to convey to his peers the essential role of Israel’s secular Jews in the country’s spiritual redemption.
The journeys of these men take the reader on a multifaceted yet emotive tour of the schisms within Israeli society. Highly recommended.
June 28, 2014
RARELY have I read a book that so pulled me into the narrative that I wanted to put all others aside and be absorbed. RARELY have I read one that touched me on so many levels. The writing is at once personal and majestic, weaving at one time the personal stories of some truly remarkable people but bringing these stories into a close touch and weaving them into the breadth of history of Israel from 1967 until 1995. I do not know if I will ever have the stregth to go and re-read this again, but passages of it will be at the forefront of my thoughts for a long while. YES< well worth the read, the investment of time and the enjoyment.
January 4, 2014
Absolutely fabulous. Ten stars.
I've read several books on Israel at this point, and this is the one I've enjoyed most. Hands down. I wish I could write a review that would do it justice.
Yossi Klein Halevi traces the lives of several paratroopers from the Six Day War, and through introducing us to their stories, offers a great deal of insight into the development of right-wing and left-wing Israeli politics. The characters are interesting not only for their distinct personalities, achievements, and life trajectories, but for their impact on Israel, Israel's impact on them, and as a microcosm of the various divisions in Israeli society -- right-left, hawk-dove, religious-secular, communist-capitalist, etc.
The paratroopers meet in 1967 in the 55th Brigade. Arik Achmon is an astoundingly capable individual, kibbutz-born but coming to embrace capitalism and to foster its growth in Israeli society. Udi Adiv, also kibbutz-born, is disenchanted with the Six Day War and takes up the Palestinian cause, eventually imprisoned for his role in creating an anti-Zionist terrorist underground. Meir Ariel becomes a poet-singer, critically acclaimed but never commercially successful, going through a variety of bohemian phases including a quasi-religious one. Avital Geva, a devoted kibbutznik and leftist, becomes an artist and peace activist. Yoel Bin-Nun, a religious soldier, helps found a strong settlement movement but comes to reject their staunch messianism and extreme, intransigent views. Yisrael Harel and Hanan Porat, in contrast, are religious soldiers who also embrace the settlement movement and criticize Yoel bitterly for his more moderate stance.
This book reminded me of זכרונות אחרי מותי, using the readable and fascinating story of an important individual as a lens through which to begin to understand Israeli history. But Like Dreamers: The Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, and the Divided Israel They Created was even better. We watch seven individuals, not just one, diverge and converge to offer a multidimensional and nuanced view of Israeli society and the political scene. I cried when I read about Rabin's death, because I had a new understanding of the man himself and of what his life and death meant. The disengagement from Gaza, which happened a few months after I moved to Israel when I was bleary-eyed and trying to get my children adjusted to a new language and culture, suddenly took on a whole new meaning for me.
I don't know whether you'll feel as passionately about this book as I did if you don't feel as passionately as I do about the topic, or the land itself. But if you do, this book is highly recommended.
I've read several books on Israel at this point, and this is the one I've enjoyed most. Hands down. I wish I could write a review that would do it justice.
Yossi Klein Halevi traces the lives of several paratroopers from the Six Day War, and through introducing us to their stories, offers a great deal of insight into the development of right-wing and left-wing Israeli politics. The characters are interesting not only for their distinct personalities, achievements, and life trajectories, but for their impact on Israel, Israel's impact on them, and as a microcosm of the various divisions in Israeli society -- right-left, hawk-dove, religious-secular, communist-capitalist, etc.
The paratroopers meet in 1967 in the 55th Brigade. Arik Achmon is an astoundingly capable individual, kibbutz-born but coming to embrace capitalism and to foster its growth in Israeli society. Udi Adiv, also kibbutz-born, is disenchanted with the Six Day War and takes up the Palestinian cause, eventually imprisoned for his role in creating an anti-Zionist terrorist underground. Meir Ariel becomes a poet-singer, critically acclaimed but never commercially successful, going through a variety of bohemian phases including a quasi-religious one. Avital Geva, a devoted kibbutznik and leftist, becomes an artist and peace activist. Yoel Bin-Nun, a religious soldier, helps found a strong settlement movement but comes to reject their staunch messianism and extreme, intransigent views. Yisrael Harel and Hanan Porat, in contrast, are religious soldiers who also embrace the settlement movement and criticize Yoel bitterly for his more moderate stance.
This book reminded me of זכרונות אחרי מותי, using the readable and fascinating story of an important individual as a lens through which to begin to understand Israeli history. But Like Dreamers: The Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, and the Divided Israel They Created was even better. We watch seven individuals, not just one, diverge and converge to offer a multidimensional and nuanced view of Israeli society and the political scene. I cried when I read about Rabin's death, because I had a new understanding of the man himself and of what his life and death meant. The disengagement from Gaza, which happened a few months after I moved to Israel when I was bleary-eyed and trying to get my children adjusted to a new language and culture, suddenly took on a whole new meaning for me.
I don't know whether you'll feel as passionately about this book as I did if you don't feel as passionately as I do about the topic, or the land itself. But if you do, this book is highly recommended.
October 28, 2013
Probably the best book I've read in years. No matter how much you read or know about what makes Israel 'tick', this book gives you that inside out perspective. The format forces you to pay attention though, and it's probably best to read in a few days if you can. Highly recommend.
January 12, 2022
A nearly impenetrable-to-a-Gentile look into the various flavors of Zionism.
Halevi's "Like Dreamers" tells the interconnected stories of several Israeli paratroopers who helped liberate Jerusalem during the 1967 Six Day War and how they slowly grew as far apart ideologically as one could imagine.
Despite that early common cause, the players in Halevi's book become everything from outright capitalist CEO, libertine singer-songwriter, imprisoned pro-Palestinian radical, and religious revolutionaries of various stripes. This is more than a "where are they now?" work as Halevi weaves in their stories into the evolution of Israel from an ideologically homogenous beachhead for Jews fleeing the Holocaust into a modern state with wildly divergent views on what it means to ensure its own "security."
Let's be clear: this book is NOT for the Gentile or lay reader. There is so much assumed knowledge about Israel, its cultural mores, and general rhythms that one looking for a slow introduction into things like the (fairly strange) elements of communal kibbutz life or how/why that approach dominated so much of Israeli consciousness in its early years will be left wanting.
Similarly, the reader is left with very little understanding or appreciation of the distinctions between religious or secular Zionism except insofar as both concepts exist, but Halevi never gets the reader to a fuller understanding or appreciation. What the reader is left with is a LOT of quasi-messianic proclamations (either from an explicitly religious or explicitly Marxist) position that "X will be the betrayal/death of Israel" -- "X" is an ever-changing variable that occupies all ideological positions simultaneously. It could be taking a hard line against Arafat, it could be appeasing Arafat, it could be letting the more conservative Likud gain power, it could be the left-leaning Labor maintain power. It almost doesn't matter because on nearly every page, someone is betraying or destroying Israel.
Halevi's writing style isn't quite historical, and it's not quite narrative. It's almost gossipy. Conversations feel contrived if not outright invented and some of Halevi's descriptions beggar belief (his overly sympathetic description of Baruch Goldstein's thoughts/motivations before his machine gun attack on a Hebron mosque is a rather grotesque example)
Add in an unhealthy dose of radicalism and terrorist attacks (from multiple sides) and the end result is that the reader is inclined to be a blackjack dealer at the end of his shift -- wipes his hands as he backs away saying "Good luck, gentlemen."
Halevi's "Like Dreamers" tells the interconnected stories of several Israeli paratroopers who helped liberate Jerusalem during the 1967 Six Day War and how they slowly grew as far apart ideologically as one could imagine.
Despite that early common cause, the players in Halevi's book become everything from outright capitalist CEO, libertine singer-songwriter, imprisoned pro-Palestinian radical, and religious revolutionaries of various stripes. This is more than a "where are they now?" work as Halevi weaves in their stories into the evolution of Israel from an ideologically homogenous beachhead for Jews fleeing the Holocaust into a modern state with wildly divergent views on what it means to ensure its own "security."
Let's be clear: this book is NOT for the Gentile or lay reader. There is so much assumed knowledge about Israel, its cultural mores, and general rhythms that one looking for a slow introduction into things like the (fairly strange) elements of communal kibbutz life or how/why that approach dominated so much of Israeli consciousness in its early years will be left wanting.
Similarly, the reader is left with very little understanding or appreciation of the distinctions between religious or secular Zionism except insofar as both concepts exist, but Halevi never gets the reader to a fuller understanding or appreciation. What the reader is left with is a LOT of quasi-messianic proclamations (either from an explicitly religious or explicitly Marxist) position that "X will be the betrayal/death of Israel" -- "X" is an ever-changing variable that occupies all ideological positions simultaneously. It could be taking a hard line against Arafat, it could be appeasing Arafat, it could be letting the more conservative Likud gain power, it could be the left-leaning Labor maintain power. It almost doesn't matter because on nearly every page, someone is betraying or destroying Israel.
