Old soldiers, new wars

“OLD SOLDIERS never die,” goes the adage, “they just fade away.” But Rehavam Ze'evi – the controversial general-turned-politician assassinated in Jerusalem 15 years ago – won't even fade away. Having decided to name after the slain minister a memorial site at one of the IDF's most revered battlegrounds, the government has been ambushed by nonagenarian war veterans waging the last battle of Israel's first war, to the sound of a fading elite's last hurrah. The showdown is about one location and two legacies. The location is the Sha'ar Hagai mountain pass halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which witnessed some of the fiercest and most crucial fighting of the War of Independence. The legacies are that of the fabled Palmach (Hebrew acronym for “strike forces”), whose units fought here, and that of one Palmach officer – Ze'evi – who did not. The Palmach remains, to this day, a source of consensual admiration. Ze'evi, a repository of political controversy and moral blemish, is the antithesis of consensus. The mountain pass, notching the Judean Mountains where they meet the coastal plain, is inescapable for those seeking the shortest path to Jerusalem from the sea. To get a feel of what the fighting in this strategic location was about during the War of Independence, one had best arrive here on foot after midnight, climb up one of the surrounding slopes, listen to the crickets, and admire the surrounding darkness, solitude, and starstrewn skies. Then, surveying the highway's bustle underneath, one will understand how easily vehicles carrying supplies to Jerusalem were sniped, shelled and torched from these slopes while Jewish Jerusalem was under siege. Most of the Harel Brigade's 418 fatalities during the War of Independence fell in skirmishes along the ridge that sprawls from the mountain pass to what now is the Jerusalem suburb of Mevaseret Zion. The graves of 138 of them, often younger than 20, can be visited in Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, about a 10-minute ride uphill from Sha'ar Hagai, the mountain pass's Hebrew name, meaning “the valley's gate.” Few of the IDF's many battles have been as costly, protracted, stubborn, symbolic and emotionally charged as the one that raged here for nearly a year following the UN's partition vote in the fall of 1947, and ended with Jerusalem's reconnection to the sea and inclusion in the Jewish state. Sitting on a local stone after one of those battles, local fighter and national poet Haim Guri wrote lines that generations of Israeli children have since been singing at annual Memorial Day ceremonies. “Remember our names forever,” the future Israel Prize laureate commanded the mountain pass. “Convoys charged en route to the city,” he recalled, where “our dead line the path” while “the metal skeleton is as silent as my friend,” where “nights passed in daggers and fire,” and where “glory and sorrow” now shared space with “a burnt chariot and an unknown soldier's name.” Notebook in hand, the 25-year-old Guri strolled along Sha'ar Hagai's fresh bodies and jotted on: “I remember them one by one / here we fought together on rock and cliff / here we were together – all one family.” Now 93, Guri still remembers his comradesin- arms clearly enough to recall that Ze'evi was not among them. “He didn't fight here,” said the doyen of Israel's literati, after joining fellow veterans who now emerged at the site where they once dodged bullets, this time to protest the commemoration plan. “This has a disgusting political smell,” he said. Having witnessed Israel's every drama since the day of its birth and in many cases also played central roles in them – the politically savvy veterans avoid Ze'evi's controversial record, focusing instead on the technicality of his lack of any role in their particular battle. Even so, that record hovers above the row, and is indeed problematic. No one disputes the tall, bespectacled, and intellectually curious Ze'evi's credentials as a Palmach warrior, who in fact called his son Palmach, a name no one else is known to have ever donned. Born and raised in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood opposite Jerusalem's Old City walls, Ze'evi joined, as a teenager, the clandestine units that later spearheaded the IDF's victory in the War of Independence, and inspired its future crack units' esprit de corps. The 22-year-old Ze'evi fought on the northern, central and southern fronts, rising to battalion commander soon