Israel: Three Voices of Ayeleth

There is one story every tourist in Israel hears: the story of the Sabra fruit. Found on a cactus, the Sabra is covered with thorns. But despite its forbidding exterior, its center is soft red and sweet. Israel's young people, the tale concludes, are called Sabras, for they are like the Sabra fruit: hard on the outside but soft on the inside.

Naomi will be twenty-one in February. Born on Ayeleth Hashachar, Naomi is Sabra to the core.

You see it first in her walk. Tall, her black hair close-cropped, she carries her lithe body with uncanny grace--an assurance that comes from years of hard labor. Naomi works in the kibbutz bee-hives. Clothed in stifling protective garments on searing Israeli afternoons, she sloshes rich, amber honey into pails. She is the only girl on the kibbutz who does it. It is work that many men cannot stand.

Her life has bred in her a hard pride easily taken for snobbery. A foreigner feels it quickly, for like many Sabras, she is reserved toward strangers. Her quiet, brown eyes can fix a newcomer, penetrate and turn away with cruel coldness.

Yet, for all this, she is not unfeminine. She and her friends spend their meager clothes-allowance in Tel Aviv, not content with the kibbutz's anachronistic styles. Every night she deliberates over what to wear to the evening meal. She passes long hours after work playing with her year-old nephew.

There are other cracks between the thorns, and sometimes, on velvet Israeli evenings, her reserve dissolves entirely and reveals a pensive girl, struggling with great uncertainties. Naomi wants desperately to go to the University and study literature. "I feel that here I am marching in the same place," she says with subdued passion. "Every day the same thing." Her radio (one of the few luxuries the kibbutz allows its members) plays classical music all Sunday when the Israeli radio broadcasts Christian Masses. She keeps a copy of Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems (looking strangely unfamiliar in Hebrew) above her bed.

But it is not enough to want to study. She has no money to live or pay tuition, for no one on the kibbutz owns personal property beyond the clothes on their back. Nor does she have the training to get a good job. The kibbutz has given her no marketable skill, and with Israel in a mild depression, unskilled labor is flooding the economy.

But the cruelest fact of all is that, even if she found a job that barely paid her way, once she left she could not return. The kibbutz--which requires a year-long trial for prospective members--allows its members a one-year sabbatical, but to take more would mean forfeiting membership. Despite her sense of stagnation, Naomi finds more than home and family at Ayeleth. It has been her way of life: a philosophy and social order not easily shed.

Naomi is not the only young kibbutznik demanding more than her home can offer. Responding to this outcry, and its own needs for trained teachers, economists and agriculturalists, the kibbutz sends some members to a University, all expenses paid. But this does not help Naomi. The kibbutz requires that its scholars study something it needs and return to serve Ayeleth with their new skills. It does not need experts in literature. Anyway, all the slots for the coming year are filled by others, so Naomi would have to mark time for another year, perhaps more.

Eventually Naomi accepts a compromise. Instead of leaving she will take courses two times a week from a local teacher, and then later, the kibbutz will send her to the University--to study what, she is not yet sure. It is a defeat. Even the Sabra must sometimes swallow her pride.

But in one area, the Sabra does not accept defeat. During the war Naomi sat in the cool semi-darkness of one of Ayeleth's concrete shelters, and sang "We Shall Overcome" to the faint crump of Syrian shells. The shelter's occupants were not as sure of their impending triumph as foreign experts. They knew only that if Syrian troops swarmed down from the brown hills across the Jordan, they would have to fight to the last woman and child. The Syrians would leave no one alive. "I was not afraid," says Naomi without hesitation, "Only worried--about my brother."

Naomi's 24-year-old brother is an artillery officer whose unit pounded Syria from nearby fields. Naomi once had another brother. In the Sinai campaign of 1956, he was one of 1500 paratroops dropped deep in Egyptian territory to secure the Mitla Pass.

* * *

About three weeks after the war, Nadav comes home on leave for the first time. For much of his two days at Ayeleth, he is surrounded by groups of young people hanging on his every word. Now 23, Nadav is serving his fifth year in the Israeli air force, the elite of her armed forces and the key to her smashing victory. He seems the kibbutz hero.

He is not, of course. The Israelis don't make heros of their warriors. In a country where everyone serves, and war has been a fact of life for 19 years, a martial cult has no meaning.

Still, by American standards, Nadav has all the credentials. Medium height, wiry, he has a broad face with sharply etched features. His handshake is firm. His smile slashes clean and white above a square chin.

No matter how well you work. Nadav can humiliate you. He does everything at top speed, darting from one task to another with furious energy. He guides precarious burdens effortlessly to rest with an instantaneous calculation of his cool black eves. His fingers are smooth, agile.

Coordination, the key to combat flying, has made him an officer and instructor, and from time to time, probably saved his life. For the first three days of the Six Day War, Nadav criss-crossed the blue skies over Sinai, raking Egyptian planes and armor with his French Super Mystere jet. Then, with Israeli troops on the Suez, he arced north to pound the Syrian heights opposite Ayeleth.

