Benny Darom – What the Expulsion May Cause Among the I.D.F. Soldiers Who Are Meant to Participate In It

“The government will be asked today (Sunday) to approve the expulsion of the first group of settlements – Netzarim, Morag, and Kfar Darom”.

What lies behind this announcement?

What might the expulsion do to the I.D.F. soldiers who are meant to participate in it?

The Story of Benny Darom

Benny Darom sat in his office, looking over the documents in front of him.

He wasn’t enthusiastic about what awaited him. For several months he had been looking for a Deputy Director for his business; from time to time he had invited someone for an interview. He was already starting to despair.

He was looking for someone who could truly share the load.

Not only a conscientious worker, but someone he could rely upon.

Someone with whom he could brainstorm; someone who could help him chart the correct course for the business, to make the right decisions at the critical moments.

The buzzer sounded and Rivka, his secretary, informed him that Yitzhak Keren had arrived.

Benny swept the papers on his desk into the drawer, and got up to open the door.

He invited Mr. Keren in, and slowly the conversation got going.

Mr. Keren was pleasant but authoritative, about 45 years old – about 10 years older than Darom.

Benny tried to remember where he knew this man from. Usually, he read the CV before the interview. This time, Mr. Keren had been recommended by a friend whom Benny trusted. He would read the CV after the interview.

After about an hour, the conversation ended with Benny telling Mr. Keren that they would talk again in a few days.

Left on his own, Benny sighed heavily.

This wasn’t the one. Yes, the man appeared serious enough, authoritative, knew what he wanted. He sounded like someone who would get the job done. But Benny was looking for more. He wanted someone whose decisions he could rely on. Someone with vision, someone who thought freely. This was missing. He had the sense that the man was trying to please. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he needed the job? But Benny trusted the senses he had developed over the years. It was more than that: it was something in the man’s personality. Benny decided to look over the CV. He opened the folder that Mr. Keren had brought with him and began to review it. At once he froze. In a flash he knew why the man had looked familiar.

Yitzhak Keren was Tzahi Kornesky.

Benny closed the file, and felt the symptoms rushing over him.

His breath was short, a headache developed, and he knew that in a few moments it would be ready to explode, with his heart beating wildly.

Hot flushes washed over him and he was perspiring.

It was clear that today was a write-off.

He told Rivka that he was leaving for the rest of the day, and would not be available.

He called him, praying that Galit would be there.

“I’m coming,” he said.

He had no idea how he had got home. Lucky that the journey was a short one.

When he opened the door and stepped in, Galit paled. His face was wet; his hair was stuck to his temples. He was white; his eyes tortured.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“What happened, Benny? What happened? Why suddenly today?”

Come, sit down. She took him by the hand and led him, like a little boy, to the sofa. Benny sat down, his face in his hands. “I want to watch it!”

“But what happened?

Benny, you have to do something. It gets worse every year; it lasts longer and longer around the date.

And now again – on just a regular day, with no connection to the date. You look as though it happened right now. Leave the tape, Benny; let’s go and see someone about this.” Galit placed her hand on his knee and squeezed, but he wouldn’t budge. “I want to see it.” She sighed, gave in, brought the tape from their room and slipped it into the video machine.

There on the screen, the CNN reporter was speaking from Kfar Darom after the evacuation. On top of the ruins of one of the houses stood a masked terrorist. He spoke in Arabic, with laughter and cheering audible in the background. The Hebrew translation ran along the bottom of the picture. “I,” declared the terrorist, “I killed the mother who lived in this house, but I didn’t manage to chase away her family. That the Israel army did for me.” He waved a two-day-old newspaper, with a picture of Benny evacuating a kicking, screaming child from the house. The camera focused on the newspaper picture, and Benny’s expressionless face above the face of the child filled the screen.

Benny touched the remote and froze the picture. His whole body was wracked with sobs. Galit cradled him and rocked him: “Enough, Benny, enough. It’s been more than ten years; even the child in the picture isn’t crying any more. Enough, enough.” She stopped talking and just rocked him, running her hands through his sweat-drenched hair. Later in the evening, after he had slept for a few hours, he showered and joined Galit in the sitting room.

He looked at her lovingly. She was the only one who knew what he went through. Everyone knew Benny Darom, the “macho”, owner of a successful business, who one year drove a  Toyota Corolla – “Your car says everything about you”, and the next year a Volvo – “The car for people like you”. Successful, good-looking, with a beautiful wife and a luxury home in the city center.

Only Galit, his girlfriend from high-school and his wife for the past 9 years, knew how broken he was inside.