Halevi's writing style isn't quite historical, and it's not quite narrative. It's almost gossipy. Conversations feel contrived if not outright invented and some of Halevi's descriptions beggar belief (his overly sympathetic description of Baruch Goldstein's thoughts/motivations before his machine gun attack on a Hebron mosque is a rather grotesque example)
Add in an unhealthy dose of radicalism and terrorist attacks (from multiple sides) and the end result is that the reader is inclined to be a blackjack dealer at the end of his shift -- wipes his hands as he backs away saying "Good luck, gentlemen."
February 11, 2020
This was one of the best books I have ever read, a masterful job at explaining the genesis of the rift that grew in Israeli society between those who supported settlements in areas that were not "Israel proper" and those who were against it. Halevi does this in the best style of reporting: through the eyes and voices of some of the paratroopers who were in the division that unexpectedly liberated the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six Day War in 1967.
Following several of these paratroopers in their personal and professional lives, we see how their political positions either solidified (in some cases, hardened), or changed (in a few cases, radically) regarding Israeli expansion into Judea and Samaria in particular, what is usually called the West Bank.
These same paratroopers met again and again in their units, coming to Israel's defense in future wars. Most remained friends, even when their political views clashed. Incredibly, one of the paratroopers, the son of radical leftists, got caught up in a network of Arab terrorists and infiltrated Syria before he was caught and thrown in an Israeli prison for man years.
This is a fascinating book and, I think, a very objective look at this aspect of modern Israeli history.
Following several of these paratroopers in their personal and professional lives, we see how their political positions either solidified (in some cases, hardened), or changed (in a few cases, radically) regarding Israeli expansion into Judea and Samaria in particular, what is usually called the West Bank.
These same paratroopers met again and again in their units, coming to Israel's defense in future wars. Most remained friends, even when their political views clashed. Incredibly, one of the paratroopers, the son of radical leftists, got caught up in a network of Arab terrorists and infiltrated Syria before he was caught and thrown in an Israeli prison for man years.
This is a fascinating book and, I think, a very objective look at this aspect of modern Israeli history.
July 7, 2019
If you want to learn about modern Israel from an Israeli perspective, this is your book. I've never read a modern history of a nation this comprehensive, yet so personal in my entire life.
Like Dreamers is a stunning work of journalism that begins with the brigade of Israeli paratroopers that captured Jerusalem from Arab forces during the Six Day War in 1967 and follows them through the tumultuous course of Israeli history. The book begins as a gripping account of the war and the battle for the most holy city in all the world, but that is only the beginning. From the battle fields, Yossi Klein Halevi traces the lives of several of the paratroopers as they take their place in the fledgling nation and try to navigate the moral complexities of founding a new country where an entirely different people has been living for centuries.
Some of the men become ardent Zionists and are instrumental in forming the controversial Israeli settlements that the world is still grappling with today, while others supported giving land to the Palestinians in exchange for peace. Some came from the cities, others came from the kibbutz. One paratrooper even became so concerned about Palestinians that he served a significant jail sentence for giving Israeli intelligence to the Syrians. What started as a group of men on a military mission ended up becoming a mosaic that reflected the deep divisions in Israeli society, but in religious observance and political ideas.
Lots of books that focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are deeply one sided and are trying to make an argument for what is right or wrong in the ever growing quagmire, but Like Dreamers took a totally different approach. Halevi examined Israel from all angles and presented the arguments and history unfolded as this diverse group of men saw it without attempting to make an argument for one side or the other. This resulted in an incredibly nuanced look at a problem that leaves the reader educated, but not brainwashed. I think anything about Israel that leaves the reader deeply confused about what the solution is, instead of absolutely sure of the right path, is the mark of a job well done.
My only complaint about this book is although he did look at the violence committed by the Jews and the Palestinians, I felt his coverage of the second intifada was not as in-depth as I would have liked. This book seemed to downplay how Palestinians felt in occupied areas and actions by the IDF that would have driven them to start the war. I understand that the Oslo process fell apart and that's what triggered the violence, but I think this book glossed over actions by the IDF in those occupied territories and the economic strain that put on Palestinians.
Despite that criticism of the last section of the book, this is phenomenal. And the way he ended the book could not have been more perfect. Like Dreamers is a fantastic achievement.
Like Dreamers is a stunning work of journalism that begins with the brigade of Israeli paratroopers that captured Jerusalem from Arab forces during the Six Day War in 1967 and follows them through the tumultuous course of Israeli history. The book begins as a gripping account of the war and the battle for the most holy city in all the world, but that is only the beginning. From the battle fields, Yossi Klein Halevi traces the lives of several of the paratroopers as they take their place in the fledgling nation and try to navigate the moral complexities of founding a new country where an entirely different people has been living for centuries.
Some of the men become ardent Zionists and are instrumental in forming the controversial Israeli settlements that the world is still grappling with today, while others supported giving land to the Palestinians in exchange for peace. Some came from the cities, others came from the kibbutz. One paratrooper even became so concerned about Palestinians that he served a significant jail sentence for giving Israeli intelligence to the Syrians. What started as a group of men on a military mission ended up becoming a mosaic that reflected the deep divisions in Israeli society, but in religious observance and political ideas.
Lots of books that focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are deeply one sided and are trying to make an argument for what is right or wrong in the ever growing quagmire, but Like Dreamers took a totally different approach. Halevi examined Israel from all angles and presented the arguments and history unfolded as this diverse group of men saw it without attempting to make an argument for one side or the other. This resulted in an incredibly nuanced look at a problem that leaves the reader educated, but not brainwashed. I think anything about Israel that leaves the reader deeply confused about what the solution is, instead of absolutely sure of the right path, is the mark of a job well done.
My only complaint about this book is although he did look at the violence committed by the Jews and the Palestinians, I felt his coverage of the second intifada was not as in-depth as I would have liked. This book seemed to downplay how Palestinians felt in occupied areas and actions by the IDF that would have driven them to start the war. I understand that the Oslo process fell apart and that's what triggered the violence, but I think this book glossed over actions by the IDF in those occupied territories and the economic strain that put on Palestinians.
Despite that criticism of the last section of the book, this is phenomenal. And the way he ended the book could not have been more perfect. Like Dreamers is a fantastic achievement.
January 27, 2015
This is not so much a review of this book, but a reaction to it, albeit, from someone I don't think the author intended to read it. I'm neither an Israeli nor even a Jew. While I was once engaged to marry a self-described "Jewish princess" and I once studied Judaism in college, it would be best to discard the first fact -- it turns out it was a big misunderstanding...she didn't really like me -- and the college professor was emphatically biased toward Christianity and against every other religion. In short, I'm not well versed in the day-to-day nuances of modern Israeli history, and this book basically covers Israel for nearly 40 years, starting with 1967. Like the entire book, the author gives extra importance to a particular event, in this case the Six-Day War, and then embellishes that particular event to mean much more than it really does. He does this by choosing a handful of the paratroopers in that war, and then makes them represent all of Israeli society for the next few decades. In essence, he interlaces multiple biographies together, but with little of the obvious synchronization that might follow a more conventional history, such as all the cadets at West Point in, say 1846, that ended up fighting with or against each other a few years later in the American Civil War. Moreover, the book took a great many historical dates and religious customs for granted for the reader, going far beyond the handful of Jewish holidays that many Americans are familiar with. At times, it seems that nearly everyday and every location in Israel has some deep significance. And everyone seems to take offense that someone else isn't giving that significance due weight. If there is one aspect of this narrative that caught me most off guard, it was how much Israelis apparently dislike each other. There was only one subject of the mini biographies that struck me as more logical than emotional, and even he was chastised by his wife for not caring enough for others reactions to his actions. I'll offer two quotes from the book that get at the heart of the narrative. Almost inevitably the book draws out this conclusion, "How were Israelis to argue with restraint when both right and left were convinced that their opponents prevailed, the state would be not merely diminished but destroyed?" It's at this point the author tries to make this just two sides of an Israeli issue, when throughout the narrative, he repeatedly points out multiple shades of gray. In short, even if a person was supposedly on one side or other of the left/right line, each person also had multiple reasons for disagreeing with others on their "side" why and how they should be "left" or "right". Somewhat later in the book, the author points out, "...the left had been correct about the dangers of occupation, but the right had been correct about the chances of peace." I found this just a little bit funny that he was giving the "sides" so much credit, since neither "side" would have been willing to do so. And that's not even including the Palestinians or other Arabs into the discussion. In the end, I thought this was unnecessarily difficult to absorb, but, nevertheless, extremely enlightening and worthwhile for me to read. Frankly, I'm a bit disturbed that American news media has not done a better job of pointing out the issues raised in this book.
January 17, 2014
Read Review at: http://manoflabook.com/wp/?p=10399
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi is a non-fiction book which follows the footsteps of seven Israeli paratroopers who fought together and the different paths their lives took. Mr Halevi, son of a Holocaust survivor and a recovering extremist right ideologue.