"In Sinai, it was like a game," he says with an almost puzzled smile. "The tanks and planes sit there, and you go boom-boom--like practice. The air war is very clean, you know. There are no bodies. Sometimes you see soldiers running, no more. In Syria it was more difficult--lots of anti-air-craft." In Syria it was also less anti-septic, for Nadav at least. Returning from runs, he flew through the smoke spiraling off of Ayeleth's burning fields and storage bins. "I thought the whole kibbutz was burning," recalls Nadav. "It made me very mad. Then I wanted to kill them."

As he works, Nadav makes effortless and intelligent conversation. His English grammar is only fair, but the range of his vocabulary is astounding. ("I learned to speak from foreigners," says Nadav. "From foreign girls," chimes in a friend, and Nadav only smiles.)

Though best in math during his school years. Nadav will talk about almost anything. "The Americans are good but naive," he says. "In Vietnam, they try to help people but they don't know how." He has just read a book on Mongolia, which he liked very much, and offers to lend it out. He does not hate the Arabs--except for the Syrians--or laugh at their ludicrous performance in the air. How can you fix or fly a plane, he queries, when you never see a machine most of your life.

But the Syrians are a different breed. "They are not like human beings," contends Nadav. Early in the Syrian campaign, he relates, but after one of the numerous U.N. agreements on a cease-fire, the Syrians lynched two Israeli pilots on the streets of Damascus, then broadcast the hangings over Damascus T.V. so the Israelis could share the spectacle. In retaliation, the Israeli air force demolished the T.V. station. The Syrians charged a cease-fire violation. In Nadav's eyes, it was only justice.

Nadav's air-force room-mate is still a Syrian captive and he confesses he is deeply worried. For Nadav, the war is still not over--not until his roommate crosses the border alive. Eventually in late August, he is returned--with the bodies of two other fliers.

There is even a bad-boy-making-good angle to Nadav's story. In his youth, he was wild and unpopular. He would borrow kibbutz tractors and take joy-rides into the fields--a dangerous past-time with Syrian snipers in the hills and both the Lebanese and Syrian borders nearby. And few of his age-group respected him, despite his obvious ability. Rooms would fall quiet and slowly empty when he entered.

All that, of course, is changed, or almost changed. A trace of the rogue remains in Nadav. On routine postwar patrols, he twice screams over the kibbutz at tree-top level, just to say hello. And despite his open smile, there is something haunting in Nadav's agate eyes: a cool measuring, a cruelty, perhaps a ruthlessness. It is well disguised, but you feel better with him than against him.

In skill and efficiency, Israel's air force is rated second only to the United States'. Nadav may not be a hero, but his example will not hurt his service's future prospects. During the summer, three boys from the Kibbutz pass the rigorous admission test and follow Nadav into the air-corp's elite rank. One is Nadav's younger brother.

* * *

There is nothing special about Yael. She is quiet, short, a little too heavy, not very pretty. But one thing makes her different. Yael is not a member of Ayeleth Hashachar. She is from the city, from Tel Aviv.

Yael is one of ten girls serving their military duty at Ayeleth. Service is compulsory for all girls between 18 and 20, but now that Israel's regular army is so efficient, girls no longer do any fighting. Their two years amount to a general national service and can be spent in military offices, teaching or on kibbutzim. Yael has been at Ayeleth 10 months.

It is hard to put your finger on the differences between Yael and her kibbutz contemporaries. She is a little more friendly, perhaps more gentle. Her English is better, a tribute to the cities' superior schools.

The real difference, however, is one of attitude. Yael came to Ayeleth to escape the drudgery of military paperwork and its 9 to 5 day, but now she wants to leave. She has found the endless routine of physical labor as oppressive as office work--and less instructive.

She does not entirely regret her choice. Coming from Tel Aviv, she knew as little about kibbutzim as most Americans, and her ten months have taught her much about the kibbutz's strictly communistic economics and its rugged population.

But Yael speaks for a generation of Israelis moving away from the kibbutz and its limited life. Yael's horizons are broader than those of her kibbutz friends. She has been to New York twice visiting relatives. She is curious about the racial riots in the United States and quick to grasp the immensity of the problems underlying them. Already matriculated, Yael has no doubt about going on with her studies, and has decided to spend one year studying in the U.S., probably at Berkeley. Yael's generation is returning to the European of its own accord, demanding higher education and a higher standard of living.

But the new attitude is not strictly a doubling back. It is a new synthesis. Yael may find Ayeleth too confining, but she works without complaining, and what she does, she does well--often better than kibbutzniks. Nor does she resent Army service. She welcomes it as an educational experience and a patriotic necessity including the two months of boot-camp--pure military training--with which women begin their military duty.

If let alone, Yael's generation will build a strong and progressive culture out of the sands of the Middle East. But if threatened, it can fight with cunning and perserverance for the right to live