The Sword And The Olive

by van Creveld, Martin

  Although joined by some recent immigrants, especially from Egypt, Lebanon, and Algeria,11 most of the Arab population had been living in the area for centuries. Although not in possession of formal title,12 it had often been using the land in question for hunting, grazing, wood-gathering, and the like, a problem not at all unique to Palestine but one with consequences felt equally in countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In fact, the difference between the formal, individual, Western landowning system and the antiquated, informal, family- or clan-based one prevailing in much of the Ottoman empire persists in much of the West Bank and even in parts of the Negev Desert, where it sometimes gives rise to conflicts. At that time it often led to quarrels over grazing rights, water holes, rights to fruit- bearing trees, and the like, as well as plain theft and robbery.13 The unsettled conditions created a demand for guards—who in the best Ottoman tradition themselves sometimes turned robber and blackmailed their employers. Many of them were Circessians, members of a Muslim people who had left their native Caucasus during the 1870s to avoid coming under Russian rule. Though they had since become acclimatized, they still retained their separate identity, as they do to the present day.

  MAP 1.1 JEWISH SETTLEMENTS IN PALESTINE, 1914

  Apart from the desire to escape pogroms and poverty, the newly arrived Jewish settlers also brought with them certain ideas. Prominent among them was the need to leave the traditional Jewish occupations such as innkeeping, small-scale trading, lending, and the like, into which they had been driven by centuries of persecution as well as the prohibition on owning land. This situation had supposedly created a race of Luftmenschen (Yiddish for air men), that is, a race of petty hagglers whose souls were as arid, as cramped, and as devoid of wider vistas as the shtetels in which they spent their lives.14 Taking up the anti-Semitic stereotypes created by the societies in which they were born, some early Zionists even went so far as to claim that Jews did not know how to dress, walk, or behave themselves.15 In any case they dreamed of taking up agriculture, both as a way to earn an honest living without the need for intermediaries and to regenerate individually and as a community.

  Along with the declared preference for an agricultural way of life came socialist and even communist ideas. (Throughout the period between 1880 and 1917, Jews, hoping that a brave new society would do away with discrimination, were prominent in the movements that led to the Russian Revolution.) 16 Some of these ideas derived from books—first those of Saint Simon and Fourier—whose solution to the problems of this world was the establishment of self-contained agricultural communities—and later those of Marx. However, probably the most important motive behind the adoption of socialism and collective forms of settlement such as the moshavim and kibbutsim was the fact that the purchasing agencies normally made land available to groups rather than to individuals. Another was the practical problems that the immigrants faced in their new country. Young, penniless, and often acquainted with each other from back home, they clustered together in search of work and a place to live. This was carried to the point that entire families might occupy a single shanty and two people shared a pair of boots.

  Although the Old Testament has plenty to say about war and warfare, during the period of the Diaspora (starting in 70 A.D.) any idea of organized Jewish military action appeared almost entirely preposterous. Hence, and beginning already around 200 A.D., a long line of scholars had begun removing all reference to it from Jewish thought, even to the point where their exegesis turned King David from a commander into a scholar and his band of champions from soldiers into yeshive students.17 During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the wind began to change. In Thessaloniki and elsewhere, a few rabbis came under the influence of the Greek and Italian struggles for independence. They started looking forward to the day when the Jews too would set out to reconquer their ancient country, weapons in hand.18 After midcentury such ideas were no longer rare. In 1862 the well-known Pomeranian rabbi Tsvi Kalisher followed up his Palestinian journey by publishing Greetings from Zion, drawing up a comprehensive and, as he claimed, divinely inspired plan for the Jewish resettlement of Palestine. In the process, “battle-worthy guards” would have to be mounted to prevent the “tent-dwelling” sons of Yishmael from “destroying the seed and uprooting the vineyards.”19