The immediate thought I had when seeing Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi was my dad. He was an Israeli paratrooper and fought in the 1967 Six Days War. I would have loved for him to read this book and get his take, but he passed away three years ago.
Mr. Halevi goes back to a time where the Jews, barley two decades after the holocaust, are facing annihilation again, and again the world is not interested in helping. Then, in six days, the state of Israel tripled its size, won a war in a way which seemed miraculous, liberated (depends who you ask) Jerusalem and divided itself for decades to come.
Whatever happened before or after, the Battle of Jerusalem was pivotal point in Israeli and Middle Eastern history. Mr. Halevi tells the story of the battle and its aftermath in both cultural and historical context through the view point of seven paratroopers which make the events more personal and understandable.
The author does an excellent job keeping the story balanced, he presents the views of the kibbutzniks who want a socialist paradise, the religious settlers and their views on the importance of keeping the land, the capitalist and artist.
The lives of the seven paratroopers keep interlacing throughout their lives, whether in war or peace, while they seven maintained different views on what’s good for the state of Israel and society, they mostly managed to keep a friendly and supportive relationship despite their differences. What the author manages to convey, is not only Israel’s reality and its problems, but also the lifelong connections of those who served in the Israeli army.
The book shows Israeli history and ideology through the eyes of élite Ashkenazi soldiers, women are sidekicks, Palestine merely an idea and Sephardic Jews are barely mentioned. Yet, the narrative is fascinating, the stories are personal and the history is rich.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi is a non-fiction book which follows the footsteps of seven Israeli paratroopers who fought together and the different paths their lives took. Mr Halevi, son of a Holocaust survivor and a recovering extremist right ideologue.
The immediate thought I had when seeing Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi was my dad. He was an Israeli paratrooper and fought in the 1967 Six Days War. I would have loved for him to read this book and get his take, but he passed away three years ago.
Mr. Halevi goes back to a time where the Jews, barley two decades after the holocaust, are facing annihilation again, and again the world is not interested in helping. Then, in six days, the state of Israel tripled its size, won a war in a way which seemed miraculous, liberated (depends who you ask) Jerusalem and divided itself for decades to come.
Whatever happened before or after, the Battle of Jerusalem was pivotal point in Israeli and Middle Eastern history. Mr. Halevi tells the story of the battle and its aftermath in both cultural and historical context through the view point of seven paratroopers which make the events more personal and understandable.
The author does an excellent job keeping the story balanced, he presents the views of the kibbutzniks who want a socialist paradise, the religious settlers and their views on the importance of keeping the land, the capitalist and artist.
The lives of the seven paratroopers keep interlacing throughout their lives, whether in war or peace, while they seven maintained different views on what’s good for the state of Israel and society, they mostly managed to keep a friendly and supportive relationship despite their differences. What the author manages to convey, is not only Israel’s reality and its problems, but also the lifelong connections of those who served in the Israeli army.
The book shows Israeli history and ideology through the eyes of élite Ashkenazi soldiers, women are sidekicks, Palestine merely an idea and Sephardic Jews are barely mentioned. Yet, the narrative is fascinating, the stories are personal and the history is rich.
March 13, 2014
There are many ways to write the history of a nation. It is possible to describe the military campaigns and the political maneuvering in a very dry, detail-filled fashion, the way most history books record the passing of time. Or, alternatively, one can make history come alive by bringing the stories of the individuals involved to the forefront, highlighting their actions, thoughts, and fears in such a way that we feel we are living their experiences with them.
In Like Dreamers, author and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi relates the stories of seven Israeli paratroopers, members of the IDF reservists' Brigade 55. This unit was involved in the operation that liberated the city of Jerusalem; its soldiers were among the first to recapture the Temple Mount and fall entranced when viewing the stones of the Western Wall. Six years later, the very same unit took part in the successful, but costly Israeli counterattack against the Egyptian army, securing a beachhead on the western side of the Suez Canal.
The seven paratroopers depicted in this very readable account are real people, emerging from parallel idealistic tracks of agrarian kibbutz life and religious Zionism to converge in the same army unit and witness comrades falling in Israel's defense. Following military service, evolving beliefs and changing realities take these seven paratroopers in different directions that reflect the changes and chasms forming in Israeli society.
Like Dreamers tells the story of modern Israel in a narrative form that could easily be grasped as suspenseful fiction, except for the fact that everything is true. The book is both compelling and exhaustive, and is based on the author's ten years of extensive research and interviews with veterans of the 55th Reservist Paratrooper Brigade, settlers, religious Zionists, kibbutzniks, and peace activists. The author successfully and objectively deals with the most difficult issues facing Israel today, relating parallel stories on a wide canvas and explaining the development of opposing viewpoints without overbearing political ideology.
As a result of the author's attention to both detail and story-telling, Like Dreamers emerges as an epic masterpiece that will undoubtedly take its place among the most highly regarded Israeli history texts.
In Like Dreamers, author and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi relates the stories of seven Israeli paratroopers, members of the IDF reservists' Brigade 55. This unit was involved in the operation that liberated the city of Jerusalem; its soldiers were among the first to recapture the Temple Mount and fall entranced when viewing the stones of the Western Wall. Six years later, the very same unit took part in the successful, but costly Israeli counterattack against the Egyptian army, securing a beachhead on the western side of the Suez Canal.
The seven paratroopers depicted in this very readable account are real people, emerging from parallel idealistic tracks of agrarian kibbutz life and religious Zionism to converge in the same army unit and witness comrades falling in Israel's defense. Following military service, evolving beliefs and changing realities take these seven paratroopers in different directions that reflect the changes and chasms forming in Israeli society.
Like Dreamers tells the story of modern Israel in a narrative form that could easily be grasped as suspenseful fiction, except for the fact that everything is true. The book is both compelling and exhaustive, and is based on the author's ten years of extensive research and interviews with veterans of the 55th Reservist Paratrooper Brigade, settlers, religious Zionists, kibbutzniks, and peace activists. The author successfully and objectively deals with the most difficult issues facing Israel today, relating parallel stories on a wide canvas and explaining the development of opposing viewpoints without overbearing political ideology.
As a result of the author's attention to both detail and story-telling, Like Dreamers emerges as an epic masterpiece that will undoubtedly take its place among the most highly regarded Israeli history texts.
February 16, 2016
Brilliant. Yossi Klein Halevi nails it again, in this book that profiles the paratroopers who liberated the Western Wall and unified Jerusalem in 1967. Their triumph, hailed at the time as something akin to a miracle, also laid the grounds for the divisions that have grown since. The book's subtitle is: "the story of the Israeli paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation."
These paratroopers came from all walks of life: religious, secular, artistic, academic, military, leftist. All were proud of the sense of unity they felt and engendered. Halevi shows their worlds from their points of view, so even a vehement anti-settlement Jew can readily understand the point of view of a religious, Jewish settler establishing him or herself on the West Bank. But Halevi, an observant Jew, also shows the dangers of that position and offers sympathetic portraits of those opposed to the settlers. The result: we understand both sides of the story.
Meanwhile, Israel remains caught between a rock and a hard place. Palestinians are in revolt, wanting autonomy and sovereignty; religious Jews are adamant that in the wake of disastrous consequences of the "land for peace" swap, Jews not relinquish a biblical heritage. Bringing Jews together, which is what happened in the '67 war, is said to be a precursor to the Messianic age. But as the violence of the various intifadas takes an ever larger toll, that unity has been sundered.
Meanwhile, the various personalities in that rare mix of fighters who brought all of Jerusalem under Jewish/Israeli rule, is set under a sensitive microscope, adjusted by this extraordinary reporter whose soul is in the heart of the story he tells.
These paratroopers came from all walks of life: religious, secular, artistic, academic, military, leftist. All were proud of the sense of unity they felt and engendered. Halevi shows their worlds from their points of view, so even a vehement anti-settlement Jew can readily understand the point of view of a religious, Jewish settler establishing him or herself on the West Bank. But Halevi, an observant Jew, also shows the dangers of that position and offers sympathetic portraits of those opposed to the settlers. The result: we understand both sides of the story.
Meanwhile, Israel remains caught between a rock and a hard place. Palestinians are in revolt, wanting autonomy and sovereignty; religious Jews are adamant that in the wake of disastrous consequences of the "land for peace" swap, Jews not relinquish a biblical heritage. Bringing Jews together, which is what happened in the '67 war, is said to be a precursor to the Messianic age. But as the violence of the various intifadas takes an ever larger toll, that unity has been sundered.
Meanwhile, the various personalities in that rare mix of fighters who brought all of Jerusalem under Jewish/Israeli rule, is set under a sensitive microscope, adjusted by this extraordinary reporter whose soul is in the heart of the story he tells.
September 29, 2017
This book tells the stories of seven paratroopers liberated of the Old City of Jerusalem from Jordanian forces during the Six Day War of 1967. The book really does a good job immersing the into the mindset of the various Israeli sub-communities of the Seventies and Eighties by following the intimate details of their diverse experiences over that period.
