My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  But now the steamer carrying the Bentwich delegation back from Palestine to London is crossing the dark sea on its way to Constantinople. The May night is hot. My great-grandfather is on deck, watching the white foam and the black waves. He only vaguely understands what he has just done, only vaguely envisions the transformation that will take place in the Land of Israel. His understanding of the Land is so very limited. But he does know that an era has come to a close and that a new era is set to begin. Something both grand and terrible occurred when the Oxus made its appearance at the Jaffa port and laid on its shore all that it carried on board.

  (photo credit 2.1)

  TWO

  Into the Valley, 1921

  I AM BOUND NORTH. FROM TEL AVIV TO HADERA IT IS ALL ASPHALT, GAS stations, and shopping malls. Crowded graceless cities appear and disappear, and it is difficult to tell them apart. Coastal Israel is dense, intense, consumerist, and sweaty. But when I turn east and pass the Arab-Israeli villages of Bartoa and Umm el-Fahem, and reach the Valley of Yizrael, which Bentwich crossed in 1897, I see a fertile basin of plowed brown fields. And when I continue eastward, surrounded by the scent of heavy soil, I arrive at one of my favorite Israeli vantage points. Just after the kibbutz named Yizrael, the landscape suddenly opens up. Before me are the Valley of Harod and the rocky ridges of Mount Gilboa, and I can see the gentle green slopes of the Isaschar heights, with its numerous kibbutzim. It’s so quiet here. The spell of another era still hangs over the Valley of Harod.

  In the dilapidated archives of Ein Harod, the first kibbutz of the valley, I pore over maps, plans, protocols, articles, letters, and personal journals. I look at the black-and-white photographs from the 1920s: our very beginning in the valley. Before me is the genesis of the Zionist adventure.

  Harod Valley is a long, narrow strip of land locked between the dramatic mountain ridge to its south and the gentle heights to its north. To the east is the city of Beit Shean; to the west, the watershed line. In the 1920s there were three Palestinian villages and two Palestinian hamlets in the valley. These thirty thousand dunams* were owned by the Sarsouk family of Alexandria. Most local inhabitants were their serfs.

  Local history is ancient and bloody. On the mountaintop of Gilboa, King Saul and his son Jonathan were killed when the army of Israel was crushed by the Philistines. The bodies of the king and prince were violated. Under Gilboa burbles the water source to which Gideon brought his warriors before defeating the Midianites. And by the spring of Harod, Gideon divided the brave from the timid, separating those fit to serve their nation from those unfit.

  In 1904 the Turkish Empire laid down a German-planned railway in the midst of the long strip of land. Yet the valley’s torpor proved to be stronger than progress. Twice a day the steam train whistled through the silence, but the silence prevailed. As late as 1920, the valley was first and foremost a patchwork of wild fields scarred by boulders and stubborn bushes that prevent cultivation. Scattered among the fields were deadly marshes in which Anopheles mosquitoes bred, infecting most of the local Palestinians with malaria. Yet on the paths descending from the spring of Harod, barefoot village girls walked in their long black dresses, carrying clay jars full of water on their heads. Skinny young shepherds roamed with their herds of gaunt sheep. On both sides of the Turkish-German railway, native life meandered as it had for hundreds of years. Still, death was in the air. It lurked low in the poison-green marshes of Palestine, and it hovered above the endangered Jews of Europe.

  In April 1903 an Easter pogrom took place in Moldova’s capital, Kishinev. Forty-nine Jews were murdered, hundreds brutally injured. World Jewry was in turmoil. Theodor Herzl was personally shocked. Deeply affected by Kishinev, he considered buying the property of the Sarsouk family in Palestine in order to relocate the victims of European anti-Semitism there. He had the proposal reviewed by a consultant, who concluded that the land in the Valley of Harod was exquisite, but to evacuate the serfs from the estate would require the use of force.

