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CHAPTER 1

ARRIVAL

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

H. L. MENCKEN

When I first came to Israel in 1982, it was not as a soldier or spy, but as a tourist — a twenty-one-year-old Canadian fresh out of the army looking to ease himself back into civilian life. After three years of a strict military regimen in the Canadian armed forces, what I really wanted was to see the world through the eyes of a typical hedonistic backpacker — not through the crosshairs of a 7.62mm FN assault rifle, or out of the Plexiglas window of a military helicopter.

Leaving my home in Victoria, British Columbia, I flew to Europe and wandered the streets of London, Paris, and Rome, as well as those of a slew of picturesque small towns in the European countryside. I tried to pick up some of the local languages, while earnestly thrusting my own bad high school French, Italian, and German on the hapless locals. I didn't have to answer to anyone, let alone salute them. I got drunk with all kinds of people in all kinds of places, and had the opportunity to learn a little about European women, and their famously liberal sexual mores. In retrospect, those times were good preparation for some of the undercover work I would eventually be doing in Europe about eight years later.

By October, my plan was to winter somewhere warm, then go back to Canada and rejoin my friends, who were by now slogging away at university. Through the youth hostel grapevine, I'd heard that Israel might be a practical choice. Especially popular at the time were the country's kibbutzim — collectives where visitors could work the fields or factories in exchange for room and board. I didn't know much about them, but it sounded fun.

Tel Aviv in the morning: The scene resembled something like rush hour in any major American city — except the drivers were a lot less polite. Fat palm trees and lush green gardens surrounded low-slung apartment blocks — a strange combination of Santa Monica and the Italian Riviera. The language spoken sounded odd and entirely foreign. How amazed I would have been to learn that within a few years, I would become completely fluent in Hebrew.

From the sidewalk, I could see the sun reflecting off the Mediterranean. A group of wetsuit-clad boys not much younger than I carried their surfboards to the sea. You'd never have known that Israel was then at war, having invaded Lebanon in June to roust Palestinian terror groups from the southern part of the country. Soldiers of both sexes were everywhere, their body language and manners casual. Military service is compulsory for Israelis between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, and most men remain in the army's reserves until middle age, so people are used to carrying weapons and seeing others doing the same. The presence of armed men doesn't arouse the sense of anxiety it does in other parts of the world.

At the kibbutz placement agency, I was met by a friendly man who spoke English well. As we gazed at a map of Israel pinned to the wall behind his desk, he asked me where I wanted to go. I asked him to send me someplace warm that I could get to by bus. He scribbled the name of a kibbutz in the Bet Shean Valley on a piece of paper. Then he handed me a transit pass and gave me directions to the city's central bus station, where I caught a bus out of Tel Aviv.

Traveling roads once used by the Romans, Greeks, and a dozen other great empires, we passed through a succession of Jewish and Arab villages. Then we turned into a fertile valley bordered by the Gilboa Mountains to the south and a set of low acacia-studded hills to the north. I saw the duncolored mountains of Gilead off to the east, property of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. I was awestruck — not just by the physical beauty, but by the centuries of history in which I knew this land was steeped.

At the kibbutz, I was warmly greeted by twenty-somethings from New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Sweden, and South Africa. The place had something of a party vibe, complete with a pub that some 1960s-era volunteers had converted from an old poultry-processing plant. The beer was plentiful and absurdly cheap. Whatever loneliness I'd felt when I arrived the night before quickly dissipated.

In recent decades, Israel's kibbutz movement has fallen into decline — along with the socialist political ideology that gave rise to it. But during the country's early years, the kibbutzniks were Israel's heart and soul. Most were stoical, avowedly secular Jews whose parents and grandparents had survived the Holocaust or other intense hardships. They'd arrived with a dream to forge a new identity for themselves and shed the dark cloak of Diaspora Judaism.

Though they always comprised a small percentage of Israeli society, kibbutzniks formed the core of Israel's founding warrior class — once staffing as much as eighty percent of the country's top military jobs. To this day, whole special forces units are still composed of kibbutzniks. Getting up early, working the land, camping, and hiking were activities kibbutz children did practically from the cradle. They were tough and selfconfident, and they knew how to work as part of a team.

I stayed on the kibbutz for several months, working the cotton plantation while trying to learn Hebrew and exploring the country in my spare time. Like most tourists, I spent much of my time in Jerusalem. Canada is not a religious country, and this was the first time I'd been to a place where people took their communion with God so seriously.

