The lives of many members of the generation that didn't exist when the state of Israel came into existence are split in two: the part before the 1967 Six-Day War, and the part that came after. For 19 years, a sense that something had been missed in the historic birth of the nation hung over us in various ways, but then in one fell swoop, a second "independence day" arrived in a six-day rebirth. Jerusalem was liberated, and we felt that the broken had been made whole. Our joy overflowed as the walls came down.
The national consciousness was reshaped in these moments. As the years went by, reality – as it sometimes does – tapped us on the shoulder, and we clung to the dream – whatever each person's dream might be. For me, 1967 pushed me toward documentation, research, and writing, mostly about Jerusalem, which is also a dream – the sleeping beauty whom thorny vines tried to choke and silence for nearly 20 years, and was now freed from her bonds.
The results of the Six-Day War shaped, to a large extent, the lives of four of my personal heroes. Together, they make up a sort of mosaic that reflects the face of the generation that grew out of the pivotal war.
Israel Harel, 79, has felt for years that our society and leadership failed to fully realize the almost miraculous victory of the Six-Day War. He feels that weak-spiritedness caused us to lose our grip on the golden treasure the war brought us; that the Israeli mindset was unable to fully implement the historic reality.
Almost all of Harel's activity since then has stemmed from an urgent sense that something is missing and that there is a vacuum that must quickly be filled with facts and a new kind of awareness. Harel founded the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip (Yesha). He also laid the foundations of a different, more Jewish and nationalist media (the periodical "Nekuda") in an attempt to offer an alternative to the media monopoly that was ruled almost exclusively by the camp that saw the results of the Six-Day War as a disaster rather than a great victory.
Rabbi Benny Lau, 57, head of the initiative 929 – Tanakh B'yachad (Bible Together) and a great Torah scholar, was six years old when the war broke out. Lau, like Harel, says he "loves the stretches of the country that were released in the Six-Day War with all my heart," but unlike Harel, "is willing to give them up for the sake of peace."
However, Lau mostly focuses on peace at home, on dialogue and attempts to bridge the enormous schism that the war caused within the Israeli public. Lau has the impression that "the alienation between parts of Israeli society has reached levels that comprise a national danger to the state."
Elan Ezrachi, 63, another of my heroes, is a fiery debater whom I deeply respect. Unlike many who think like he does, Ezrachi did not leave Jerusalem. He is here to stay and fight for the minority he frequently represents. The cultural and religious pluralism he wants to inculcate into the city is not always popular, but it is of unparalleled importance for Jerusalem to remain what it is: a wonderful collection of contradictions, communities, factions, and groups of different colors. We both see this cocktail as the true Jerusalem.
Archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, the granddaughter of biblical archaeologist Professor Binyamin Mazar, uncovers the secrets of Jerusalem and spearheaded the fight by the Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the Muslim Waqf sawed apart Temple Mount antiquities and spread Jewish relics in garbage dumps like "chaff that the wind drives away" (Psalms 1:4); when the Israel Antiquities Authority bowed to the political echelon and was willing to accept that enormous indignity, Mazar and her colleagues stood up and illustrated the ancient Mishnaic saying: "In a place where there are no people, try to be a person." The results speak for themselves: Mazar and her colleagues forced the government to confront the Waqf over the most sensitive place in the world to save what remained of the Temple Mount antiquities. For years, Mazar and her colleagues' professional discoveries on the slopes of the Temple Mount managed to confound archaeologists and biblical scholars who argued that the stories in the Bible were a later rewrite of history and that the events related therein were only tenuously linked to reality.
A 'bomb' of awareness
After the Six-Day War, the Haaretz newspaper, which today is the most outspoken opponent of the settlement enterprise, ran an editorial whose title borrowed from Isaiah: "Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion."
"The splendor of the past is not far off. From now on, it will be part of the new state and its light will shine its rays on the enterprise of building a Jewish society, which is a link in a long chain of the people's history in their land," Haaretz wrote.
Famed archaeologist and former acting prime minister Yigal Allon announced that "the state of Israel has been reborn." A year after the war, on Israel's 20th Independence Day, Rachel Yannai Ben-Zvi (widow of the country's second president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi) lit one of the torches at the annual ceremony on Mount Herzl and declared, "For the glory of the greater Land of Israel."