after the war. Though in that role he lost 40 soldiers in a border skirmish with Syrian troops in 1951, Ze'evi rose up the ranks quickly, serving as deputy commander of the Southern Command during the 1956 Sinai Campaign, and joining the General Staff in 1967. The image problems came later, proceeding from military conduct to criminal associations and from political extremism to alleged sexual assault. IRONICALLY NICKNAMED Gandhi after the founder of modern India – since showing up one day in his unit's dining room wearing only a towel – Ze'evi first courted controversy for his machismo while serving as commander of the Central Command during the early 1970s. With Palestinian terrorists crossing the Jordan routinely until King Hussein's assault on them in September 1970, Ze'evi would invite dignitaries and celebrities to spectate with him from a comfortable distance while his troops pursued infiltrators between the Judean Desert's cliffs and caves. When returning with them to his headquarters in Jerusalem, he would lead them to a lioness he kept in a cage near his office. While many challenged this conduct as tasteless and arrogant, there was nothing illegal about it. Criminal suspicions surfaced later that decade, after his discharge from the military, with media revelations that Ze'evi was associating with the heads of a Tel Aviv crime gang. Suggestions that Ze'evi's contacts with criminals were more than social were made at the time by a young and bipartisan legislative duo, Yossi Sarid from Labor, and Ehud Olmert from Likud. Criminal charges were never pressed, and the only crime informally alleged was assisting in creating the alibi of other felons for a double murder. However, last spring a Channel 2 TV exposé charged Ze'evi with raping a woman subordinate while he was a general, and of planting a bomb at the doorstep of a journalist at the request of a gang leader she attacked in her column. The alleged rape victim spoke but remained unidentified. However, veteran actress Rivka Michaeli, now 78, said on camera that, when she was young, Ze'evi physically harassed her. No less tellingly, former lawmaker Yael Dayan recalled having seen, during a campfire with other generals, including her famous father Moshe Dayan, how Ze'evi slaughtered a goat by clubbing it on the head with a spade. “My father tried to cover my face so the view wouldn't shock me,” she said. Ze'evi's family protested the exposé and tried to prevent its broadcast through a restraining order, arguing that the dead Ze'evi is being convicted while unable to reply. It was a nonstarter. The court rejected the appeal, and lawmakers led by Labor's Sheli Yachimovitch launched a parliamentary campaign to cancel the budgeting of the assassinated minister's commemoration, reportedly a cumulative 13 million shekels over the years, and 2.3 million shekels in fiscal 2016 alone. In what is unfolding as a struggle over the architecture of Israeli memory, Meretz legislators last month walked out of the plenary's annual session in Ze'evi's memory, and others from the Yesh Atid and Zionist Camp factions boycotted the session, while Benjamin Netanyahu urged all “to exercise extreme caution when passing his [Ze'evi's] verdict.” Despite the prime minister's admonition, Ze'evi's image as a felonious thug has registered, and thus returned to the limelight an already eventful career's turbulent political phase. Ze'evi, whose career would end with three bullets fired to his head, entered the political arena the way he left it ‒ with a bang. Mixing stratagem and scandal he called in 1987 for the “voluntary transfer” – as he put it – of Israeli Arabs to other countries. The stratagem was to penetrate the political landscape through the unmanned secular flank of the far Right. The scandal was to land in that political extremity, this close to the disgraced Rabbi Meir Kahana, a veteran of the Palmach. The Palmach was a pillar of Israel's founding elite. Besides producing much of the young IDF's brass, including six future chiefs of staff, the Palmach's 6,000 troops – 1,168 of whom were killed in action – took pride in a pioneering ethos that made them the newborn state's moral avant-garde. Combining military training with farming, the Palmach's commanders preached a battlefield morality that they called “purity of arms,” while its troops included future cultural icons such as poets Yehuda Amichai, Ayin Hillel and Haim Hefer and authors Moshe Shamir, Samekh Yizhar and Amnon Shamosh. Ze'evi was actually