However, I thought that the author didn’t do that very efficiently. It is well over 500 pages, and the author will sometimes go several pages saying very little. How many times does he have to zoom back to Avital sitting in his greenhouse, or Meir bickering with his wife? The conversations are contrived – there’s no way Arik said ‘chevreh’ that many times, and I don’t believe that the author really could have seen into the exact thoughts of the characters, despite the hours or interviews and research he conducted. It’s OK to dramatize non-fiction, but this approach diminishes from the believability of the story. For a fiction novel, this is OK, but this is a history book about a contentious topic, and this much embellishment diminishes from the thesis of the book.
Besides, the characters are just not very likeable. The details of their lives start to become trivial and boring about three hundred pages in. They start to grate on your nerves. Sure – I want to respect them for their bravery in the battle for Jerusalem, but by the end of the book, I’m left with little else to admire them for. Meir’s a loser, Avital is a loser, Yoel’s a bit better than a loser, and Arik is… well, a loser. Maybe I would have liked the book if it was two hundred pages shorter – which was totally possible, and I did learn something about Israeli history and culture out of it, but at the end, it just felt like I wasted my time.
However, I thought that the author didn’t do that very efficiently. It is well over 500 pages, and the author will sometimes go several pages saying very little. How many times does he have to zoom back to Avital sitting in his greenhouse, or Meir bickering with his wife? The conversations are contrived – there’s no way Arik said ‘chevreh’ that many times, and I don’t believe that the author really could have seen into the exact thoughts of the characters, despite the hours or interviews and research he conducted. It’s OK to dramatize non-fiction, but this approach diminishes from the believability of the story. For a fiction novel, this is OK, but this is a history book about a contentious topic, and this much embellishment diminishes from the thesis of the book.
Besides, the characters are just not very likeable. The details of their lives start to become trivial and boring about three hundred pages in. They start to grate on your nerves. Sure – I want to respect them for their bravery in the battle for Jerusalem, but by the end of the book, I’m left with little else to admire them for. Meir’s a loser, Avital is a loser, Yoel’s a bit better than a loser, and Arik is… well, a loser. Maybe I would have liked the book if it was two hundred pages shorter – which was totally possible, and I did learn something about Israeli history and culture out of it, but at the end, it just felt like I wasted my time.
June 19, 2017
Like Dreamers is not a definitive history of the Six Day War, of Israel, or the Arab-Israeli conflicts, but instead is a deeply personal exploration of the lives of individuals connected by this history. It is a wonderful book, worth reading by anyone interested in Israel and connected topics.
This is one of the several things I liked about how Halevi tells this story. While the major, famous names: Ben-Gurion, Rabin, Sharon, Begin, etc., are part of it, they are never the focus, never the movers of the story. The focus is always on the lives of the paratroopers. This gives it the feel of bottom-up history, rather than a history of ‘great men.’ And that provides a more authentic and personal connection to the events and lives of those affected by the events.
The narrative is at once exhilarating, aspirational, sad, poignant, funny, and thought-provoking. The first half tracks the lives of several of the individuals of the paratrooper brigade that helped to capture Jerusalem during the Six Day War. From their childhood to the 67 war, the narrative builds towards the capture and reunification of Jerusalem. This is presented as the apex of Israeli unity. The jubilation, the exhilaration, the joy of the moment: the overnight shift from facing annihilation to redeeming the 2,000-year-old dream of Jewish history.
The second half of the book, though, walks through how this vision of unity quickly fades—both between these individuals and within the nation. In this way, the author captures the diverse and divergent visions of the Israeli left and right, the Peace Now-ers and Greater Israel-ers, the kibbtuzniks and the settlers, the secular and the religious. And by focusing on particular individuals, Halevi shows how these divisions and categories break down and intertwine. Individuals—and their nations—are far more complex and complicated then a set of abstract ideological views. By showing us, through the lives of individuals, how their ideas and views developed, changed, and morphed in the face of a changing world, it gives a depth and humanity to the competing narratives of Israel (within Israel). It shows an abounding respect for these different ways to be Israeli, to be Zionist, to be Jewish.
This is one of the several things I liked about how Halevi tells this story. While the major, famous names: Ben-Gurion, Rabin, Sharon, Begin, etc., are part of it, they are never the focus, never the movers of the story. The focus is always on the lives of the paratroopers. This gives it the feel of bottom-up history, rather than a history of ‘great men.’ And that provides a more authentic and personal connection to the events and lives of those affected by the events.
The narrative is at once exhilarating, aspirational, sad, poignant, funny, and thought-provoking. The first half tracks the lives of several of the individuals of the paratrooper brigade that helped to capture Jerusalem during the Six Day War. From their childhood to the 67 war, the narrative builds towards the capture and reunification of Jerusalem. This is presented as the apex of Israeli unity. The jubilation, the exhilaration, the joy of the moment: the overnight shift from facing annihilation to redeeming the 2,000-year-old dream of Jewish history.
The second half of the book, though, walks through how this vision of unity quickly fades—both between these individuals and within the nation. In this way, the author captures the diverse and divergent visions of the Israeli left and right, the Peace Now-ers and Greater Israel-ers, the kibbtuzniks and the settlers, the secular and the religious. And by focusing on particular individuals, Halevi shows how these divisions and categories break down and intertwine. Individuals—and their nations—are far more complex and complicated then a set of abstract ideological views. By showing us, through the lives of individuals, how their ideas and views developed, changed, and morphed in the face of a changing world, it gives a depth and humanity to the competing narratives of Israel (within Israel). It shows an abounding respect for these different ways to be Israeli, to be Zionist, to be Jewish.
December 19, 2020
Certainly one of the best books I have read about this period of Israel history. In a small country, divisions inevitably get more personal and Israel is no exception. It's striking to see members of the famed 55th paratrooper brigade evolve to polar opposites in Israeli society, with some becoming leaders among settlers, or among Kibbutznikim, or even one being caught passing, unknowingly, information to Syrians.
The book goes a long way in presenting the current divisions in Israel and understanding even today's politics. It does remind of the saying from the Gemara, Eruvin: "Elu VeElu Devarim Elokim Haim", those and those are equally words from the God of Life.
The book goes a long way in presenting the current divisions in Israel and understanding even today's politics. It does remind of the saying from the Gemara, Eruvin: "Elu VeElu Devarim Elokim Haim", those and those are equally words from the God of Life.
July 25, 2017
Wonderful story and mostly balanced narrative of our changing state.
June 9, 2019
I learnt a LOT more detail about modern Israeli history and how it ties together, as well as being reminded just how much perspective matters all the way through. Lots to think about here.
March 8, 2025
The story of the Israeli Paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation. Very well researched and a fascinating account of political trends in Israel told through personal stories.
April 4, 2025
“Meir loved Tirza. Around Tirza he felt fully alive. In choosing her as his bride, he conceded the impossibility of a normal life.”
May 5, 2021
I read this after looking for a follow-up to 1967 by Tom Segev and it is the perfect companion. Halevi follows a group of Israeli paratroopers who took the Temple Mount in 1967 and follows them as they go on to represent different trends and political movements in the decades to come. Through these men readers get an intimate look into Israeli peace, settler, business, militant, and other movements.
February 10, 2021
An important book to read if one wishes to understand the current political situation in Israel. At times, particularly toward the end of the book, it did feel like it dragged a bit, but the depth of research and the incredible writing were both astounding. One leaves with a clearer understanding of just how difficult and complex the situation in Israel is.
