My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  Ideologically, activism means practicing revolutionary values in everyday life. Socially, activism is wrestling with human nature and changing the unjust order of things. Politically, activism is seizing the initiative and confronting the Arabs by force. But activism has an overall meaning that is far deeper than all that. Activism is the revolt of the Jews against the passivity of their past. It is the rebellion of the Jews against their tragic fate and against acceptance of their tragic fate. It is not a specific goal or target, but momentum. Activism is the momentum of doing, of moving forward. Activism is the last attempt of the Jews to resist oblivion. Activism is the desperate rebellion of Jewish life against Jewish death.

  Like Bentwich, Tabenkin is not a gentleman whose company I would enjoy. Personally, I cannot stand Soviet-type politicians, dogmatic revolutionaries, and leaders who preach but don’t practice. Yet as I go over Tabenkin’s old photographs in the Ein Harod archives, I am far more forgiving. There is something fascinating about the man. He does not have Ben Gurion’s political genius. He does not have the intellectual depth of some other founding fathers of Zionism. He does not have the impressive work ethic and moral rectitude of his fellow rank-and-file comrades in Ein Harod. But there is fire in his belly. More than any other Zionist leader in Palestine, he understands the Diaspora and feels for the Diaspora. More than any other local socialist-Zionist leader, he is Jewish. Even when he rails against Judaism, he does so as a Jew. Even when he rises up against religion, he rises up religiously. There is so much God in the godless Tabenkin as he assaults God and dismisses God and tries to create a God-free, godless world.

  That’s why, in the early 1920s, Tabenkin is the link between the events in the Valley of Harod and the events in Eastern Europe. That’s why Tabenkin talks to the valley’s youth on behalf of the Diaspora, and talks to the Diaspora on behalf of the valley’s youth. That’s why, day in and day out, Tabenkin wonders whether the work being done in the valley will be sufficient, whether the valley’s youth will have enough in them to pull European Jewry from the deadly ocean in which it is drowning.

  On its first anniversary, Ein Harod celebrates its success. By now the year-old kibbutz has mastered 8,390 dunams of cultivated land. Grain takes up 7,000 dunams, olive tree groves and vineyards 450 dunams, the vegetable garden 200. There are over 600 dunams of forest, with 14,000 eucalyptus trees, 2,000 pine trees, and 1,000 cypresses, which cover the inclines of Mount Gilboa with the first green shoots of hope.

  There are nearly three hundred comrades in Ein Harod in the summer of 1922. Apart from Tabenkin and a few others, the age range is from nineteen to twenty-five. Two hundred white, cone-shaped tents house a young, thriving, and energetic community that is transforming the valley and the lives of its inhabitants. Four other new kibbutzim are now flourishing in the valley. Momentum is fast and strong; there is not a force in sight to stop it.

  Many now come to see the wonder. As the Ein Harod experiment becomes world famous, it attracts attention in Jewish communities and progressive circles worldwide. Some compare its revolutionary ways to those being tried in the young USSR. Some see it as providing the only example of successful, democratic socialism. When one of Zionism’s leading lights arrives for a day-long visit, he thinks in different terms. Deeply touched, the national moral leader says the following:

  From the nation’s valley of death rose a new generation. This generation finds life’s meaning in toiling our ancestor’s land and reviving our ancient tongue. The draining of the Harod swamps, which only covered the land after our people were forced to go into exile, is a true wonder. But this wonder also symbolizes the draining of the swamp our nation was bogged down in during two millennia of exile. You, the pioneers of Harod, are the heroes of the new generation. What you are doing is healing the land and healing the nation. You are taking us back to the source.

  Yet the listening comrades are not heroes. What’s remarkable about them is their lack of heroism. Practical and down-to-earth, they know they must do whatever must be done, but there is no self-aggrandizement about them, no sentimentality, no smugness. Caught in a drama larger than themselves, they simply carry on. Another furrow, another acre, another swamp, until the valley is truly theirs. Until the land is once again the Land of Israel.