  Herzl’s Zionism of 1903 found the use of force unacceptable. But seventeen years later, Zionism was no longer so fastidious. The Great War and the Great Revolution had hardened hearts. So when the Sarsouk transaction was finally signed, in the summer of 1920, it was clear to all concerned what was required: decisive, rapid action. Action to be carried out by a new breed of Jew.

  In the decade following the Kishinev pogrom, some one million Jews fled Eastern Europe, while fewer than thirty-five thousand immigrated to Palestine. The choice was clear: the masses who wanted a life went to America. The few who wanted utopia made aliyah to the Land of Israel. Unlike the traditional farmers my great-grandfather met in the colonies of 1897, the post-Kishinev immigrants were secular and utopian. They were Tolstoyan idealists who traveled to Palestine in order to find salvation, both for the nation and the individual, by adopting a humane and environmentally friendly socialism.

  The great creation of the utopians was the commune. In 1909 they established Degania, the first small, intimate commune, with the aim of respecting individual needs and freedom. Degania survived, but the utopians failed. Many felt lonely in the harsh, barren land. Some sank into depression. A few committed suicide. Most gave up and left for America.

  Meanwhile, in Europe, big events were occurring. The First World War was perceived by many Jews as Armageddon. Lenin’s October Revolution was considered a messianic event. But despite war, revolution, and postrevolution civil war, persecution was worse than ever. Pogroms were everywhere.

  The failure of the socialist utopians in Palestine and the acute distress of Jews in Eastern Europe forced Zionism to look for new modes of action. The new idea was to colonize Palestine by establishing communist colonies that would not be small, intimate, and utopian like Degania, but large, rigid, and almost Bolshevik. The idea now was to win the land by forming a tough, determined, semimilitary Labor Brigade.

  In the summer of 1920 the Labor Brigade was founded. A year later it was hundreds of comrades strong. They felt and spoke as if they were the avant-garde of the Jewish people. They acted as if they were the revolutionary elite marching ahead of the masses they were about to liberate. No job was unworthy, no mission impossible. They would do whatever needed to be done in the name of the Zionist revolution.

  I look closely at their photographs. The young men I see are indeed new Jews. They are strong, buff, beaming with certainty. It is hard to believe that the parents they left behind in Eastern Europe were shtetl merchants or ghetto scholars. Within a short period of time, the transformation among these youngsters was beyond comprehension. Now they wear egalitarian berets and caps, khakis and sleeveless shirts, khakis and no shirts at all. And their fine torsos are proudly on display. They are tanned and muscular; they look like models of revolutionary potency. From the recesses of previous generations’ humiliation, manly energy is now bursting.

  The girls are surprisingly provocative. Some still wear the vestiges of trendy European fashion. Had they not landed on the Palestine shore, they would be dancing the Charleston to the music of the Roaring Twenties. But even those clad in spartan khaki are tantalizing. As there is no God and no father in Palestine, all is free. As there is no religion and no family, all is open. Under these empty blue skies there is no mercy, but there are also no limits. There is nothing to stop the most ambitious and audacious of all twentieth-century revolutions.

  It is the summer of 1921, and all is quiet in the valley. Apart from the railway, what is here now is what has been here for hundreds of years. What the American traveler John Ridgway described in the last quarter of the previous century can still be seen in the first quarter of the new century: “The valley full of harvesters, pickers and packers. Donkeys heavily laden with sacks of grain are walking by while women are busy picking whatever is left in the field. Often one hears the singing of harvesters as they bend over the stalks of grain, their bodies swaying to the rhythm of age-old chants.”

  Below the mountainside village of Nuris stand the st
one houses built by the Sarsouk family for its Ein Jaloud serfs. And where Kibbutz Yizrael will be built sits the quiet village of Zarin. On one of the hills slump the mud huts of Tel Fir. Down below are hidden the scattered homes of Shatta. And over on the northern heights, the village of Komay overlooks the valley it commands.