June 17, 2019
Memorable Quotes from Like Dreamers:
As Arab armies massed along Israel’s borders, demonstrators in the streets of Cairo and Damascus chanted “Death to Israel.” Yet the international community seemed indifferent. Even the United States, caught in an increasingly hopeless war in Vietnam, offered little more than sympathy. My father and I shared the same unspoken thought: again. Barely two decades after the Holocaust, the Jews were facing destruction again. Once again, we were alone. (xxi)
The kibbutz was an attempt to transcend human nature, replace selfishness with cooperation. (xxii)
The Jewish state was the only democratic country to have been founded in large part by egalitarian collectives, and whose key institutions - trade unions, health clinics, bus cooperatives, even the army - were created by radical socialists. (xxiii)
The kibbutz and the Soviet Union were different aspects of the same historical march: the kibbutz and experiment in pure communism, the Soviet Union an experiment in mass communism. Both were necessary to prove the practicality of radical equality. (5-6)
And lest we forget: Stalin defeated Hitler, and the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. And in 1948 the Soviets had supported Jewish statehood and shipped Czech weapons to the IDF. (6)
Almost everything here [Kibbutz Ein Shemer] had been planted or built by their own hands. Everyone was valued for who they were, not only for what they did. (6)
To a kibbutznik, the word I sounded vaguely immoral. All that was great and worthy in Israel had been achieved by transmuting I into we. (9)
Avital and Ada would have preferred a civil marriage, but that wasn’t an option in Israel. And so they endured a curt religious ceremony in the office of the “red rabbi,” so called for specializing in weddings of kibbutzniks and not imposing stringent religious demands. (9)
Beneath their pork-eating, Yom Kippur-violating veneer, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah discerned in kibbutzniks holy Jews. They were working the land of Israel, defending the people of Israel. The kibbutz’s very utopianism negated its professed commitment to “normalizing” the Jewish people. What other nation had been founded by voluntary communes seeking to purify human nature of selfishness? (26)
Rabbi Kook the father had compared secular pioneers to the workmen who built the ancient Temple: during the period of construction, they were permitted to enter the Holy of Holies at will; one the Temple was completed, though, only the high priest could enter that consecrated space, and then only on Yom Kippur. Secular Zionism was preparing the way for the rebuilt Temple, and for its own disappearance. (26)
Enzo Sereni, an Italian-born Jew with a doctorate in philosophy, had left behind a family fortune to become a kibbutznik... A pacifist, Sereni refused to carry a weapon or even a stick on guard duty. He walked neighboring Arab villages, befriending mukhtars and peasants… 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. (36)
May 1967. On the streets of Cairo, demonstrators waved banners of skulls and crossbones and chanted, “We want war!” Caricatures in the Arab world’s government newspapers fantasized about the coming victory. An Egyptian cartoon showed a hook-nosed Jew being strangled by a Star of David; a Syrian cartoon showed a pile of skulls in the smoking ruins of Tel Aviv. One ad in an Egyptian newspaper depicted a hand plunging a knife into a Star of David, and was signed, “Nile Oils and Soap Company.” (55)
As young men began disappearing from Israel’s streets and fields, high school students and pensioners volunteered to take their place, working as mailmen and harvesters. The army requisitioned tour buses, taxis, private cars. Gradually, civilian Israel was absorbed into military Israel. (55)
“Eisenhower writes that a soldier who doesn’t complain isn’t a soldier. So be soldiers, and complain… Argue, analyze, curse, [bemoan] the home and the fields and the studies you’ve left behind. Hit as hard as you like. Just keep smiling…” (62)
But Motta was keenly aware that the battle for Jerusalem was different from other battles. He kept a detailed diary, recording not only military details but also poetic moments, like the anti-Zionist Hasid who helped evacuate the wounded “Zionist” soldiers. For Motta, archaeologists, no less than paratroopers, belonged to this war, which was about not only survival but also retrieval: what had been taken from the Jewish people was about to be returned. (80)
The Temple Mount, Yoel repeated to himself. Soon we will be standing on the Temple Mount - What did it mean? The Temple Mount had been so inaccessible that Jews could only imagine reclaiming it in the time of the Messiah. And yet here was Yoel, heading toward the holiest place on earth in the boots of war, in the company not of prophets but of pork-eating kibbutzniks. “Like dreamers,” the Psalmist wrote of the Jews returning to Zion. Perhaps he was suggesting not only joy but dislocation. (89)
Arik heard some of the soldiers speaking about “miracle” and felt uneasy. What miracle? The Jews had won because they stopped waiting for miracles and learned to protect themselves. (96)
Though kibbutzniks were barely 4 percent of the population, nearly two hundred of them had been killed in the [Six Day] War, a quarter of Israel’s fatalities. Raised on reticence, young kibbutzniks suddenly felt a need to talk - about losing friends and about killing for the first time; about the shifting face of the enemy, from crowds chanting “Death to Israel” to lines of Arab refugees; about their identification with Jewish vulnerability before the war and their unease with Jewish power afterward. The victory they had helped bring had turned Israel into an occupier - true, history’s most improbable occupier, having gone to battle not to conquer but survive. No one had intended this. But now kibbutzniks, the children of utopia, were suddenly occupiers. (124)
But negotiations seemed more remote than ever. The Arab League had just issued its three noes: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. Eshkol shared the fear of his cabinet’s doves of ruling a million Palestinians, the threat to the demographic intactness of a Jewish state. But even the doves agreed that there could be no return to the fragile prewar borders; the only debate was how much of the West Bank should eventually be returned. (142-143)
Founded by dissidents from the Israel Communist Party, Matzpen was an uneasy coalition of Maoists and Trotskyites and anarchists, united only by antipathy to Zionism. Though Matzpen considered itself an Arab-Jewish movement, almost all of its members were Jewish. (161)
Fired from jobs, sometimes shunned by their families, Matzpen members prided themselves on being a kind of esoteric elite, the Jews who knew the truth about Zionism. Yet even in their contempt, Udi and his [Matzpen] friends proved Zionism’s success. Only Zionist empowerment could have made young Jews feel safe enough, barely twenty-five years after the Holocaust, to despise Jewish power. (162)
Alterman’s table was a place of national pilgrimage. Politicians came to consult him about how to deal with rivals, generals confided military strategy, kibbutzniks shared their commune’s dilemmas, young poets their work. (190)
As existential fears eased, suppressed social tensions emerged. The most acute was the status of Israel’s Sephardim, Jews from Muslim countries who formed over half the country’s population. Many still lived in substandard housing projects built by an impoverished Israel in the 1950s. Sephardim were vastly underrepresented in the Labor-dominated political system, and their culture was largely excluded from mainstream Israel. (219)
Right-wingers bitterly accused the government of turning Judea and Samaria, the Jewish heartland, into Judenrein - “emptied of Jews,” a Nazi term - territory. (221)
On guard duty around late-night campfires, the reservists in Suez City dissected the war. Who was responsible for the depleted stockpiles of weapons they had found on Yom Kippur? For the intelligence failure to read the most blatant signs of impending invasion? For the doctrine of Israel’s invulnerability and the contempt for the fighting capability of the other side? For the strategic stupidity of the Bar-Lev Line? Someone had to answer for this. (262)
What had Israel gained by refusing to launch a preemptive strike on Yom Kippur morning and then surrendering to American pressure to save the Egyptians from defeat? Only the world’s contempt. And now the government was preventing settlement in the land of Israel. (267)
He set out a list of rules for himself. First, forget your previous existence. Hope for nothing and expect nothing… Approach prison with the same curiosity you would apply to any society; become a student of its ways. Accept petty humiliations, like eating with a spoon. Be intellectually engaged and emotionally detached. (286)
On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly voted, 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, to declare Zionism a form of racism. The resolution, initiated by Arab nations and endorsed by the Soviet and Muslim blocs, was the culminating moment of the growing Arab success, impelled by the oil boycott, to Isolate Israel. Sitting in solemn assembly, the UN in effect declared that, of all the world’s national movements, only Zionism - who factions ranged from Marxist to capitalist, expansionist to conciliatory, clericalist to ultrasecular - was by its very nature evil. The state of the Jews, the Israeli political philosopher J.L. Talmon noted bitterly, had become the Jew of states. (296)
This coalition of outcasts from the Labor Zionist ideal of “real Israeliness” was presided over by Zionism’s ultimate outcast. While most of the Labor movement had accepted the UN’s 1947 plan partitioning the land into a Palestinian and a Jewish state, Begin’s right-wing “Revisionists” had been bitterly opposed. As leader of the the Irgun underground, Begin had been hunted not only by the British but by Labor Zionists, who feared that his anti-British violence would endanger the chances for a Jewish state. (321)
“Several weeks have passed since the elections… but we haven’t heard one bit of self-criticism.” To our shame, he continued, it was successive Labor governments that presided over the destruction of Zionist ideals, allowing the pursuit of wealth to become the new Israeli ideal. “The spirit of pioneering and volunteering has disappeared. We need to change this reality.” (322)
There was no peace movement like this anywhere - led by those who had fought the last war and would, if necessary, fight the next one. (327)
Among Nekudah’s minuscule staff they joked that some readers took out subscriptions only to be able to cancel in protest. (336)
How do you make a small fortune in Israel? went the joke. Invest a large one. (346)
The settlers called their new organization the Yesha Council. Yesha was the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. By happy coincidence, the word yesha also meant “salvation.” (359)
For many Israelis, the murderous intent of the PLO was embodied by the fate of the Haran family. Three years earlier, PLO terrorists crossing from Lebanon by sea broke into the home of Danny and Smadar Haran, in the northern coastal town of Nahariya. They caught Danny and the Harans’ four-year-old daughter, Einat, took them to the shore, shot Danny, and smashed Einat’s head against a rock. Meanwhile, Smadar had been hiding in a closet with her two-year-old daughter, Yael; to keep Yael from crying, Smadar had pressed her mouth shut and accidentally smothered her. It was a story that could have come from the Holocaust. (383-384)