  But there is one feature of the landscape that does not yet retreat. The serfs of Ein Jaloud are gone, but the serfs of Shatta remain, living by the railway station right in the center of the valley. And the villagers of Nuris menacingly overlook Ein Harod from the mountaintop. The villagers of Zarin are actually doing quite well as the valley booms. The friendly neighbors of Tel Fir and those of Komay are multiplying now, as the anopheles mosquitoes are no longer here to take the lives of their young. The Bedouins, too, find the valley more attractive now. As summer peaks, they pitch their black tents in the northern part of the valley. Their herds of sheep foray into the fields, and their young, armed horsemen terrify the kibbutz girls. So mission is not yet accomplished. There is indeed a solid Jewish base in the valley. Five different kibbutzim have begun to establish one of the first strips of Jewish territorial continuity in the country. But the work isn’t done. The Arabs of the Harod Valley still stand in the way of the Jewish liberation movement that needs to remove them from this valley.

  At noon on April 17, 1926, the working day is cut short in the Valley of Harod, and the last blast is heard in the quarry. An hour later all harvesting stops in the fields. The young comrades of Ein Harod are called back to camp. So are the young comrades of the neighboring Tel Yosef, Gvat, Beit Alpha, and Hephzibah. Throughout the valley, kibbutz members are showering, shaving, and donning their white Shabbat outfits. Back in the quarry a wooden stage is set up. By four o’clock all is ready. The old piano is on the stage decorated with green palm leaves. By horse, by mule, by carriage, by wagon, and on foot, thousands of pioneers flock to the valley quarry turned amphitheater.

  From day one, the rough Labor Brigade pioneers of Ein Harod have had a soft spot for all things musical. One of them has an explanation. “The playing of classical music fills the void in our lives,” he writes.

  The time of music is the only time that our communal dining room resembles a place of worship. There is a reason for that. Leaving God behind caused a terrible shock to us all. It destroyed the basis of our lives as Jews. This became the tragic contradiction of our new life. We had to start from scratch and build a civilization from the very foundation. Yet we had no foundation to build on. We had no Ultimate. Above us there were blue skies and a radiant sun, but no God. That’s the truth we couldn’t ignore and cannot ignore for a moment. That is the void. And music for us is an attempt to fill the void. When the sounds of violins fill our dining hall, they reacquaint us with life’s other dimension. They raise the deepest, forgotten feelings buried in all of us. Our eyes close, turn inward, and an aura almost of sanctity enwraps us all.

  Just a few months earlier, in the late autumn, the first quarry concert was held. Thousands gathered from all over the valley to hear the local choir and string quartet play Beethoven, Bach, and Mendelssohn. A local teacher said that on this great day the mountains of Gilboa were revived. A young girl read Ezekiel’s Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. And all were silent as the tall, lanky violinist of Ein Harod played Bach against the backdrop of the quarry’s walls. But today is different. Today it is Jascha Heifetz who is about to play.

  Heifetz was born in 1901 in the Lithuanian capital of Vilna. He began playing the violin at three, and by the time he was seven he played Mendelssohn’s concerto brilliantly in public. At the age of twelve he was considered one of Europe’s musical prodigies, and at the age of sixteen—a week before the Balfour Declaration was issued—he made his legendary American debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Now an American citizen and star, Heifetz is to the music of the twenties what Chaplin is to comedy and Einstein to physics. An astounding talent; a rare incarnation of man’s extraordinary, almost divine gift.

  That’s why the Harod
Valley pioneers are so excited. It’s not only that they appreciate music and regard it as almost sacred. It’s not only that music is the one thing that allows them to let go and allows suppressed pain and longing to moisten their eyes. It’s also the fact that the world’s most renowned violinist recognizes the importance of their endeavor by giving a concert in their remote quarry. It’s the fact that the best that secular Jewish Diaspora civilization has produced is about to pay homage to their audacious attempt to create a new secular Jewish civilization in the valley. Heifetz is Heifetz, but he is also Jascha, one of us. One who rose from the misery and despair of the Jewish past and the Jewish present and has distilled his genius from them. One who has escaped the hopelessness of Eastern Europe and chosen America. So when this brilliant cousin chooses to acknowledge his fellow young Jews who are escaping what he escaped in a very different way and in a very different place, even the toughest among the Labor Brigade comrades are beside themselves. They feel that a biblical-like spectacle is about to happen.