  But whereas Kalisher and his followers were strictly orthodox—much later, they were to found the MAFDAL (National Religious Party)—many of the Zionists who followed him had freed themselves from their parents’ religious beliefs and were strongly secular-minded, even atheistic. In their hands the longing for settling the country, including the establishment of some kind of Jewish army, did not link up with the Torah but with Jewish history, particularly during the Hellenistic and Roman periods with which many of them were familiar from their school days. Hence, for example, the sudden popularity of “Maccabee” (Maccabean) and “Bar Kochva” (after the leader of an anti-Roman Revolt in 132-135 A.D.) as names for Jewish student associations and the like—to say nothing of a Viennese sports club known simply as Ha-koach (The Force). It was in this context, too, that the story of Masada was resurrected.20 Of all the ancient sources that describe the Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 66-73 A.D., Jewish as well as non-Jewish, the only one to mention Masada is Josephus. During the Diaspora centuries the episode was all but ignored by Jewish scholarship, which did not approve of suicide under any circumstances. In the hands of the chalutsim (pioneers) it was revived, however, until it became inflated into a symbol of national heroism—“again Masada will not fall.”

  When the Biluyim, whose role in Zionism is akin to that of the Mayflower Pilgrims in the English settlement of North America, arrived in 1882, their “constitution” already included a clause concerning the need to master the use of weapons for self-defense.21 A few years later one of their number, Yaakov Cohen, wrote a poem about the need to “deliver our country by the force of arms.” Having fallen “by blood and fire,” Judaea would likewise rise “by blood and fire.”22 In this way he unwittingly coined a slogan that would be adopted by some of the ancestors of today’s Likud Party.

  From 1880 on, the contrast between the supposedly cowardly “Diaspora Jew” who “avoided the ranks of heroes”23 and the courageous Israelites depicted in the biblical Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel A, and Samuel B became a stock-in-trade of Hebrew literature. Thus, in 1905, the poet Chayim Bialik was sent by the Zionist organization of his native Odessa to report on the pogroms that had taken place in the Ukrainian town of Kishinev. The outcome was a famous poem named “Be-ir Ha-hariga” (“In the City of Slaughter”). While wasting few words on the gentile rowdies it described the Jewish victims as “hiding in shitholes.” Not only did they refuse to move a finger even when their wives were raped in front of their eyes, but later they came running to the rabbis to ask whether those same wives could still be sexually approached or not. Another poet, Shaul Tshernichovsky, wrote ballads celebrating the heroism of King Saul on the eve of his death in the Battle of Gilboa. Yet another, Yehuda L. Gordon, sang the praise of Jewish paragons from King David through the Maccabeans all the way to the rebels of 67-70 A.D., whom he depicted as fighting the lions in the Coliseum. Later the work of all three poets, but the former two in particular, formed part of the official curriculum and were studied by generations of schoolchildren. All three still have streets named after them in every major Israeli city, as does Max Nordau, the best-selling Zionist author who invented the term yahadut shririm (muscular Jewry) to describe the type of person he dreamed about.

  The scion of an assimilated bourgeois family in Vienna and a dyed-inthe-wool liberal, Theodor Herzl, as the founder of modern Zionism, was less enthusiastic about arms, armies, and heroic deeds. In The Jewish State, his most important programmatic work, he did not envisage the people’s return to their country as an enterprise to be carried out by force. Instead he emphasized the role of Jewish capital and Jewish know-how; indeed when he visited Palestine in 1898 he could see for
himself that they were already beginning to revive the country. Concerning the military, all he had to say was that the coming state would be neutral (presumably he had Switzerland in mind) and would only need a small army that, however, would be provided “with every requisite of modern warfare” for keeping internal and external order.24 Still, in the privacy of his diaries even he took a different line and allowed his imagination to run wild. As a young man he had enjoyed the pseudo-martial strutting associated with student life;25 now he noted that the new state should permit dueling so as to help restore the Jews’ long-lost sense of honor.26 A born impresario, he discussed the military ceremonies, tattoos, and parades that would be held to uplift the masses and imbue them with the proper martial spirit27 and speculated about the color of the breeches to be worn by the Jewish cavalry force.