PLO members fired at the advancing Israelis from mosques, schools, hospitals. IDF loudspeakers warned residents to flee. Tens of thousands of civilians, in cars and trucks, on foot, crowded the roads heading north. In some camps PLO fighters allowed civilians to leave; in others, they held civilians as hostages. (385)
On September 16 [1982], Phalangist fighters moved into Sabra and Shatila, two refugee camps in West Beirut, and massacred hundreds of Palestinians. One Phalangist in spiked shoes stomped a baby to death. Though no Israelis were involved in the slaughter, the IDF had allowed the Phalangists to enter the camps, assuming their mission was to fight the remaining PLO forces there. And the IDF had provided flares to help the Phalangists to identify PLO fighters. World outrage was directed against Israel. “Goyim kill goyim,” Begin was reputed to have said bitterly, “and they blame the Jews.” (390)
[During the War in Lebanon in 1985] Inflation reached over 400 percent. Israelis rushed to spend their paychecks. The government printed a five-thousand shekel note. Pickpockets, Israelis joked, kept the wallet and threw away the money. The Israeli tendency to improvise, expressed on the battlefield as daring, was exposed as mere recklessness in civilian life. (425)
The settlers were “historical people, and historical people become - at certain moments - hollow, and allow history to stuff them, and then they are dangerous and deadly.” And, warned Grossman, the next generation of Jewish terrorists, successors to the settlers’ underground, was now being incubated in the settlements and yeshivas of religious Zionism. (438)
“We are prevented from exercising our right to self-defense,” noted a leaflet distributed in Ofra. “Those who rise to kill us are protected by the Israeli government, and we are required to flee.” Yet for leftists, the problem wasn’t Israeli restraint but brutality. Left and right no longer seemed capable of even perceiving the same reality. (441-442)
Even in hard-line Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein was considered extreme. He was a disciple of the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane, who had been assassinated by an Arab terrorist in New York in 1990. Kahane created a Jewish theology of vengeance and rage. The purpose of the Jewish people, he had preached, was to defeat Amalek - the biblical tribe that attacked the Israelites in the desert and whose evil essense passes, in every generation, into another nation seeking to destroy the Jews. When Jews erase Amalek, God’s name will be glorified and the Messiah will come. (486)
Rather than contributing to Israeli security, as settlers had 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. (528-529)
[May 1967] There was widespread unemployment. More people were emigrating than immigrating. The joke Israelis told was, “Last one out of the airport, shut the lights.” (534)
The Six-Day War had created a country caught in a 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. (534)
As Arab armies massed along Israel’s borders, demonstrators in the streets of Cairo and Damascus chanted “Death to Israel.” Yet the international community seemed indifferent. Even the United States, caught in an increasingly hopeless war in Vietnam, offered little more than sympathy. My father and I shared the same unspoken thought: again. Barely two decades after the Holocaust, the Jews were facing destruction again. Once again, we were alone. (xxi)
The kibbutz was an attempt to transcend human nature, replace selfishness with cooperation. (xxii)
The Jewish state was the only democratic country to have been founded in large part by egalitarian collectives, and whose key institutions - trade unions, health clinics, bus cooperatives, even the army - were created by radical socialists. (xxiii)
The kibbutz and the Soviet Union were different aspects of the same historical march: the kibbutz and experiment in pure communism, the Soviet Union an experiment in mass communism. Both were necessary to prove the practicality of radical equality. (5-6)
And lest we forget: Stalin defeated Hitler, and the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. And in 1948 the Soviets had supported Jewish statehood and shipped Czech weapons to the IDF. (6)
Almost everything here [Kibbutz Ein Shemer] had been planted or built by their own hands. Everyone was valued for who they were, not only for what they did. (6)
To a kibbutznik, the word I sounded vaguely immoral. All that was great and worthy in Israel had been achieved by transmuting I into we. (9)
Avital and Ada would have preferred a civil marriage, but that wasn’t an option in Israel. And so they endured a curt religious ceremony in the office of the “red rabbi,” so called for specializing in weddings of kibbutzniks and not imposing stringent religious demands. (9)
Beneath their pork-eating, Yom Kippur-violating veneer, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah discerned in kibbutzniks holy Jews. They were working the land of Israel, defending the people of Israel. The kibbutz’s very utopianism negated its professed commitment to “normalizing” the Jewish people. What other nation had been founded by voluntary communes seeking to purify human nature of selfishness? (26)
Rabbi Kook the father had compared secular pioneers to the workmen who built the ancient Temple: during the period of construction, they were permitted to enter the Holy of Holies at will; one the Temple was completed, though, only the high priest could enter that consecrated space, and then only on Yom Kippur. Secular Zionism was preparing the way for the rebuilt Temple, and for its own disappearance. (26)
Enzo Sereni, an Italian-born Jew with a doctorate in philosophy, had left behind a family fortune to become a kibbutznik... A pacifist, Sereni refused to carry a weapon or even a stick on guard duty. He walked neighboring Arab villages, befriending mukhtars and peasants… 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. (36)
May 1967. On the streets of Cairo, demonstrators waved banners of skulls and crossbones and chanted, “We want war!” Caricatures in the Arab world’s government newspapers fantasized about the coming victory. An Egyptian cartoon showed a hook-nosed Jew being strangled by a Star of David; a Syrian cartoon showed a pile of skulls in the smoking ruins of Tel Aviv. One ad in an Egyptian newspaper depicted a hand plunging a knife into a Star of David, and was signed, “Nile Oils and Soap Company.” (55)
As young men began disappearing from Israel’s streets and fields, high school students and pensioners volunteered to take their place, working as mailmen and harvesters. The army requisitioned tour buses, taxis, private cars. Gradually, civilian Israel was absorbed into military Israel. (55)
“Eisenhower writes that a soldier who doesn’t complain isn’t a soldier. So be soldiers, and complain… Argue, analyze, curse, [bemoan] the home and the fields and the studies you’ve left behind. Hit as hard as you like. Just keep smiling…” (62)
But Motta was keenly aware that the battle for Jerusalem was different from other battles. He kept a detailed diary, recording not only military details but also poetic moments, like the anti-Zionist Hasid who helped evacuate the wounded “Zionist” soldiers. For Motta, archaeologists, no less than paratroopers, belonged to this war, which was about not only survival but also retrieval: what had been taken from the Jewish people was about to be returned. (80)
The Temple Mount, Yoel repeated to himself. Soon we will be standing on the Temple Mount - What did it mean? The Temple Mount had been so inaccessible that Jews could only imagine reclaiming it in the time of the Messiah. And yet here was Yoel, heading toward the holiest place on earth in the boots of war, in the company not of prophets but of pork-eating kibbutzniks. “Like dreamers,” the Psalmist wrote of the Jews returning to Zion. Perhaps he was suggesting not only joy but dislocation. (89)
Arik heard some of the soldiers speaking about “miracle” and felt uneasy. What miracle? The Jews had won because they stopped waiting for miracles and learned to protect themselves. (96)
Though kibbutzniks were barely 4 percent of the population, nearly two hundred of them had been killed in the [Six Day] War, a quarter of Israel’s fatalities. Raised on reticence, young kibbutzniks suddenly felt a need to talk - about losing friends and about killing for the first time; about the shifting face of the enemy, from crowds chanting “Death to Israel” to lines of Arab refugees; about their identification with Jewish vulnerability before the war and their unease with Jewish power afterward. The victory they had helped bring had turned Israel into an occupier - true, history’s most improbable occupier, having gone to battle not to conquer but survive. No one had intended this. But now kibbutzniks, the children of utopia, were suddenly occupiers. (124)
But negotiations seemed more remote than ever. The Arab League had just issued its three noes: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. Eshkol shared the fear of his cabinet’s doves of ruling a million Palestinians, the threat to the demographic intactness of a Jewish state. But even the doves agreed that there could be no return to the fragile prewar borders; the only debate was how much of the West Bank should eventually be returned. (142-143)
Founded by dissidents from the Israel Communist Party, Matzpen was an uneasy coalition of Maoists and Trotskyites and anarchists, united only by antipathy to Zionism. Though Matzpen considered itself an Arab-Jewish movement, almost all of its members were Jewish. (161)
Fired from jobs, sometimes shunned by their families, Matzpen members prided themselves on being a kind of esoteric elite, the Jews who knew the truth about Zionism. Yet even in their contempt, Udi and his [Matzpen] friends proved Zionism’s success. Only Zionist empowerment could have made young Jews feel safe enough, barely twenty-five years after the Holocaust, to despise Jewish power. (162)
Alterman’s table was a place of national pilgrimage. Politicians came to consult him about how to deal with rivals, generals confided military strategy, kibbutzniks shared their commune’s dilemmas, young poets their work. (190)
As existential fears eased, suppressed social tensions emerged. The most acute was the status of Israel’s Sephardim, Jews from Muslim countries who formed over half the country’s population. Many still lived in substandard housing projects built by an impoverished Israel in the 1950s. Sephardim were vastly underrepresented in the Labor-dominated political system, and their culture was largely excluded from mainstream Israel. (219)
Right-wingers bitterly accused the government of turning Judea and Samaria, the Jewish heartland, into Judenrein - “emptied of Jews,” a Nazi term - territory. (221)
On guard duty around late-night campfires, the reservists in Suez City dissected the war. Who was responsible for the depleted stockpiles of weapons they had found on Yom Kippur? For the intelligence failure to read the most blatant signs of impending invasion? For the doctrine of Israel’s invulnerability and the contempt for the fighting capability of the other side? For the strategic stupidity of the Bar-Lev Line? Someone had to answer for this. (262)