  There are thousands and thousands of them now, packing the makeshift seats of hard, gray boulders. And when Heifetz arrives at last, I watch both the maestro and his ecstatic audience. Both the violinist and the pioneers are as old as the century. Both the violinist and the pioneers will become the century’s icons. They tell the century’s Jewish tale. And when the young men and women of Harod stand up and clap and cheer, the Vilna boy, who cannot start playing until they quiet down, is truly touched. Although he is a cold, perfectionist performer, he is overwhelmed. And between the young man standing on the improvised stage and the young masses standing in the improvised amphitheater, there is suddenly an intimate dialogue. The two great forces, the two sorts of creative energies that erupted dramatically out of modern Jewish distress and that represent the two great choices of the Jewish people in the twentieth century, face each other. In the quarry of the Valley of Harod, one bows to the other.

  But as Heifetz stretches his arm to pull the bow across the strings, I think of all that is to happen in the valley.

  In three years’ time, the firstborns of Ein Harod will crouch for days in the first cement-built dairy, hiding from the gunfire of Arab neighbors.

  In nine years’ time, the Arab villagers of Shatta will be forced to leave their homes by the railway station, and a new kibbutz will take their place.

  In ten years’ time—to the day—the valley’s fields will be set on fire by Arabs who suddenly realize how far the Jews have come. Watching the burning fields, the firstborns of Ein Harod will harden their hearts.

  In twelve years’ time, in Ein Harod, the first elite Anglo-Jewish commando unit will be founded. The unit will raid Arab villages at night, killing some of their civilian inhabitants.

  A few months later, a landmark Jewish sergeants’ course will be launched in Ein Harod. The course will lay the very first foundation for Israel’s future army.

  In twenty years’ time, Ein Harod—and the forces it gave birth to—will have real military might. In twenty-two years, that military might will attack the villages of Nuris, Zarin, and Komay. It will drive all Palestinian inhabitants out of the valley.

  As Heifetz plays and his music reverberates in the hushed quarry, I wonder at the incredible feat of Ein Harod. I think of the incredible resilience of the naked as they faced a naked fate in a naked land. I think of the astonishing determination of the orphans to make a motherland for themselves—come hell or high water. I think of that great fire in the belly, a fire without which the valley could not have been cultivated, the land could not have been conquered, the State of the Jews could not have been founded. But I know that the fire will blaze out of control. It will burn the valley’s Palestinians and it will consume itself, too. Its smoldering remains will eventually turn Ein Harod’s exclamation point into a question mark.

  I close the Heifetz file in Ein Harod’s dilapidated archives and go out into the early evening air. I have supper with my dear elderly relatives. I wander the paths of the deteriorating kibbutz. Over the last thirty years, it has lost its way. The economic base of Ein Harod collapsed and its social fabric frayed. Most of the young have left; most of the elderly are aging in despair. The collective dining room is empty, the collective children’s homes are closed, and the collective spirit is gone. Just as the kibbutz rose, the kibbutz fell. So as I look out at the spring down below and at the mountain ridge casting its shadow, I realize it’s a spring-or-mountain question: Triumphant Gideon or defeated Saul? But my question is not yet answered as the dying light caresses the darkening Valley of Harod.

  * * *

  * A dunam is a traditional unit of land measurement representing the area that could be plowed in a day. It is approximately equivalent to a quarter of an acre.

  (photo credit 3.1)

  THREE

  Orange Grove, 1936

  ORANGES HAD BEEN PALESTINE’S TRADEMARK FOR CENTURIES. IN THE 1850s, a new variety of orange was discovered in the citrus groves of Jaffa, and by 1890 the new Shamouti orange—large, oval, and juicy—had found its way to Queen Victoria’s table. By 1897, when Herbert Bentwich disembarked at the remote port of Jaffa, the same grizzled stevedores who took him ashore were already loading thousands of crates of Shamouti oranges (now called Jaffa oranges) each winter onto Liverpool-bound ships. After World War I, the new awareness of the virtues of vitamin C brought about a dramatic rise in the demand for citrus fruit throughout Europe. In 1925 there were only 30,000 dunams of citrus groves in Palestine; two years later there were nearly twice as many, and two years after that, by 1929, they had multiplied yet again to 87,000 dunams. By 1935 there were 280,000 dunams of citrus groves in Palestine. Within a decade, citrus growing in Palestine had risen almost tenfold. The small province, now under the British Mandate, had become a powerhouse of citrus export, so much so that in 1935, one-third of the oranges imported to Great Britain were Jaffa oranges.

