When I first picked out this book, I anticipated that “the story of the Israeli paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem” would have a lot more to do with the actual battles of the Six Day War. But as I now know: anyone looking for that book should look elsewhere. Like Dreamers is about these paratroopers and that war, but only insofar as Halevi believes the war to have been the most pivotal moment in modern Israel’s history and the paratroopers a useful example of engaged, elite citizens shaping the national project.
Halevi instead focuses on the Six Day War as having introduced a previously unthinkable issue in the Israeli discourse: that of “should”. Israel fought a war and won—far surpassing the historic precedent of merely surviving—meaning that for the first time the nation thought not only of what it “could” have but what it “should” have. Like Dreamers is about the ongoing adjudication of this issue. In essense, it tackles the following question, lifted in this instance from the book’s inner monologue written for Yisrael Harel:
…what nation would turn its back on its ancestral heartland, won in a defensive war against attempted genocide?
My stance on this issue is pretty deduce-able. In our more settled times (compared to ’67), my mental model of the country has always been defined by the places I’ve actually been and where the vibrancy of the country’s life is concentrated—so settlements are less important, to the point that my pragmatism toward an eventual cessation of hostilities means I would give them up in a heartbeat. That puts me somewhere like “sympathetic to the above sentiment but it’s irrelevant.” I nevertheless enjoyed that Like Dreamers exposed me to a vast spectrum of dialogue that I had not yet encountered.
In this book there is a secular, weed-smoking, kibbutznik musician who builds an intense and personal relationship with God in a country largely restricted to religious binaries. There is a religious Zionist yeshiva-leading Rabbi who fiercely defends secular Israelis as Jewishly righteous and condemns violations of secular laws in religious terms. There is a man who fights for the kibbutzim, another for a free market, and a third for the public to draw a line of descent between the socialist communes and settler villages. Getting to know these characters means constant engagement with the brilliant and bewildering entanglement of Israeli society, all too recognizable to those who know it well:
His love for the land of Israel was inseperable from his famous love for women: “There are those more beautiful than her / but none as beautiful in the way she is.”
As Israel’s ultra-religious population skyrockets and the country’s long-standing conflicts with its neighbors seem ever more intractible, effective solutions are going to have to get a lot weirder. That makes a book like this all the more important. Like Dreamers resists simple categorization—it is not an endorsement nor condemnation of the settler cause. I mean, it even contends with one of my favorite wacky solutions of all time: “keeping settlements intact under Palestinian sovereignty.” If the solutions people came up with decades ago were viable they would have worked decades ago. Only the weird ideas are going to work from here on out. Just look how weird we’re already getting: sending laser defense systems to a desert kingdom to fend of nuclear-addled Iranian attacks, fighting terrorists hand-in-hand with the Lebanese, and witnessing the rebirth of a nation at the hands of al-Qaeda’s most Hoover-pilled soldier. Is it that unfathomable to see a future where Jewish religion and secularism converge? I am holding on to my hope for an incredible future.
Like all good, focused book reviews, I will end with a tangent. Like Dreamers formalized my conception of one of Israel’s most impactful military doctrines: never fight a war on the home front. In the United States this is not something one needs to think about, as America’s enemies are oceans away. But in Israel it’s a big deal—fighting on the (tiny and densely populated) home front means untold Israeli civilian casualties. This doctrine’s impact is obvious in the case of 1967, when a then-smaller Israel fought the Jordanians in the West Bank (annexing Jerusalem), the Syrians in the Golan Heights (now also annexed), and the Egyptians in Sinai (returned for peace). The doctrine is still very much relevant: just look at the maps of the current conflicts in Lebanon and Syria. Despite what the American zeitgest may imply, I do not believe that Israel is a radical expansionist power in the Middle East. Rather, it’s implementing the same doctrine as always: the West is just profoundly forgetful.
In any case, as you may have observed already, I quite liked this book. I found it rather engaging: it managed to skip the part of most Israel-oriented books where they start by trying to introduce you to the conflict and then end before they can talk about anything else. Consider giving Like Dreamers a read—and if you do, let me know your thoughts.