What had Israel gained by refusing to launch a preemptive strike on Yom Kippur morning and then surrendering to American pressure to save the Egyptians from defeat? Only the world’s contempt. And now the government was preventing settlement in the land of Israel. (267)
He set out a list of rules for himself. First, forget your previous existence. Hope for nothing and expect nothing… Approach prison with the same curiosity you would apply to any society; become a student of its ways. Accept petty humiliations, like eating with a spoon. Be intellectually engaged and emotionally detached. (286)
On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly voted, 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, to declare Zionism a form of racism. The resolution, initiated by Arab nations and endorsed by the Soviet and Muslim blocs, was the culminating moment of the growing Arab success, impelled by the oil boycott, to Isolate Israel. Sitting in solemn assembly, the UN in effect declared that, of all the world’s national movements, only Zionism - who factions ranged from Marxist to capitalist, expansionist to conciliatory, clericalist to ultrasecular - was by its very nature evil. The state of the Jews, the Israeli political philosopher J.L. Talmon noted bitterly, had become the Jew of states. (296)
This coalition of outcasts from the Labor Zionist ideal of “real Israeliness” was presided over by Zionism’s ultimate outcast. While most of the Labor movement had accepted the UN’s 1947 plan partitioning the land into a Palestinian and a Jewish state, Begin’s right-wing “Revisionists” had been bitterly opposed. As leader of the the Irgun underground, Begin had been hunted not only by the British but by Labor Zionists, who feared that his anti-British violence would endanger the chances for a Jewish state. (321)
“Several weeks have passed since the elections… but we haven’t heard one bit of self-criticism.” To our shame, he continued, it was successive Labor governments that presided over the destruction of Zionist ideals, allowing the pursuit of wealth to become the new Israeli ideal. “The spirit of pioneering and volunteering has disappeared. We need to change this reality.” (322)
There was no peace movement like this anywhere - led by those who had fought the last war and would, if necessary, fight the next one. (327)
Among Nekudah’s minuscule staff they joked that some readers took out subscriptions only to be able to cancel in protest. (336)
How do you make a small fortune in Israel? went the joke. Invest a large one. (346)
The settlers called their new organization the Yesha Council. Yesha was the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. By happy coincidence, the word yesha also meant “salvation.” (359)
For many Israelis, the murderous intent of the PLO was embodied by the fate of the Haran family. Three years earlier, PLO terrorists crossing from Lebanon by sea broke into the home of Danny and Smadar Haran, in the northern coastal town of Nahariya. They caught Danny and the Harans’ four-year-old daughter, Einat, took them to the shore, shot Danny, and smashed Einat’s head against a rock. Meanwhile, Smadar had been hiding in a closet with her two-year-old daughter, Yael; to keep Yael from crying, Smadar had pressed her mouth shut and accidentally smothered her. It was a story that could have come from the Holocaust. (383-384)
PLO members fired at the advancing Israelis from mosques, schools, hospitals. IDF loudspeakers warned residents to flee. Tens of thousands of civilians, in cars and trucks, on foot, crowded the roads heading north. In some camps PLO fighters allowed civilians to leave; in others, they held civilians as hostages. (385)
On September 16 [1982], Phalangist fighters moved into Sabra and Shatila, two refugee camps in West Beirut, and massacred hundreds of Palestinians. One Phalangist in spiked shoes stomped a baby to death. Though no Israelis were involved in the slaughter, the IDF had allowed the Phalangists to enter the camps, assuming their mission was to fight the remaining PLO forces there. And the IDF had provided flares to help the Phalangists to identify PLO fighters. World outrage was directed against Israel. “Goyim kill goyim,” Begin was reputed to have said bitterly, “and they blame the Jews.” (390)
[During the War in Lebanon in 1985] Inflation reached over 400 percent. Israelis rushed to spend their paychecks. The government printed a five-thousand shekel note. Pickpockets, Israelis joked, kept the wallet and threw away the money. The Israeli tendency to improvise, expressed on the battlefield as daring, was exposed as mere recklessness in civilian life. (425)
The settlers were “historical people, and historical people become - at certain moments - hollow, and allow history to stuff them, and then they are dangerous and deadly.” And, warned Grossman, the next generation of Jewish terrorists, successors to the settlers’ underground, was now being incubated in the settlements and yeshivas of religious Zionism. (438)
“We are prevented from exercising our right to self-defense,” noted a leaflet distributed in Ofra. “Those who rise to kill us are protected by the Israeli government, and we are required to flee.” Yet for leftists, the problem wasn’t Israeli restraint but brutality. Left and right no longer seemed capable of even perceiving the same reality. (441-442)
Even in hard-line Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein was considered extreme. He was a disciple of the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane, who had been assassinated by an Arab terrorist in New York in 1990. Kahane created a Jewish theology of vengeance and rage. The purpose of the Jewish people, he had preached, was to defeat Amalek - the biblical tribe that attacked the Israelites in the desert and whose evil essense passes, in every generation, into another nation seeking to destroy the Jews. When Jews erase Amalek, God’s name will be glorified and the Messiah will come. (486)
Rather than contributing to Israeli security, as settlers had 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. (528-529)
[May 1967] There was widespread unemployment. More people were emigrating than immigrating. The joke Israelis told was, “Last one out of the airport, shut the lights.” (534)
The Six-Day War had created a country caught in a 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. (534)
March 19, 2015
With Israel much in the news this past year, many people find themselves in discussions about Israel’s founding and the evolution of Israeli politics since independence in 1948. One way to approach that history and to acquire a deeper understanding of today’s Israel is to read Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers.
Like Dreamers is an example of what is called social history. Instead of reporting on the main players in the main events, Like Dreamers tells the personal stories over forty plus years of seven men who were part of the liberation and unification of Jerusalem in 1967, and in so doing exposes the reader to the divisions that emerged in Israeli society between secular versus religious Zionists, between settlers in Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) versus the residents of pre-1967 Israel, between Kibbutzniks versus metropolitans.
The March 2015 election results testify to the fact that Israel is a divided society. While the subtitle “The story of the Israeli paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation” suggests the paratroopers are to blame for the subsequent divisions, most of the seven men Halevi writes about did everything in their power to bridge the divide. The problem is that complex and deep-seated problems are not easily resolved despite the good-faith efforts of the best of men.
If nothing else, readers of Like Dreamers will come away with a greater appreciation of how great the divide is for example between those who see the world through the lens of Torah versus those who no longer believe in a god nor practice the Jewish religion. Each has a claim to how Israel should be governed and how problems such as Arab terrorism should be addressed.
Halevi brings his seven men to life by following their personal lives, their careers, their wishes and their fears. Occasionally one might wish he’d have left out some small personal item, but on the whole he gives very complete pictures of each man’s life treating even the most extreme with empathy. His smooth writing style is ideal for a book of this length and it doesn’t require any specialized knowledge or background.
Like Dreamers is an example of what is called social history. Instead of reporting on the main players in the main events, Like Dreamers tells the personal stories over forty plus years of seven men who were part of the liberation and unification of Jerusalem in 1967, and in so doing exposes the reader to the divisions that emerged in Israeli society between secular versus religious Zionists, between settlers in Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) versus the residents of pre-1967 Israel, between Kibbutzniks versus metropolitans.
The March 2015 election results testify to the fact that Israel is a divided society. While the subtitle “The story of the Israeli paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation” suggests the paratroopers are to blame for the subsequent divisions, most of the seven men Halevi writes about did everything in their power to bridge the divide. The problem is that complex and deep-seated problems are not easily resolved despite the good-faith efforts of the best of men.
If nothing else, readers of Like Dreamers will come away with a greater appreciation of how great the divide is for example between those who see the world through the lens of Torah versus those who no longer believe in a god nor practice the Jewish religion. Each has a claim to how Israel should be governed and how problems such as Arab terrorism should be addressed.
Halevi brings his seven men to life by following their personal lives, their careers, their wishes and their fears. Occasionally one might wish he’d have left out some small personal item, but on the whole he gives very complete pictures of each man’s life treating even the most extreme with empathy. His smooth writing style is ideal for a book of this length and it doesn’t require any specialized knowledge or background.
November 9, 2019
Can a small group of people, say, at first a few dozen, and then just a handful, represent the story of an entire country? And the dreams and hopes and failures and tribulations that are forever associated with that country and its citizens?
Like Dreamers is an epic, decade-spanning examination of members of the Israeli army paratrooper brigade that fought in the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six Day War of 1967. That war resulted in the Old City being turned over from Jordanian control into Israeli hands, bringing the holy site of the Western Wall into Jewish sovereignty for the first time in 2,000 years.
Israeli journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi begins the book by recounting the battle that took place in June 1967. He relays the story of how the paratroopers at first weren’t even posted in Jerusalem, and then recounts the battle against the Jordanians amidst the dark, tight, winding streets of the ancient city — and the many casualties suffered by the Israelis. There was at first reluctance by the Israeli government to take control of the Old City, but the decision was made to take advantage of the opportunity. In the early chapters we are introduced to the teenagers who the book follows through adulthood.