  Prior to their arrival, a few of the immigrants had been members of improvised gangs in their Russian hometowns. They did their best to put up some kind of resistance to the pogroms and also engaged in what they called “national terror”—meaning occasional assassination attempts directed at prominent anti-Semites.28 Convinced that force could be met only with force, it was these people who, in 1907, established the two earliest self-defense organizations: Bar Giora (after a leader in the Great Revolt against the Romans in 67-73 A.D.) and Ha-shomer (The Guard), into which the former was later absorbed. Their leader was one Joshua Chankin, then aged forty-three, who had lived in the country since 1881. With his black beard and haunted look he bore a faint resemblance to Rasputin; as a land-purchasing agent working for the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) he had access to funds. His closest comrades were one Yisrael Shochet and one Yitschak Ben Tsvi. The former was a charismatic character, a strict disciplinarian, and possessed of a strongly independent mind; this last quality would cause him to be pushed aside when Jewish self-defense became institutionalized after World War I. The latter, a mild and scholarly man, proved a better survivor and lived to become Israel’s second president in 1952.

  Self-defense apart, the first concern of the shomrim or “guards” was to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the small towns from which they came and that, to them, stood for everything that was base, cowardly, and weak. Accordingly they modeled themselves on the Circessians, who enjoyed a reputation for bravery and whose place, after all, they sought to take. They grew mustaches and put on Arabic dress including kefiye (headgear), shabariye (a curved hunting knife with grooves to take the blood), and a bullet-studded bandoleer. Some also set out to acquire at least a smattering of Arabic language and culture—including the establishment in many settlements of a madfa (guest room) where visiting Arabs would be served coffee and engaged in long, leisurely, conversations.29 Precisely because they represented a vital part of the Guards’ attempt to create a new self-image, these affectations were by no means universally welcomed by the established Jewish population. To them, the attempt to replace a crowd of real Arabs with their Jewish imitators seemed either reprehensible or ludicrous.30

  Partly by persuasion, partly by less reputable methods such as mounting raids and thus displaying the inadequacy of the existing security arrangements, Ha-shomer was able to take over guard duties in a considerable number of Jewish settlements. As is apt to happen in such situations, it was by no means always entirely clear whether the sums they received (usually very paltry, but often combined with room and board) represented wages or protection money; on at least one occasion they even threatened to kill some farmers who would not take them on.31 Riding horses and carrying rifles, pistols, sabers, and sometimes merely sticks, the shomrim engaged in occasional skirmishes—brawls might be a better term—with Arab intruders, horse thieves, and the like. From time to time there were casualties on both sides. However, the shomrim understood that the objective of Arab “warfare” during those years was booty rather than blood. Hence overall violence was held within bounds and the matter was usually settled by holding a sulcha or “reconciliation ceremony.”

  A highly secretive, elitist organization—it held its initiation rites in dark caves lighted by candles32—at peak Ha-shomer itself numbered approximately a hundred members. Its hard core, some ten or twelve in number, originated in Chankin’s own hometown, Gomel, and were related to each other by blood or marriage. However, it did not admit “ordinary” people—including, as it happened, a black-haired, stocky, recent immigrant by the name of David Gruen (later David Ben Gurion), who apparently refused to swear unconditional allegiance to the organization and its leaders.33 Ha-shomer was by no means sufficient to mount guard over the Jewish agricultural settlements that, though small and comparatively few in number, were already coming to be scattered all over the country. Accordingly, the nucleus of true shomrim was supplemented by several hundred others who were not members but whom the organization, acting as a contractor, hired and put to work. Funding came from the various Jewish land-acquisition companies that, through their agents, advanced money for purchasing arms. For example, a rifle cost 120 French francs and a horse 400; a major item of expenditure consisted of an insurance fund of 7,000 francs, which was meant to cover any claims for compensation that might arise from the Guards failing in their duty. Conversely, the farmers who hired the organization’s services undertook to pay it 40-120 francs a month for each Guard (payment varying on whether or not he was mounted). In addition, one mejida (a small Turkish coin) was owed in case the farmer himself proved negligent by leaving gates open and the like.34