More than 50 years down the road, question marks have replaced many of these exclamation points. Although some 400,000 Jews live in Judea and Samaria, the cradle of our people, and another 220,000 live in greater Jerusalem (making up about 40% of the population of east Jerusalem), the country is split. The dispute over the future of these areas has become ingrained and constant. It involves feelings and principles and ideology. It is a question that has security and intellectual aspects, and sometimes it's even tribal. Often, this dispute sidelines other important societal issues. The faces of that generation are the face of a great victory, just as they are the face of the great disagreement that came after it.
Harel, born to a family of Holocaust survivors from Romania, arrived on the deck of an illegal immigrant ship two years before the state was founded. He was 30 when, as an IDF paratrooper, he reached the gates of the Temple Mount on the third day of the war. He describes what he felt then as a "bomb of awareness."
"I don't believe in miracles, but I remember that on my way up to the Temple Mount, my feet didn't touch the ground. It was almost like floating. To our discredit, the only person who talked about the Temple Mount in those moments was a 37-year-old secular guy, who'd been born in Jerusalem but grew up in Rehovot [in central Israel] – [then-head of the 55th Paratroops Brigade and later Chief of Staff] Motta Gur. In those moments, even religious Zionism didn't realize what a great day it was. To a large extent, it [the religious Zionist movement] woke up only after the [1973] Yom Kippur War."
Harel was part of the forces assigned to secure the Temple Mount after it was liberated.
"I saw with my own eyes how everyone who visited the Mount – including [religious Zionist leader] Rabbi Shlomo Goren – looked first for the Western Wall. Skipping the Temple Mount was symptomatic of the big miss and the lack of spirit that, ever since then, have been part of the governments' – even right-wing, national ones – approach. All the strategic and psychological understanding has been reduced to viewing these parts of our homeland as a bargaining chip," Harel says.
"The question that was asked was 'how can this card be played?' The answer that became permanent was that it would be most noble to 'play it' in exchange for peace. This, unfortunately, is a formula that is still valid for too many people. Often, demographics was just an excuse," Harel says.
He also says that the intrasocietal debate "silenced many good people who realized that this was a one-time historic opportunity, and in hindsight weakened and backed off from seeing it through."
From Oxford to Jerusalem
Harel was part of the greater Israel movement from its inception. He edited the movement's newsletter Zot Ha'aretz ("This is the Land").
He also attended the first Passover seder held at the Park Hotel in Hebron, which marked renewed Jewish presence in the City of the Patriarch for the first time after its Jewish inhabitants were driven out in the riots of 1929, but overall leaned more toward giving a voice to a vision and setting goals. His pen was his sword. He wrote for the Ma'ariv newspaper, but when the paper's editors at the time, Shalom Rosenfeld and Tommy Lapid, learned that Harel was planning to move to the Ofra settlement, they called him in for a talk and expressed reservations about his living in an "illegal settlement." Harel, who was cut almost to the quick by their attitude, resigned and decamped to Ma'ariv's rival paper Yedioth Ahronoth, which he later left, as well.
The first burden Harel took up was to establish the Yesha Council, a vision laid out for him by settler activists Uri Elitzur and Elyakim Haetzani. It was a Sisyphean task, often an exhausting one. Harel went from settlement to settlement, adding committees and secretaries to the new entity, which gradually became the main representative body of the settlement enterprise. He left his mark on the quality publication Nekuda, which attempted to give a voice to the heterogeneous settlers and their world and break down the media portrayal of settlers as fanatics.
Nekuda was published for 31 years and fostered many figures in Israel's Jewish, nationalist media sphere.
But Harel was looking to legitimize the settlement enterprise not only in the media but also through national consensus and politics. At the start of the 1990s he responded to a call by Yossi Alpher, then-head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and met with a group of intellectuals from the Right and the settlement movement, as well as a group of Palestinians that was led by Islamic scholar Professor Yazid Said. The meetings were originally held in a country house near Oxford, England, and later on in Jerusalem. Their purpose was to examine the feasibility of dialogue between the settlers and the Palestinians.
When the secret meetings were eventually leaked following the murder of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Harel was condemned as weakening and diverging from the path he purportedly represented. Some even wanted to oust him from the leadership of the Yesha Council, but he won a vote of confidence by a large margin. Today, he has revealed that a "non-paper" containing unofficial understandings between the settlers and the Palestinians had been worded in Oxford in which "the Palestinian partners in the dialogue [gave their] de facto recognition of the settlement enterprise, and even agreed that they [the settlers] would remain Israeli citizens living in a sovereign Palestinian state when it was established."