part of this legacy. An avid book collector and history buff, he headed Tel Aviv's Museum of the Land of Israel and wrote several books, including a chronicle of a Scottish adventurer's 19th-century voyage down the Jordan and a history of the 1929 massacre of Hebron's Jews. However, in veering to the far right, Ze'evi put off his former comrades, who mostly remained in the Labor fold where they were reared. Such, for instance, were Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yeshayahu Gavish, who fought at Sha'ar Hagai, then led the IDF's conquest of the Sinai in 1967, and now heads the campaign against naming the memorial site after Ze'evi. “We have nothing against him,” he told reporters, “Ze'evi was a member of the Palmach, but he had nothing to do with Sha'ar Hagai.” ZVI ZAMIR, a battalion commander in Sha'ar Hagai back in '48, concurs. “We were friends with Gandhi but, had he been alive, this matter would not have arisen at all… We [Zamir's battalion] lost some 40 boys at Sha'ar Hagai, and we are suddenly being forgotten.” “Forgotten,” in this case, insinuates more than the treatment of one site and one name. Having fought here under 26-year-old Yitzhak Rabin's command, the veterans are craving a national salute for trailblazers who ended up on the wrong side of today's political divide. Zamir, Gavish, Guri and the rest of the Palmach's veterans were indeed friends with Ze'evi, so much so that back in 1991, when a newspaper investigation doubted the newly appointed minister Ze'evi's military record, a battery of Palmach veterans led by Yitzhak Rabin published an ad in which they defended his military record, even while reiterating their political disagreements. Ze'evi's military record included a little-known role as builder of Singapore's army, a task he was assigned in 1967 and fulfilled with great success. Then again, once out of uniform, and unlike many of his colleagues, Ze'evi never received from Labor's establishment a major public assignment. Zamir, for instance, headed the Mossad under Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir. Gavish headed Koor in the 1980s, Israel's largest employer at the time, when it was still controlled by Labor through the Histadrut labor federation. Palmach's commander Yigal Alon became labor minister in 1961, Rabin became ambassador to Washington in 1968, Haim Bar-Lev became trade minister in 1972, David Elazar headed the ZIM shipping lines from 1974, and the list goes on. Ze'evi, by contrast, was briefly an adviser to Rabin, but otherwise failed to land a high-profile civilian job. Instead, he headed a museum, and even that relatively marginal position was handed to him by then-Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo Lahat, a fellow general, yet not a Palmach veteran, and also not a Labor chieftain, but a member of Likud. Now the political fortunes have turned. Ze'evi is in, the Palmach veterans are out. Ze'evi is so in that the list of landmarks named after him seems endless, ranging from boardwalks in Eilat and Ashdod and parks in Lod, Rehovot and Yokne'am, to a military camp in Ramle, a boulevard in Rishon Lezion, and a bridge above the Ayalon expressway outside posh Ramat Hasharon. Some of this commemorative inflation reflects Ze'evi's unique death, which caught him in the last hours of his tenure as tourism minister, a position from which he had resigned the previous day in protest of a tactical IDF retreat from parts of Hebron. Ze'evi's assassination, by three Popular Front gunmen outside his room in what then was the Jerusalem Hyatt, makes him Israel's most senior terrorism victim. While that explains why Ze'evi, despite his baggage, is so extensively memorialized, it might actually help the angry Palmach veterans who now find him obstructing their path to their conquests' last peak. Ze'evi's place in the public memory is already ensured. Theirs is not. And with their cause so consensual and their gravitas so glaring, the adversarial establishment they face is likely to heed what poet Guri begged of this mountain pass, after surviving its inferno in 1948: “Remember our names forever.”

Old soldiers, new wars

A dispute over the naming of a 1948 memorial site after Rehavam Ze'evi mixes nostalgia, scandal and bad blood.

Navigating the post-post-October 7 era

Noahides gather in Jerusalem for first global congress

Old soldiers, new wars

A dispute over the naming of a 1948 memorial site after Rehavam Ze'evi mixes nostalgia, scandal and bad blood.

See more on