Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation 

In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present.

SYNOPSIS

For years, Yos­si Klein Hale­vi has distin­guished him­self as one of the most elo­quent and insight­ful jour­nal­ists writ­ing from Israel; his new book, Like Dream­ers, is, in many respects, the bril­liant cul­mi­na­tion of his life’s work thus far.

On the sur­face, Like Dream­ers tells the sto­ry of sev­en para­troop­ers who fought for the lib­er­a­tion of Jerusalem in 1967, but who then took oppos­ing paths, some of them becom­ing lead­ers of the peace camp argu­ing for return­ing the lands cap­tured in the Six Day War, while oth­ers assumed lead­er­ship roles in Israel’s then nascent set­tler move­ment that advo­cat­ed keep­ing the ter­ri­to­ry for­ev­er. But with artis­tic sub­tle­ty, Like Dream­ers moves through an account of those sev­en lives to an account of the life of Israel — its dreams and dis­ap­point­ments, its accom­plish­ment and fail­ures, and of the painful and dra­mat­ic choic­es it still must make.

Like Dream­ers charts the ori­gins, suc­cess­es, and mis­steps of both the set­tlers and their neme­ses in the peace camp. But the real hall­mark of Klein Halevi’s por­trait is its abil­i­ty to illus­trate the deeply Jew­ish and Zion­ist as­pirations of both. He loves and admires both, and gets us, his read­ers, to do the same.

That is not to say that Klein Hale­vi embraces all the char­ac­ters in the book. The descrip­tion of the Baruch Gold­stein attack ends with ​“the mur­der­er, beat­en to death, lay[ing] in his own blood.” And though Klein Hale­vi har­bors a deep love for the Zion­ist spir­it of the settle­ment move­ment, he remarks, through one of his char­ac­ters, that — at least in Hebron — ​“A for­eign spir­it, anti­thet­i­cal to Zion­ism, was stirring.”

His clear-head­ed dis­trust of Pales­tin­ian lead­ership is, like­wise, refresh­ing­ly hon­est. ​“In a speech in a Johan­nes­burg mosque intend­ed to be off-lim­its to the press,” Klein Hale­vi tells us, ​“Arafat argued that his peace over­tures were mere­ly tac­ti­cal. He recalled that the prophet Muham­mad declared a cease-fire with an Ara­bi­an Jew­ish tribe, and then when he be­came strong enough, broke the cease-fire and destroyed the tribe.”

In show­ing us the best (and some of the worst) of each of these move­ments, leav­ing us in admi­ra­tion of their most noble aspi­ra­tions, Like Dream­ers is thus a pro­found cor­rec­tive to a long­stand­ing and self-destruc­tive Israeli ten­den­cy. ​“What went wrong?” a young man asks Yoel bin Nun, one of the archi­tects of the set­tler move­ment towards the end of the book. Replies the rab­bi, ​“We didn’t lis­ten to the moral argu­ments of the left.”

Like Dream­ers, which mod­els that lis­ten­ing and that self-cri­tique, is thus a balm for the Zion­ist soul, a stir­ring mod­el of how those still com­mit­ted to Israel’s future might forge a new path forward.

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WHY WE LOVE THIS BOOK

Yossi Klein Halevi takes us on a tour of Israel's history from 1967 through the eyes of a cadre of young soldiers in the 55th Paratrooper Brigade who reunited Jerusalem and stood at the Temple Mount on the third day of the Six Day War... "like dreamers". With amazing skill, HaLevi takes us into the dreams and visions of these men from disparate backgrounds who would go on to be artists and entrepreneurs, rabbis, journalists and politicians, leaders of both Peace Now and the Yesha Council, and even one convicted terrorist... but for a moment stood together, bled together, and dreamed together. For me, this book is about complexity, beauty, heartbreak, love, community, and pain: it is about a relationship to a dream that is Israel; I hope you will read and rediscover the beauty of the Land, the State and the People of Israel.

Rabbi Yonatan M. Warren, BCC
Lieutenant Commander
U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yossi Klein Halevi is an author, thinker and commentator on Jewish and Israeli affairs. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, will be published in May 2018 by Harper Collins. His last book, Like Dreamers, took the top prize in the 2013 National Jewish Book Awards.

A frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of leading newspapers and magazines, he is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative.

His first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, was published in 1995. In 2001, he published, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. 

Born in New York, Halevi moved to Israel in 1982 and lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sarah, a landscape designer. They have three children.