But the internal strife in Israel distressed Harel no less. He felt that the nation was sectoralized and torn. Rabin's murder deepened his realization that peace at home was no less important that peace with the enemy. Thus the "Forum for National Responsibility," comprising about 60 secular and religious Jewish figures – writers, career military, politicians, and public figures from the Right and the Left – was born.
They worked under the auspices of the Yitzhak Rabin Center and with the blessing of the former prime minister's widow, Leah Rabin, with whom Harel met a number of times. Together, the forum members formulated the "Kinneret Convention," which was intended to normalize relations between the various factions of the Jewish society in Israel. Former ministers Effi Eitam and Yuli Tamir represented the right and left ends of the political spectrum, respectively. The result was somewhat reminiscent of Israel's Declaration of Independence. It addressed basic issues such as the Jewish character of the state, democracy, equality, and the rights of minorities.
Even today, the Kinneret Convention is considered one of the more serious extra-parliamentary attempts to outline what is needed for peace on the home front, but somewhat failed to stand up to the test of reality.
"Unwillingness to listen"
A few years after the Rabin murder, the writer S. Yizhar felt that there were two Jewish peoples living in Israel, who spoke different languages and responded differently to the same events. Yizhar worried that the two peoples had different interpretations of the purpose of the state, their own Jewishness, and their daily lives.
"What one saw as an achievement, another saw as a loss, and what one saw as an honor, the other saw as dishonor, and what excited one depressed the other," he wrote.
Without going into specifics, Yizhar was writing about the dispute that has rocked Israeli society since the Six-Day War.
Lau, the founder of 929 – Bible Together, and the person who founded the Beit Midrash for Social Justice at Beit Morasha in Jerusalem, is more pained by this schism than anything else.
"Almost all of myself is devoted to dialogue between Jews," says Lau, who as a 14-year-old took part in mass visits to Sebastia [near Nablus] in Samaria in an attempt to renew the Jewish presence there.
"I remember myself at Sebastia during Hanukkah of 1976, together with my brother, as the helicopter of [then] Defense Minister Shimon Peres landed, and he being met with a volley of rotten tomatoes.
"At the door of the helicopter, next to Peres, there was my father, Naftali Lau-Lavie, and in a second he saw us and came up to us, looking severe. It was the first time I realized that not everything was understood," he says.
The young Benny Lau lived with the feeling that the events that excited us in the Six-Day War were "the right move by history, which talks of redemption, of returning home," but 50 years after the war, Lau talks about the legacy of his rabbinical mentor, Rabbi Yehuda Amital of the Har Etzion Yeshiva, "who loved these parts of this land with all his heart, and who was willing to give them up for peace. That's where I am, too," he says.
"But I absolutely can't experience negotiations on [giving up] parts of the Land of Israel without feeling pain that borders on betrayal," he says.
Q: Can Israeli society reach an agreement on this issue?
"We have a problem. When I sit with Jews whom I deeply appreciate, like [author] Amos Oz and [psycholinguist] Tsvia Walden, or [author] David Grossman, and ask myself whether they feel the deep connection to the country that I do? Whether giving up [parts of it] pains them and cuts into their flesh? My answer is that they and the kibbutz movement had a different, less intimate experience of the Six-Day War… and that these parts of the country give me.
"On the other hand, it's clear to me that the society I encounter in Tel Aviv today is a very depressed one. The secular Left is living under a heavy cloud. It feels like the Zionist dream, as it perceives it, is moving unimaginably far away from the place where it dreamed up the state. The way these people see it, we have turned from a fighting people to an occupier, to a violent public that is taking control of their lives in terms of culture, power, lack of tolerance for humanist values.
"I was standing in Amos Oz's home on the 12th floor in Ramat Aviv. He showed me from the window the houses of the neighborhood and said, 'You should know that almost every house here has at least one son or daughter who has chosen to live outside Israel, and that's pain that isn't discussed. It's very hard to see a dream moving away. This is the result of a lot of different processes and causes, but among others, it's the result of the character that a lot of people in our society have adopted. I hear rabbis talking with a kind of racism and a kind of violence toward liberal groups, sometimes in the name of religious hegemony. I see a leadership that is sometimes insolent and bullying. The sense is that the leadership today, of which religious Zionism is a part, doesn't know how to hold dialogue. Just because you're in power doesn't give you the right to disdain the people who oppose you, ignore the other side's pain and concerns."