  The organization’s name notwithstanding, even at this early stage the line separating defense from offense proved difficult to maintain. In addition to its declared task of guarding the settlements, Ha-shomer provided escorts for men and women traveling from one place to another. Chasing away intruders and recovering stolen property such as horses, mules, and livestock easily translated into hot pursuit, ambushes, and the like.35 It also translated into vendettas (gum in Arabic) with neighboring clans, who sought to avenge their members who had been wounded or killed by the Jahud (Jews). Gaining confidence—also as a result of self-designed training exercises—the organization’s members sometimes initiated punitive expeditions or simply raids in order to acquire arms from their enemies. They also helped settlers clear newly acquired or disputed plots, an operation that then and later was known under the grandiloquent name of “conquering [i.e., settling] the land.”

  A typical “conquest” took place in the summer of 1909 at Kfar Tabor near the mountain of that name.36 Twenty-five Ha-shomer members—a huge force for those days—were concentrated together with arms, plows (for opening the land and thus marking it), and draft mules. A morning parade was held and those present took an oath to conquer or die; equally important, a field kitchen was improvised and staffed by the men’s sisters, girlfriends, and wives. In fact, a handful of women had been members of Ha-shomer from the beginning; others were brought in as dependents of individual shomrim. In both capacities they took their share of the primitive life, not seldom at the cost of considerable physical hardship that in turn led to miscarriages. Nevertheless, they were almost entirely confined to auxiliary tasks such as cooking, doing the laundry, nursing (and, in the person of Shochet’s wife, Manya, bookkeeping), a situation about which they not infrequently complained.37

  Arriving on the spot, the Guards followed their preprepared plans and divided into two groups. While the one plowed, the other engaged in a rock-throwing exchange with some members of the local Zbich clan and, displaying their weapons, drove them off. Next the two groups reunited and sat down to a picnic that, to judge by the loving detail in which it is described, was by no means the least important part of the proceedings. The Arabs watched from a safe distance. Later they returned, claiming and, in the end, obtaining38 pecuniary compensation for land on which they had been living for centuries but that, having been sold beneath their feet, they could no longer defend. Throughout the operation, which from beginning to end lasted six days, not a Turkish soldier or policeman appears
to have presented himself.

  Not all “conquest” operations were so cozy or ended without bloodshed. In February 1911 another group of Ha-shomer members sought to establish themselves in a place named Merchavia in the Valley of Esdraelon. Ten thousand dunam (ten square kilometers) of land having been purchased by Chankin in his capacity as a JCA agent, a force of twenty Guards set out. The head of the local Sulam clan tried to make them pay protection money; failing this, harassment began, and the next three months witnessed a number of skirmishes. After an incident in which two Arabs died and a Guard’s horse was wounded, their fellow clansmen (“hundreds” of them, if the Jewish participants’ memoirs may be trusted) assembled and mounted an attack. Conducted mainly with old-fashioned rifles and accompanied by much shouting, demonstrations of horsemanship, and the like, the “battle” lasted for six hours; at that point Turkish policemen arrived from Nazareth, rescued the Jews by arresting them, and left the Arabs to plunder what remained of the settlement. An investigation was launched and, after more than a year, led to the release of the shomrim and the reestablishment of Merchavia. According to an anonymous quote in the official Hagana history,39 supposedly the episode “proved to the Arabs that Jews could not simply be robbed; people spoke admiringly of the Jew who heroically resisted a whole bunch of robbers.”