Contained within their individual stories is the collective story of Israel post-1967. Of how the glow and confidence and exaltation of that summer eventually turned into the reality of occupation, opposing visions of and for the state, and the many battles, physical, religious, spiritual, and political, that continue to burden the Jewish state.
It is of course not surprising to find from within a group the size of a paratrooper brigade individuals with different philosophies, belief systems and religious leanings. Still, Halevi finds from within this group incredibly disparate stories that represent polarities of Israeli thought. There are left-leaning, socialist graduates of the kibbutz, and there are the right-leaning, ultra-religious progenitors of the settler movement. There is the man convicted of treason for acts against the state, and there is the poet and songwriter who never quite makes it as an artist, inches closer to religion over the course of his life, wandering philosophically to understand the meaning of being Jewish and Israeli.
While the stories of these individuals are compelling, the question is to what extent do they work in portraying the larger Israeli story. I found the narratives of the individuals highlighted by the author to be constricting and limiting in some ways, but still, they work as stand-ins for the major issues Israeli society has faced and continues to struggle with.
There is the story of the kibbutz movement, and how it began as a model for the collectivist spirit of settling the land and working together to build a home and life out of the desert. We see how the settler movement of the religious communities comes to define itself, and how it interjected its religious and spiritual understandings of their definition of the Jewish state into the broader Israeli political landscape. We see the difficulties of endless war, from the 1973 Yom Kippur War to the evolution of Palestinian terrorism and into the first and second intifadas. We see how political life in Israel changed over time, culminating in the failed peace process and assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. There is the evolution of Israeli art, music and literature; there are the beginnings of Israeli industry and commerce, which today sees Israel as a leader in technology and innovation.
Israel has grown and matured. It has gone through being an international pariah, which in many ways it still is, to a state that can take care of, and defend, itself. It grapples with many of the same issues from its founding in 1948. The role of Judaism within society and government. The definition of boundaries and the relationship with its often hostile Arab neighbors. The role of settling the land, even in disputed areas. The need for the government to settle Jewish immigrants from across the globe, from Russia to Ethiopia to western Europe. There is the divide between Jews of Ashkenazic and Sephardic descent. It’s all here in this book, represented by true stories of actual Israelis whose very lives mirrored, in so many ways, the life and history of Israel.
This is not a book about the future, nor is it much one about the present. Yet in this innovative and selective exploration of Israeli history, we see so much of what Israel has endured and confronted — and still does. We see the foundation of the endless struggles of the Jewish state, internally and externally.
We also experience birth and death, love and loss, dreams accomplished and missed, some of the very ranges of human experiences that are both universal but also specific to what it means to be Israeli, to lead an Israeli life.
Those looking to understand Israel by exploring its past will get a lot out of this book, even if the narrative is itself narrow in terms of the number of people fully examined here. The story lines constrict as the book reaches its conclusion. There are many stories not seen or told, but that limitation doesn’t detract from those we see so intimately.
The dream of living peaceably in a Jewish homeland still exists for so many. But the task of defining what (and where) that means is still unresolved. Like Dreamers is a bit of a kaleidoscopic vision at the attempt of making that dream into a reality. While this book, like all others, comes to end, the main takeaway is that the story is ongoing. Reading this book will help you better understand that story, and who is telling it.
Like Dreamers is an epic, decade-spanning examination of members of the Israeli army paratrooper brigade that fought in the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six Day War of 1967. That war resulted in the Old City being turned over from Jordanian control into Israeli hands, bringing the holy site of the Western Wall into Jewish sovereignty for the first time in 2,000 years.
Israeli journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi begins the book by recounting the battle that took place in June 1967. He relays the story of how the paratroopers at first weren’t even posted in Jerusalem, and then recounts the battle against the Jordanians amidst the dark, tight, winding streets of the ancient city — and the many casualties suffered by the Israelis. There was at first reluctance by the Israeli government to take control of the Old City, but the decision was made to take advantage of the opportunity. In the early chapters we are introduced to the teenagers who the book follows through adulthood.
Contained within their individual stories is the collective story of Israel post-1967. Of how the glow and confidence and exaltation of that summer eventually turned into the reality of occupation, opposing visions of and for the state, and the many battles, physical, religious, spiritual, and political, that continue to burden the Jewish state.
It is of course not surprising to find from within a group the size of a paratrooper brigade individuals with different philosophies, belief systems and religious leanings. Still, Halevi finds from within this group incredibly disparate stories that represent polarities of Israeli thought. There are left-leaning, socialist graduates of the kibbutz, and there are the right-leaning, ultra-religious progenitors of the settler movement. There is the man convicted of treason for acts against the state, and there is the poet and songwriter who never quite makes it as an artist, inches closer to religion over the course of his life, wandering philosophically to understand the meaning of being Jewish and Israeli.
While the stories of these individuals are compelling, the question is to what extent do they work in portraying the larger Israeli story. I found the narratives of the individuals highlighted by the author to be constricting and limiting in some ways, but still, they work as stand-ins for the major issues Israeli society has faced and continues to struggle with.
There is the story of the kibbutz movement, and how it began as a model for the collectivist spirit of settling the land and working together to build a home and life out of the desert. We see how the settler movement of the religious communities comes to define itself, and how it interjected its religious and spiritual understandings of their definition of the Jewish state into the broader Israeli political landscape. We see the difficulties of endless war, from the 1973 Yom Kippur War to the evolution of Palestinian terrorism and into the first and second intifadas. We see how political life in Israel changed over time, culminating in the failed peace process and assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. There is the evolution of Israeli art, music and literature; there are the beginnings of Israeli industry and commerce, which today sees Israel as a leader in technology and innovation.
Israel has grown and matured. It has gone through being an international pariah, which in many ways it still is, to a state that can take care of, and defend, itself. It grapples with many of the same issues from its founding in 1948. The role of Judaism within society and government. The definition of boundaries and the relationship with its often hostile Arab neighbors. The role of settling the land, even in disputed areas. The need for the government to settle Jewish immigrants from across the globe, from Russia to Ethiopia to western Europe. There is the divide between Jews of Ashkenazic and Sephardic descent. It’s all here in this book, represented by true stories of actual Israelis whose very lives mirrored, in so many ways, the life and history of Israel.
This is not a book about the future, nor is it much one about the present. Yet in this innovative and selective exploration of Israeli history, we see so much of what Israel has endured and confronted — and still does. We see the foundation of the endless struggles of the Jewish state, internally and externally.
We also experience birth and death, love and loss, dreams accomplished and missed, some of the very ranges of human experiences that are both universal but also specific to what it means to be Israeli, to lead an Israeli life.
Those looking to understand Israel by exploring its past will get a lot out of this book, even if the narrative is itself narrow in terms of the number of people fully examined here. The story lines constrict as the book reaches its conclusion. There are many stories not seen or told, but that limitation doesn’t detract from those we see so intimately.
The dream of living peaceably in a Jewish homeland still exists for so many. But the task of defining what (and where) that means is still unresolved. Like Dreamers is a bit of a kaleidoscopic vision at the attempt of making that dream into a reality. While this book, like all others, comes to end, the main takeaway is that the story is ongoing. Reading this book will help you better understand that story, and who is telling it.
June 16, 2016
This book brought up many painful memories from the years I was affiliated with religious Zionism. I learned to avoid idealogues of all stripes, be they Marxists or Stalinists, religious kibbutniks or religious settlers, who knew the "truth" and, therefore, what everyone else should believe and how they should behave. ""It's interesting," replied Yehudit in her slow and thoughtful way, "that when the left turns extreme we produce traitors like Udi Aviv, and when the right turns extreme they produce murderers [like those who planned to blow up the Temple Mount.]""
August 28, 2015
This book is simply stunning. I've heard from some people that they don't like the way it jumps around among the different characters, but I actually really appreciate that style--it demonstrates how the characters all lived parallel and intersecting lives over the same period of time. There was so much history about Israel and Jerusalem that I didn't know before reading this book, and somehow the author managed to give me a thorough history lesson while also telling a story that flowed like a novel. This is definitely the best book on Israel I have read thus far--highly recommended!
May 12, 2014
Filled with beautiful, personal, and insightful vignettes about the lives and times of some of the paratroopers who liberated the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, I still found this book unsatisfying. The journalist devotion of the author to not pass judgement leaves him more sympathetic to the perspectives that led to the Jewish extremism in the 1970's and eventually led to the Baruch Goldstein massacre and the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin. We cannot be careless with our ideologies.
December 28, 2014
Powerful, engrossing read. I have a much clearer picture of the forces at work in Israel today that make achieving peace with the Palestinians so daunting. The author does a brilliant job of illuminating the complexity of Israeli politics by tracing the individual lives of certain of the paratroopers who captured the Temple Mount and united Jerusalem.
February 5, 2017
I was given a copy of this book when it was published; I admit that I was intimidated initially by the array of "characters" presented at the outset. I picked the book up again this year for a few reasons, and I am so, so glad that I did.
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