Q: True, but perhaps we should mention that the leftist elite behaved exactly this way – it scorned, strong-armed, and offended the Right and the settler public. Gush Katif [the disengagement from the Gaza Strip] wasn't so long ago.
"Indeed, but does that give you the right to hold others in contempt when you're in power? The opposite. The lack of willingness to listen to the other side runs in our veins."
Q: What do you suggest?
"First of all, there needs to be a desire to live together. There is too little of that nowadays. The fears are enormous. The verbal violence is terrible. The fear of the other side feeds violent slander that's like a poisoned arrow. That's true of the Right and the Left. There is a system of silencing [people] that stems from fear. We aren't able to sit with each other and listen. The fear often leads to hatred. When you don't talk – you don't get to know each other, and the other turns into a demon and you hate what you think they represent. You have no idea who they are, and what hurts them. Life here is often conducted in totally separate spheres.
Q: Can anything be done to remedy that?
"There are a lot of remedies. I lobby via the 929 initiative to [have people] meet and study Torah together, with the understanding that this treasure, the Torah, is a treasure of all parts of society. No one owns it. Some think that this is secularization, and some think this is religification, and I say to both [camps]: I don't know any other way. I want to meet somewhere that elevates the meeting. Israeli society has come together in two places – around the Holocaust and around fate. What I am proposing through the Torah is to empower the meeting between fate and purpose. I believe that this kind of meeting will drop the level of threat and fear between us. I don't know any other way besides dialogue, besides meeting and meeting and meeting again.
"100% from Granddad"
The Bible is also at the forefront of Mazar's work over the past few decades, but somewhat differently.
Many of Mazar's finds on the slope of the Temple Mount over the years confirm biblical stories. She has conducted digs in the most important areas to the Jewish people, which until 1967 were inaccessible to Israelis. Today, she thinks she has managed to find the remnants of King David's palace. Her dream is to one day find the graves of the royal family. Mazar believes they are buried southeast of Area G in the City of David.
In the meantime, Mazar is digging at Ophel, the biblical name for the area on the southern slope of the Temple Mount, where she has uncovered a system of defenses dating back to the First Temple era and which she thinks were constructed by King Solomon. If she were forced to pick the find of her life and professional career, she would choose the tiny stamped clay seal she found at Ophel about three years ago.
"The seal of Hezekiah," king of Judea, she says.
"It was a huge find. The closest to what my teacher and mentor, Professor Nahman Avigad, wished himself a year before his death: to see the seal of one of the kings of Judea," she says.
In 2008, Mazar found another seal that bore the name Gedaliah Ben Pashchur, one of the Prophet Jeremiah's political enemies who called for Jeremiah's death in response to his prophecies about the Babylonians sacking Jerusalem. At an excavation site in the City of David, where Mazar had been digging three years earlier – which she identifies as David's palace – she found yet another seal, this one inscribed with the name Yehuchal Ben Shelamayahu, a minister in the kingdom of Judea who worked in Jerusalem around the time of the destruction of the First Temple in 587 BCE. He served Zedekiah, the last king of Judea.
Mazar was bitten by the archaeology bug when she was a girl, when she took part in a dig director by her grandfather, Professor Binyamin Mazar. This was shortly after the Six-Day War. Grandfather Mazar was excavating in the same places his granddaughter works today.
"I get it 100% from Granddad," Mazar confirms.
Mazar completed her doctoral dissertation on the Phoenicians, Canaanite peoples of Semitic descent who lived on the coast of what is now northern Israel. At Achziv, one of the Phoenician settlements, she discovered the site of the crematorium where they would burn their dead before burying their ashes in large clay containers. This is one of the only places in the region where one of the famous Phoenician tophets has been found (another is located in Tyre, Lebanon).
