The story of modern Israel is inherently dramatic. A big, thick and well-written history of the country — like Howard M. Sachar’s “A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time” — reads like a novel even when it describes Israel’s economy.
But to give a fuller picture of Israel, Sachar’s tome needs a supplement, a book that looks beneath the big events and social forces to the lives of individual Israelis.
I think such a book has appeared, and the Jewish book world seems to be — to judge from what I see on the Internet — abuzz over it: Yossi Klein Halevi’s “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation” (Harper, 608 pages, $35).
So I ordered a review copy, and recently finished reading it. The accolades the book has received are more than justified.
“Like Dreamers” presents a fascinating gallery of colorful people navigating Israel’s history from the Six Day War of 1967 — and even a bit before that — through the near present.
What links the leading characters is their all having served in paratrooper Brigade 55 and participated in the liberation of east Jerusalem during the Six Day War.
But after that one moment of unity, forged in national crisis and violence, they each travel in different and often opposing religious, political and emotional directions.
At one end of the ideological spectrum is Udi Adiv, a would-be Marxist revolutionary who came to oppose Zionism and actually travelled to Damascus to work against Israel. At the other is Hanan Porat, who helped found Gush Emunim, the organization of militant West Bank settlers.
Ranging between them are:
• Avital Geva, a dedicated kibbutznik and creative conceptual artist active in Peace Now.
• Meir Ariel, a poet-songwriter disenchanted by romantic nationalism and lurking on the fringe of Israel’s music scene, but regarded by his cult following as Israel’s Bob Dylan.
• Arik Achmon, a hard-nosed, self-confident-to-arrogance intelligence officer, organizer and ultimately businessman striving to push Israel from socialism to capitalism.
• Yisrael Harel, a journalist and activist who founded the West Bank settlers’ organization the YESHA Council.
• Perhaps the most likeable of the lot and the book’s moral center is Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun. He believes in settling the captured territories, but his vision of Jewish unity and destiny enables him to empathize with secular Israelis who oppose this stand and to denounce courageously the people on his own side who justified the 1995 murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
These men — plus their wives and lovers, friends and enemies, teachers and students, military commanders and political leaders — experience, react to and sometimes instigate Israel’s large and small events. They also struggle with their colleagues, enemies and even their own ideals and souls.
The one serious limitation here — as Halevi acknowledges in his introduction — is that all seven of the lead figures are of Eastern European Jewish descent.
“That is because,” Halevi wrote, “the great ideological struggles that defined Israel in its formative years were fought primarily among the state’s founders and their children, most of whom were Ashkenazim.”
That may be true, but the Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jews’ experience of being outside those “great ideological struggles” also defined Israel in those years; and that community’s accumulated resentments figured significantly in the 1977 election victory of Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
It would have been nice if Halevi had found a representative from that community — and were there not some in Brigade 55? — and portrayed him with the same superb powers of empathy he displayed with the seven he did choose.
“Often these seven men argued vehemently within me,” Halevi wrote. “At times I have agreed with each of them — and passionately disagreed with each of them. But even then … I remained moved by their courage, their faith in human initiative and contempt for self-pity, their dauntless quest for solutions to unbearable dilemmas that would intimidate others into paralysis.”
As a reader I felt the same. I hope that some enterprising television producer will make this book into a mini-series. Its stories contain enough moving drama for seven films, and it presents a warm but not sentimentalized portrait of Israel.
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