  The waters flow slowly from the lively spring of Harod to the pools of Sahneh via the old mills, as they have for a thousand years. Every so often, water trickles into the ditches that the peasants dig in order to nourish their meager crops. But these waters create the boggy marshes from which rise the poisonous vapors of malaria that have turned the old village of Rihanyah into a ghost village. Everything here, by the grave of Sheikh Hassan and around the Spring of Hassan, is idle—the torpor of an ancient land deep in ancient slumber.

  And yet there are forces about to be unleashed on the quiet valley. The energy generated by Kishinev and the Great War and the Great Revolution and the pogroms. The opportunity produced by the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate and the Sarsouk transaction. The acute distress of Eastern European Jews that compels them to flee to the valley. And the new identity of the new Jews that allows them to enter the valley—to build and transform themselves in a valley inhabited by others.

  On September 21, 1921, a bizarre convoy penetrates the Valley of Harod: two cars, four horses, and a number of country wagons. The dozens of Labor Brigade pioneers in the convoy are highly excited, very much aware that they are about to tilt history. In his personal journal, one of the youngsters writes:

  No road and no path. Walking along the railway, Z. is riding ahead of us, followed by two cars and wagons and the entire platoon. The heat is unbearable. It’s already past noon and we hardly advance. Stop. Advance.…

  Now we must turn right toward Mount Gilboa. At the foot of the mountain-ridge flows the spring of Harod. The spring is the valley’s water source. We must conquer it. The spring is the key to the conquest of the valley and we are about to capture that key. Z. is still ahead, riding his noble Arab horse to the spring. Between water ponds and dank marshes we follow him until we arrive at the slopes of Gilboa. Here it is: the mouth to the cave from which the water burst: the spring of Harod.

  The time is half past four. Like our forefathers who followed Gideon to save Israel, we kneel by the water, drinking happily. East of the spring is the small hamlet of Jaloud. We set up camp right next to it, west of the spring. We raise thirty-five tents. We pound iron poles into the soil and surround the camp with barbed wire. We dig combat trenches. Within hours we have a camp with all the facilities. Like an army regiment we have all we need. There is a field-kitchen now and the girl-comrades cook supper. By sunset we finish our first day of labor in Ein Harod. We break bread and bless the valley with its first pioneers’ hora dance.

  The community of Ein Harod is imprinted on every Israeli’s psyche. In a sense it is our Source, our point of departure. But for me Ein Harod has personal significance, too. I have family here. Throughout my childhood I used to come here for the summer holidays. I was always attached to the aura of this mythological kibbutz. I loved to walk its shady pathways and enjoyed the languor of the serene afternoons of the archetypical commune. I would stand on the porch of the communal dining room and look down at the verdant valley, across the imposing Mount Gilboa.

  Now I am sitting in Ein Harod’s dilapidated archives. And as I go over the records of that first day the pioneers arrived, I find all the formative elements: the heat, the spring, the Arabs, the tents, the barbed wire. The awareness of the founding fathers that what they are about to do may require violence. Their determination to conquer the valley—come what may.

  I am no judge. I am an observer. And at this critical point I choose not to zoom in on the single dimension of Jew and Arab, us and them, Israel and its other. Rather, I widen my scope of vision and see how the different dimensions of the Zionist tale interplay in the Valley of Harod.

  By 1921 it is clear that nonsocialist Zionism will not be able to colonize Palestine. The bourgeois Rothschild colonies, like the one Herbert Bentwich visited in 1897, are done with. They are based on liberal values, a middle-class way of life, and market forces that are not up to the task. Utopian communes like Degania will not do, either. Liberty, intimacy, and individualism are incompatible with the mission. If Zionism is to prevail, there is a need now for a well-organized, disciplined socialist structure. The twenty-nine thousand dunams bought from the Sarsouk family provide the territorial base for such a structure. For the very first time, Zionism overtakes a substantial chunk of the land by building upon it a large communist colony. A kibbutz.