  The colony of Rehovot discovered the virtues of citrus in the 1920s. Rehovot was founded in 1890 on 10,600 dunams of the Ottoman feudal estate of Duran, situated some fifteen miles southeast of Jaffa. After the barren land was purchased and the Bedouins occupying it were evicted, it was taken over by Russian and Polish Jews hoping to find peace and plenty in the land of Israel. The settlers did well. Rehovot was a place where Orthodox and secular, rich and poor, Ashkenazi and Yemenite Jews lived side by side in relative harmony. Its Jewish inhabitants lived in peace with their Arab neighbors, too. By 1935 the rapidly growing colony of Rehovot was the most prosperous Jewish colony in Palestine, leading the citrus industry, which in turn was leading the country into an unprecedented boom.

  Rehovot and orange groves were a perfect match. Rehovot’s loamy red hamra soil suited the citrus trees because its unique combination of sand, silt, and clay holds plenty of moisture but also drains well, so that sufficient air can reach the trees’ delicate roots. Rehovot’s moderate climate was also well suited to the trees, since it was not too warm when the trees blossomed in spring and not too cold or windy in winter, when they bore fruit. Rehovot was rich with the water that the citrus trees badly needed, and it was close to the port of Jaffa. Rehovot embraced free-market principles, thrived on private enterprise, and had a cheap and efficient labor force provided by neighboring Arab villages. Rehovot also benefited from the cutting-edge scientific knowledge of the mostly German-Jewish agronomists working in its newly established agricultural institute. Those agronomists introduced the efficient Californian method of cultivation. Rehovot was where Western know-how, Arab labor, and laissez-faire economics merged to make the Jaffa orange a world-renowned brand. So while Europe and America were still in the grip of the Great Depression, Jaffa oranges and quickening immigration to Palestine made Rehovot prosper. And while hundreds of thousands of uprooted Jews couldn’t find a home in Europe or America, those who had chosen Rehovot were flourishing. In Rehovot of the early 1930s, the optimal conditions of Palestine met the benign aspirations of modern Zionism.

  The part
icular orange grove whose story I will tell was planted in 1931. A small fortune bequeathed to the owner by his English-Jewish father-in-law enabled him to buy seventy dunams of land from the villagers of Qubeibeh in the Valley of Dew on a hilly plot overlooking Rehovot, north of the railway. First he plowed the barren wasteland. Then he hired beret-wearing Jewish socialists and kaffiyeh-wearing Palestinian Arabs to rid the land of obstinate poisonous weeds. He commissioned one of the roaming bands of well diggers to dig a water well. But only when the excited diggers shouted that they had found water did he know that the land was indeed suitable for planting. He marked out the land meticulously with white ropes and wooden stakes. And every four meters he dug a half-meter hole, in which he planted lemon rootstock that he had brought over from a nearby nursery. He covered the plantlings with soil, which he tamped down and watered. Then he and his delicate, sun-shy, English-born wife stood in front of a weighty Kodak camera and took a picture of hope.

  Several months later, the Rehovot farmer grafted Shamouti branches onto the lemon rootstock. He gently affixed the Shamouti to the lemon and tamped the soil again, and watered and fertilized and prayed that the winds would not hit, that the hail would not despoil. Only after a long year of apprehension did the orange grower see that the grafting had gone well: the Shamouti and lemon had become one, and the fragile saplings had been welcomed by the red soil. So he and his elegant English wife stood once again between the long rows of budding trees in front of the Kodak camera and took another picture, of a hesitant beginning: the young couple, he in a pressed khaki suit, she in a bias-cut silk dress, standing beside the tentative orange saplings that had risen from a bare land.