Of course, I knew nothing of the prayers I heard from the pious bearded men bowing before the Old City's Western Wall, but I could certainly appreciate the awe-inspiring historical significance of the site. This was the one surviving piece of the Jews' ancient Roman-era temple. The very idea that modern-day Jews could reclaim it two millennia later boggled my mind.

I was barely an adult at the time, at the stage in life when many of us begin to look for meaning — something beyond the quest for girls and peer-group acceptance that dominates the teenage years. For some, this search leads to identity politics, or to nationalism, or to a reversion to an ancestral religion. Looking back, perhaps it was fate that I found myself in Israel at this impressionable time of life. Born into an Anglican family, I'd never thought much about matters of faith.

That began to change. As I traversed the country and drank in more of its history, I began to feel the stirrings of spiritual interest in Judaism. I felt something of a political awakening as well. Though I'd never followed foreign affairs closely when I was in Canada, I'd always felt a vague but oddly powerful sense of solidarity with Israel in its fight to survive amid hostile neighbors. Now that I was living in the country, learning more about its people and the threats they faced, this feeling grew.

We all have moments when we look back and think about the important crossroads in our lives. For me, the defining moment was in 1983, while riding a bus between Haifa and the pastoral fields and hills of the lower Galilee, near the sleepy town of Yokneam.

The spring sunshine was streaming through the old Egged bus windows, illuminating the crudely tattooed sequence of numbers on the upraised arm of an old man seated beside me. He looked old, wizened, yet alive — seemingly living in quiet obscurity. It dawned on me that this was the first person I'd ever seen whom I knew to be a Holocaust survivor. Despite the fact my knowledge of the Nazis' "final solution" didn't extend much beyond what I'd learned in school, the realization had a powerful effect. At a time when I needed direction in life, it awoke in me a reflexive need to protect and defend those who cannot protect themselves — the same reflex which, on a geopolitical level, led to the creation of the Jewish state itself after the Second World War. Many other factors and experiences influenced my desire to cast my lot in with the Jewish people. But this was the moment that I began to heed the words of Ruth 1:16: "Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God."

Other feelings were at play as well. One of my fellow kibbutzniks had a one-eyed Irish setter named Pogey that I would take out for long walks. Occasionally I would bump into a certain German shepherd and her mistress, Dahlia, and we fell into the habit of walking and chatting together.

I spent so much time walking Pogey that he started sleeping in my room. And it was thanks to him that I mastered my first few words in Hebrew — "sit," "stay," and "come here." By the time a year had gone by, any thought of returning to Canada was gone. Israel had become my home.

The kibbutz's leadership helped me stay in Israel. Through their auspices, I secured placement in an Orthodox conversion program that provided me with a year of intense study in Judaism and Hebrew. The application process said a lot about my new faith: while Christianity and Islam proselytize aggressively, Judaism almost seems eager to discourage new converts. During my interview with a representative of the ministry of religious affairs, which oversaw the program together with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the interviewer was downright confounded as to why I — or anyone else, for that matter — would want to join such an afflicted, downtrodden religion. He looked at me as if I were some sort of masochist.

I would not be discouraged. I had fallen in love not only with an Israeli woman, but also with an entire culture and religion. They'd embraced me as one of their own during the past year, and the least I could do was demonstrate my sincerity by joining the tribe. Conversion wasn't a decision I took lightly, and I realized that I was embarking on a journey that had a deeper meaning than what I had intended when I left Canada.

My second year in Israel was very different from my first. As part of my conversion program, I moved to a different kibbutz. This one was run by Orthodox Jews, with nary a pub or merry New Zealander to be seen. I prayed three times a day, worked the fields in punishing one hundred fourdegree heat, and spent the rest of my waking hours hitting the books. It was at least as tough as anything I'd endured in the army.

But I survived — one of only three who completed the program out of an original twenty-eight. When the year was up, I had to write final exams, undergo an oral examination in front of three university professors, and sit before a quorum of rabbis from the Chief Rabbinate. Only when I'd demonstrated my learning to their satisfaction was I granted the privilege of entering the mikveh — a Jewish communal bath that symbolically washes away spiritual impurities. I'd officially become a Jew. (There is another step in the process, of course, but I was spared; mercifully, my parents had the good sense to circumcise me at birth.)

Judaism blurs the line between religion and ethnicity, and so some Jews look askance on converts. But the scripture provides a rejoinder to such snobs: according to Jewish law, no person is permitted to remind others of a Jew's convert status for seven generations (after which the whole issue is guaranteed to be moot). As for me, I had an easier way of dealing with the issue. I'd simply remind the very few doubters I encountered that King David's Moabite grandmother, Ruth, was herself a convert.