  Kibbutz socialism is now essential for several reasons. Without group effort, Zionist colonizers will not be able to endure the hardships involved in the colonizing process. Without the idealism of kibbutz socialism, Zionism will not have the sense of moral superiority that is essential for the colonization process to succeed. Without the communal aspect of kibbutz, socialist Zionism will lack legitimacy and will be perceived as an unjust colonialist movement. Only kibbutz socialism can give Zionism the social cohesion, the mental determination, and the moral imperative needed at this revolutionary stage. And only the Labor Brigade ethos of kibbutz socialism will enable Zionism to take the valley and to take the Land.

  The move is not only brilliant, it is brave. The young Labor Brigade comrades settling in the Valley of Harod do not ask themselves how the eighty thousand Jews living in Palestine in 1921 will deal with more than six hundred thousand Arabs. They do not ask themselves how a tiny avant-garde of Palestine socialists will lead the fifteen million of the Jewish Diaspora on an audacious historical adventure. Like Herbert Bentwich, the seventy-four Ein Harod pioneers are blessed and cursed with convenient blindness. They see the Arabs but they don’t. They see the marshes but they ignore them. They know that historic circumstances are unfavorable but they believe they will overcome them. Their ethos is one of steely defiance. Against all odds they set up camp in the valley and create Ein Harod.

  They are rebels, of course. But their revolution is at least sixfold. The seventy-four twenty-year-olds launching Ein Harod rebel against the daunting Jewish past of persecution and wandering. They rebel against the moldering Jewish past of a people living an unproductive life, at the mercy of others. They rebel against Christian Europe. They rebel against the capitalist world order. They rebel against Palestine’s marshes and boulders. They rebel against Palestine’s indigenous population. The Labor Brigade pioneers rebel against all forces that are jeopardizing Jewish existence in the twentieth century as they pitch their tents by the spring of Harod.

  I watch the encampment grow. First it is located by the spring, so that it will have absolute control over the valley’s water source. Weeks later, when the serfs of the Ein Jaloud hamlet give up and leave, the encampment is transplanted to the mountain slope, right next to the deserted stone houses. By now there are 150 comrades in the Labor Brigade kibbutz of Ein Harod. They occupy seventy cone-shaped white tents.

  At the center of each tent is a red iron pole from which hangs a kerosene lamp. Three metal beds covered with gray-brown military blankets surround the pole. There are no desks or chairs, but by each bed stands an improvised cupboard made of old wooden fruit boxes in which each pioneer places his or her few personal belongings. There is also one rifle in every tent, along with some ammunition. The barren soil is covered with white gravel, and a deep trench is dug around each tent to protect it from the rains soon to fall. Metal pegs secure each tent to the ground with taut military ropes.

  The young founders of Ein Harod are ecstatic. “It’s all astounding,” writes one of them. “I cannot but think of the sons of Israel in their tents in the desert. But this is our last stop. Here our wandering ends.” The excitement is not only personal but collective. The brigade builds the land shoulder to shoulder, male and female. The collective also dances and sings. At night, young legs are thrust up in the air. Young hands are bound together. Fac
es glow, eyes glitter. They dance in circles around a bonfire, as if dance is prayer. They dance as if the act of settling in the valley is of biblical significance. Shots of celebration pierce the air.

  The pitch-black night is now reddened by fire. The downtrodden villagers wonder who are these newcomers singing, dancing, shooting in the air. The astonished valley wonders where these nomads came from to pitch tents and dance wildly into the night, to awaken the dormant valley from its thousand-year sleep. Yet the gaiety of the dancing is misleading. The exhausted young pioneers who retire to their tents and collapse onto their metal beds are all orphans. They have cut themselves off from their roots and have turned their backs on their parents. Now they are fatherless, motherless, and godless. Their camp on the slopes of the Gilboa is very much an orphanage.

  After all, Zionism was an orphans’ movement, a desperate crusade of Europe’s orphans. As the unwanted sons and daughters of the Christian Continent fled the hatred of their surrogate mother, they discovered they were all alone in the world. Godless, parentless, and homeless, they had to survive. Having lost one civilization, they had to construct another. Having lost their homeland, they had to invent another. That is why they came to Palestine, and why they now cling to the land with such desperate determination.