Even now she was silent, giving him time to talk when he was ready.

“Do you know who came to my office today looking for work? Yitzhak Keren.”

“Who is he?” she asked, surprised.

“You know him by a different name: Once he called himself Tzahi Kornesky.”

At once she understood everything.

Once Benny Darom had been called Benjamin Ronen. At some stage he had felt a desire to perpetuate Kfar Darom, in whose destruction he had participated, and he changed his name to Darom.

“You know – he’s been unemployed for half a year. The great paratrooper unit commander. Half a year he’s been looking for work.

When I was in the army, if they’d told me that he was a person just like me – a mortal who eats, drinks, and goes to the toilet, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The regiment commander was half-God. But Tzahi Kornesky? The unit commander was God Himself.

Even today he looked fine, kind of authoritative, you know… spoke “commanderish”. But then, from my point of view he was at the head of Olympus.

The evacuation started on Tuesday. I had a family that I was supposed to evacuate – a regular family. Father, mother, six children.

It’s not true that that terrorist killed that child’s mother. But it’s true that I gave him their house.

We went in there, three soldiers. Seven more waited outside. There were plenty more troops.

I knocked on the door.”

Benny lowered his head, and shook again with sobs.

Galit sat next to him on the sofa, silent.

It was the first time, after eleven years, that he was telling her what had happened there. She hoped that talking about it would help him.

“Two children opened the door for me.

I asked, “Where’s your mother?”

“In her room.”

“And your father?”

The father approached me.

“Shalom,” I said.

“Shalom,” he answered.

I knew what I was supposed to say. We had practiced it for weeks. “I’m sorry to be the messenger, but it’s time.”

He didn’t answer me.

His wife came out of her room and stood a few meters behind him, leaning against the wall. I remember that the wall was painted a sort of apricot color. Her face was white.

“You have to leave here. It’s a government decision.”

They remained silent.

The children gathered around them and held onto them. He put one hand around a girl of about 12, who was weeping uncontrollably.

“We’ll go out now and leave you to get organized. We’ll be back in an hour.”

When I got outside, all hell was breaking loose.

It was Bentzi Gabbai, the redhead who lives over there.

“The one you can’t stand?” asked Galit.

He looked at her for a moment, surprised. “I can’t stand him?

Every time I see him I can’t stand myself.

He was with me in the platoon.

He was going crazy outside.

Not just refusing orders, but thrashing around and screaming. “What, I enlisted in the army so I could turn into some type of “Ivan the Terrible”? To kick Jews out of their homes? Is the world short of ‘goyim’ who do that?”

They tried to calm him, but it didn’t help. He wasn’t just refusing orders, he was screaming at everyone who was there.

“Don’t do it! Don’t do it! It’ll sit on your souls your whole lives!” It was as though he read my thoughts. He said, “What’s twenty-eight days in prison? For that you’re prepared to do something that twenty-eight thousand layers can never cover up?

You’re not Jews! A Jew doesn’t expel another Jew!”

All the soldiers stood around, shocked. We all knew, really knew, that he was right.

We felt like tyrants. We felt as though we had come to kill. Avi Fahima was supposed to evacuate the Cohen family. He just left; he couldn’t do it. He went to his platoon commander, held out his clasped hands and said, “Arrest me. I’m refusing orders.”

The yeshiva students in the group stood aside; they all said, “We aren’t refusing orders, but we can’t.” And the redhead, redder than his hair, carried on screaming at everyone and at the officers. “For two thousand years Jews have been suffering, but this is really too much. With our own hands, to expel Jews?

Whoever doesn’t refuse orders is destroying the army. Destroying the army! Demolishing it! An army that expels is an army that is defiled! Defiled!”

At that moment the unit commander arrived on the scene.

Within two minutes, Bentzi was tied up inside the jeep.

The jeep drove off and we could still hear him screaming, “A Jew doesn’t expel another Jew!”

Then I realized that an hour had passed, and I had to go back into the house. I had no choice; the moment of truth had arrived.

Suddenly, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t feel that I had a good enough reason to do it.

Actually, you could say that I knew that all the reasons they had told me weren’t really true – and certainly not strong enough to stand up to this terrible thing that I, Benny Ronon, was about to do – do expel Jews from their house, like some Ukrainian from the previous century. I stood at the side of the house and just threw up my guts until only green water came out.

Someone brought me a canteen. My legs shook as I rinsed my mouth and my face.

Suddenly I saw Tzahi Kornesky in front of my eyes. The unit commander. He came over and patted my shoulder. I felt as though God Himself had come down and embraced me. I was in shock.