After my conversion, I was granted Israeli citizenship and got married to Dahlia, the raven-haired German shepherd owner. Not long thereafter, I was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). I was twenty-four when I received the letter from the government, the same age as my maternal great-grandfather when he was called up to fight in the Great War of 1914-18. Around this time, our first son was also born, and it was at that moment that I fully realized that my life had changed forever.

SOLDIERING ON

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

GEORGE ORWELL

It was three o'clock in the morning on a warm September day in 1984. I was standing in a small, cramped barracks building in the Israeli countryside while Sergeant Yaron, a young Kurdish Jew, surveyed the thirty-odd soldiers who made up our newly formed platoon. He was that stock figure from many war movies: the tough-as-nails sergeant who breaks down recruits with an unending stream of verbal abuse. Never before or since have I met a man who could describe his contempt for you in such a wide variety of novel and entertaining ways.

This was my first day in an IDF combat engineer company, a unit tasked with assaulting and demolishing enemy positions. Having been up since five o'clock the previous morning, we were a tired lot. I would have preferred to be sleeping, and I guess it showed on my face.

"Hey, look everybody, this guy seems really unhappy," Yaron said. He bounded over, stood about an inch from my face, and asked in a booming voice, "Where you from, pretty boy?" I gave him the name of my kibbutz.

"Not with that accent, you aren't. What candy-ass, UN-hugging country do you call home? Please don't be British, because Israel has its quota of homosexuals and we really can't handle any more." There were muffled chuckles in the background.

"Canada," I replied.

"Canada!" he exclaimed excitedly. "And tell me, what does Canada produce besides snow, trees, maple syrup, and bears? Oh, I remember now," he continued. "I've seen your peacekeeping countrymen in the Golan. Real fine fighting men — when they aren't fucking our girls in Tiberias!" His words dripped with the derision that veteran IDF soldiers typically harbor toward "peacekeeping" forces and the foreign armies that staff them — troops whose idea of a casualty is a broken typewriter or flat tire punctured on a beer run.

In fact, I wasn't quite so green as Yaron thought.

I joined the Canadian army after high school, my head full of adolescent notions of military glory. I served three years in an armored regiment of Canada's Special Service Force, an elite airborne brigade designed for rapid overseas deployment. The unit was also tasked with defending NATO's northern flank in case of a Soviet invasion, and so we found ourselves doing a lot of winter survival and combat exercises in the frozen hinterlands of Ontario and Quebec — alongside visiting NATO troops from Norway and the other "UN-hugging" Nordic nations Yaron excoriated so stridently. Our brigade was distinguished from the rest of the military by our camouflage jump smocks and shoulder flashes that bore the emblem of the winged dagger, made famous by the British Special Air Service. The rest of the military hated us for these elitist trappings, and shed nary a tear when the brigade was disbanded in 1995 following revelations that some members had tortured and killed young Somali civilians during a peacekeeping operation in 1993.

When I was called up to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, I didn't tell anyone except the recruiting officer about my former military service in Canada because I knew it would have only been a target of mockery. During my training, I pretended that I didn't know what the business end of a weapon was.

The difference between the Canadian and Israeli militaries was startling. Israel is an isolated nation the size of New Jersey, which had gone to war with at least one of its Arab neighbors every decade since its founding. And so the IDF, then as now, was a combat-oriented force full of veteran officers experienced in military operations. The Canadian Forces of my era, by contrast, was a well-meaning but ineffective peacetime army stuck in a Korean War-era time warp. The country didn't invest in its military because everyone knew the United States would do the heavy lifting if things got hot.

Another difference: in the Canadian Forces, I rarely saw my troop commander. He was a remote figure, not really one of the fighting men. But in the IDF, the officer corps' motto is "Acherai," which means "After me." They lead from the front, and they don't stand on ceremony. Once basic training is over, everyone is on a first-name basis.

Lieutenant Tal, our twenty-two-year-old platoon commander, was the perfect embodiment of this IDF ethos. He was tough and taciturn, with dark piercing eyes, black curly hair, and a wiry, sinewy frame. Like Sergeant Yaron, he'd taken part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, where our unit had gone up against elite Syrian commandos in the eastern Bekaa Valley. These men had commanded soldiers in the field and seen some of them fall. Over time, I came to admire and respect Lieutenant Tal as I have few others in my lifetime. Today he's a full colonel in the reserves and a successful lawyer in Tel Aviv. He still looks the same as when I met him in 1984.

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Excerpted from "The Volunteer"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Michael Ross.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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