Of archaeologists who have difficulty seeing Bible stories as historical and factual, Mazar has this to say: "Today, we are in a completely different place. I never personally addressed those claims. Only orderly scientific discovery meets the criteria for 'it is,' and the 'it is' today is very rich and well-based. I'm not trying to convince anybody, but when I come across an ancient fragment of pottery, like on the Temple Mount, my colleagues and I go into high gear. We must not and cannot stay silent about it. This is also the reason why I accepted the Shalem Center's generous offer and we documented all the Temple Mount walls, stone by stone, above and below ground, out of fear that one day these remnants could crumble."
Mazar, a professional, is no archaeological missionary, but she does not ignore the fact that archaeology often strengthens our national and historic narrative here.
"We are living in our country, and Jerusalem is our capital. We can't live without heritage and consciousness, after all. What are we, air?"
Nevertheless, she did not have a religious upbringing: "I'm secular in every sense, but don't be angry. I want everyone to live with whatever faith or lack of faith they see fit, without coercing anything on anyone."
The city as a test laboratory
Elan Ezrachi, whom I debate frequently and whom I respect very much, is a third-generation Jerusalemite who devotes much of his time to ties between Israel and world Jewry and is pained by the distance and tears in these relations in recent years. He is a true lover of the city but is also worried about it; he is active in Jerusalem's civil society and understands that Jerusalem has a wealth of human and social resources, in both individuals and groups, as well as orderly communities who have boundless love for the city, even if they carry personal or collective pain over it.
Ezrachi thinks that civil society in Jerusalem has the power to create plausible models for coexistence between Jews and other Jews and between Jews and Arabs, despite the many complexities and complications of the city. In arguing over the city's political future, we seem to agree on many facts and even see eye to eye about the current reality, although we draw fundamentally different conclusions.
Ezrachi was a former member of Peace Now and is willing for east Jerusalem to be the capital of a Palestinian state as part of a peace agreement. I see that as a terrible security risk and a failure of values.
Ezrachi's father, Eitan, was the first child born in the city's Rehavia neighborhood, on the day the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was inaugurated on Mount Scopus. Ezrachi Jr. was raised in the divided city, which he calls "a unique combination of modest, good-willed Zionist bourgeoisie."
"My Jerusalem carried on with restrained elegance and no distress a 10-minute walk from the border, a city in which the division between its two parts was absolute. And we 'absolutely knew that the border was close and we weren't allowed near it,'" he adds, quoting the poet Yehuda Amichai.
Ezrachi remembers, immediately after the city was reunified, looking at the crowds of Arabs walking up Agron St. from the Old City on their way to the western half of Jerusalem. He was amazed at the residents' ability to accept the moment, despite the troubles of the past, but in his latest book "Sane in Her Dream," he describes this honeymoon as an unbalanced picture.
"There was an occupying and an occupied side," he writes.
That day gave Ezrachi the insight that helps him decode the Jerusalemite compass today: "Jews and Arabs can share the space … and even exist in a certain harmony, even when then geopolitical situation around them is problematic and the future is obscured," he says.
The political solution is clear to him – "A peace deal in which east Jerusalem is the capital of a Palestinian state" – but it's equally clear to him that "in the best case scenario, we're in a long-term freeze, and in the worst-case scenario, it simply won't happen."
Jerusalem, he tells me, "continues to be undefined: on one hand Israel operates the perception that it is a unified city, and on the other, we live in a municipal space that perpetuates the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, a space that doesn't create true unification, and this is where you and I connect.
"If we've already decided that this urban area is part of the state of Israel, let's start developing equality and respect for everyone in it, including making it possible for groups, communities, cultures, and nations to share the same space," he says.
Ezrachi knows that the city's togetherness is often interpreted by the Arabs as political togetherness. He suggests giving this idea of togetherness a less institutional, more civil character.
"Even today, you can see outcroppings of cooperation at the zoo, the science museum, in the health and business fields. Personally, I was involved in a project called "Jerusalem Teachers' Lounge," a year-long program that brought teachers from the east and the west of the city together for training sessions. There is the Jewish-Arab choir at the YMCA, and the Abu Tor Project. In a certain sense, Jerusalem has become a test lab, and it has the potential to become a pilot for what could happen in the Middle East over the next few years, and forge connections that as part of diplomatic solutions seem impossible."
Harel, Lau, Mazar, and Ezrachi are members of the generation of the Six-Day War and represent different faces of the great debate that hasn't yet been settled; a dispute in which the very existence of the other side and disagreeing with it strengthens one's own consciousness and identity – whether it be Israeli, Jewish, religious, or secular.