He spoke “commanderese”.

“Commanderese?” asked Galit.

Benny looked at her as though he couldn’t remember what she was doing there. She felt as though he was suddenly being brought back from somewhere very far away, and regretted asking.

He shook as he told her, “Commanderese – short words, in bursts. Very clever words about “abilities”, “qualities”, mixed with a bit of “vision”, “Zionism”, “rule of law”, and “company pride”.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I understood quite clearly that it wasn’t me, Benny Ronen, the simple soldier, who was evacuating them, but rather “we” – the regiment, behind which was the whole platoon, behind which stood the entire unit, with the unit commander, and behind him – the Chief of Staff and the Prime Minister…

That gave me strength.  He explained that this was his order, and that I had to rely on his judgment, and he was relying on the judgment of the Chief of Staff, who was carrying out what the government had decided to do.

So it wasn’t “me”, it was “us”.

And this “we”, comprised of me and another three soldiers, we entered the house, took hold of the father and took him outside. The women soldiers carried out the mother and the eldest daughter. The younger children ran, crying, after their parents. And this “we” that was comprised of me alone went into the house and found one child hiding in the bathtub. I lifted him, screaming, kicking and crying, and went with him outside, my face expressionless so I wouldn’t fall apart altogether. And that must have been when they photographed me. I put him down inside the vehicle with his parents, and tried to calm him, but he was really afraid of me. When I tried to approach him his eyes were full of horror. I got off the bus. I only remember that I got almost as far as the jeep, and then everything went black. I don’t remember any more, only that I woke up and asked to go, and somehow I got home. And then you came and you couldn’t understand why I was standing in front of the mirror, saying “I’m alone here! There’s no-one here, I’m alone here in front of the mirror. The regiment commander and all the guys, and the platoon commander and the unit commander, and the Prime Minister… I screamed for a whole hour, “I’m alone here, I’m alone here!” Until my mother called the doctor, and he injected a sedative. And now, all these years later, I’m alone here. Alone here. I, with my own hands, did that. And today, I decided that I wasn’t going to take him as my deputy director because I can’t rely on him. So how could I have listened to him then? A thing like that has no partnership. I should have listened to myself. To my own truth. No unit commander could think for me, or feel for me, or be true to me in my place. And the unit commander wasn’t God. God is with me in the mirror.

And then I watched the video, and it’s all true. It’s me who did it. I expelled him from his house. And Bentzi, the redhead, sat in prison for 28 days for refusing orders, and another 28 days for offending an officer. And those bastards found some other clause as well. So he sat another two weeks – and came out a human being. What about me?

I changed my name, Ronen, to “Darom” – not to remind other people, but for myself. So that I will remember.”

A reminder:

Kfar Darom is a Jewish settlement dating back to the period of the Mishna. This piece of land was redeemed by the Jewish citrus grower, Tuvia Miller, 75 years ago. At the end of Yom Kippur of 1947, a  religious kibbutz was established here as one of eleven settlement points in the Negev. During the War of Independence, KFar Darom fought courageously for the State of Israel. Eventually, its defenders were ordered to withdraw, but their battle made a significant contribution to Israel’s victory.

In Tishrei 5730, the first Nahal outpost in the Gaza Strip was founded – in Kfar Dadrom. For the next 20 years the site served as a settlement training base. In Tishrei 5750, the permanent group arrived and set up a religious community settlement.

Today about 100 families live in Kfar Darom (about 1,000 people). The settlement boasts the “Alei Katif” factory and highly developed agriculture, a large yeshiva and kollel, the “Torah and Land Institute”, and the “College of Torah and the Land”.

This settlement, which has become a symbol of determination and resilience, has been attacked many times and has suffered heavy losses. But its answer has always been to continue to grow in faith and in building, in keeping with God’s promise – “I say to you – by your blood shall you live”.

Today, too, the residents of Kfar Darom – including widows and orphans, terror victims who have lost limbs, etc. and who have undergone rehabilitation with great faith and courage – want to continue holding onto their settlement. Not one of the residents has appealed to the Expulsion Authority; not one of them is packing up.

And life continues at full pace.

The joy of the children playing in the streets of the blossoming, developing Kfar Darom express the continuity of the life’s work of its founders, and the faith to build an eternal edifice in this place.

We all believe in and pray for the realization of the Divine promise:

“I shall plant them upon their land and they shall not be plucked again from their land which I have given tot hem, says the Lord your God.” (Amos 9:15)

By Asher Mivtzari, Kfar Darom. Amivtzari@walla.co.il