They were a tough, wonderful, exciting group of young people, and if they had surrendered formal religion, they had found a substitute equally demanding: they were dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state that should be called Israel and that should be founded in social justice. There were no communists in Kfar Kerem, and there were actually those who preferred capitalism with its ever-present chance for a man to become rich, but most were like Ilana: “Our house is not really our house. It belongs to the settlement, and if we should move away the house will go to someone else just like us, which is only right. I work in the vineyard and I think of it as mine, but it really belongs to the settlement, too, and if I leave, other hands will tend the grapes. The important thing is that the land will continue.”
This was the real mystique of the group: the land will continue. “There were Jews on this land four thousand years ago,” Ilana often said, “and I am proud to be a part of that chain. When I’m gone more Jews will live on our land, for another four thousand years. It’s the land that counts.”
She often recalled the teachings of her grandfather, which were kept alive in Kfar Kerem in a small book which was published after his death and in which he spoke of his great difficulty in acquiring land, and of its significance to the Jews who first realized that it belonged to them:
I met them as they came overland from Akka and the Arabs gathered at the gates of Tiberias to watch them struggle through, and everyone began to laugh, for they were thin and undernourished, and many of the men’s backs were bent from much study in the yeshivas of Berdichev. Not even the Jews of Tiberias thought that such people could live on the land, beset by drought in some years, floods in others, and Bedouins all the time. But I swore that the Jews of Kfar Kerem—as I had named the new settlement—would master the land. And to that purpose I drove them constantly to watch how the Arabs tilled the land, to remember what tricks the Russians had used on their fields; and weeks and months would go by without my ever hearing the word Talmud, but the word land was before us at every waking hour.
Ilana explained to her husband, “After it was evident that my grandfather was going to succeed, many religious Jews tried to join the settlement, but when they saw how determined Shmuel was to keep Kfar Kerem a farm and not a countryside synagogue, they left in disgust and went up to Safad. My grandfather never allowed a synagogue in Kfar Kerem nor any merchants, and this was the first new settlement to use Hebrew. Shmuel never mastered the language … he spoke it like a little boy, some of the old people told me. But before he died he was conducting the settlement meetings in Hebrew. My own father refused me permission to speak Yiddish, and I’m thankful now. Of course, I’ve picked up the usual number of words and I understand it, but I’d be ashamed to speak it.”
Land was the goal, the land of Canaan and Israel, the ancient fields awarded by God to Naphtali and Issachar and Manasseh. One day when Ilana was riding in an armed truck with her husband toward Acre she saw those once-great farm lands that had deteriorated into malaria-ridden swamps, and she broke into tears: “It’s a crime against the land. This is what happens when Eretz Israel falls into alien hands. We Jews have got to win back all this land, and in three years we’ll make it fertile again. We shall have to fight for it, foot by foot, but we shall win because I can’t believe that God intended …”
“You confuse me when you speak of God,” Gottesmann had interrupted.
“Why?”
“Well, yesterday you said some pretty forceful things against religion. Today you speak as if God were going to give you the swampland.”
“Don’t you believe that God has chosen us to tend this land?”
“No,” Gottesmann replied.
“I do,” she snapped, and her husband decided to drop the matter. Yet it was apparent to him that Ilana had come to identify God with the land, not differentiating between the two, and as the truck bounced along he thought: This must be the way people believed five thousand years ago when the long progression to monotheism started. “God is the land, therefore we shall worship this hill,” and almost at once they discovered that between God and His land there had to be some agent of mediation, whereupon they invented priests and the priests led to rabbis, and the rabbis led to all that Ilana hates.
Now, in his new home, waiting for Teddy Reich and the decisions about Safad, Gottesmann acknowledged to Ilana that he had come partly around to her way of thinking. As he ate the last of the meat—it was a matter of pride among the sabra wives not to serve dessert—he confessed, “In the last few days I’ve decided that you’re right. The land comes first, and after we get it we can worry about the other problems.”
“You’re talking sense!” she cried excitedly, pushing the dishes aside. Propping her elbows on the table she leaned forward and the lines of anxiety about her eyes disappeared. “When we get hold of the land, Gottesmann …” Like many sabras she always addressed her husband by his last name, but in her case this custom also reflected her dislike for his first name.
“I have a feeling,” he continued, “that the next six weeks will decide whether we get the land or not.”
“Whether!” she cried. “Gottesmann, we must get the land. Are you afraid we won’t?”
“I’m a soldier,” he explained. “I know what it means … in a town like Safad … forty on the other side to one on our side …”
“But we must,” she said quietly. In great agitation she left the table and stalked about the room, a husky girl, handsome in feature and explosive in her new-felt power. She was not a tall girl, but she seemed to encompass in her tense body the strength of the fields her grandfather had conquered and protected. “God of Moses!” she whispered. “Let us recapture our land.”
Then Teddy Reich exploded into the new house, and all things changed. He was a young, one-armed German Jew of twenty-four, without an ounce of fat or a shred of illusion. He moved like a charged wire, sputtering and jerking as if animated by some writhing inner force. He had keen, cold eyes, a spare chin and a close-cropped head of black hair. He was only slightly taller than Ilana, which made him much shorter than Gottesmann, and he possessed one of the most daring minds in Galilee. He was accompanied by four men like himself, all tough German Jews, and a fifth who seemed noticeably out of place. This young fighter was actually rotund, had a soft round face, drooping shoulders and a perpetual grin. He was Nissim Bagdadi, and his last name betrayed both his origin and the fact that he alone, of all the eight in the room, was a Sephardi Jew.
“The word on Safad?” Reich demanded. Throwing himself urgently into a chair he grabbed a pencil and listened.
“I was there two days ago,” Gottesmann began.
“Difficulty?”
“Shot at going in and out.”
“In the countryside?”
“No. In the town.”
“That’s to be expected,” Reich hurled back. Ilana gasped. Gottesmann had not told her he had been fired at by the Arabs. He rarely spoke of his war experiences. Reich noticed the gasp and looked at Ilana. “What’s the place look like?” he snapped.
Gottesmann took one of Ilana’s steep-sided bowls and inverted it on the table. “Looks like this,” he explained in bad Hebrew. “This flat part on top, the Crusader ruins, held by Arabs. From here they dominate everything. Now imagine the sides divided into six segments—a pie. The Arabs hold five. We hold one … this little one. At this upper corner of our segment there’s a rugged stone house which the British have turned over to the Arabs, and here there’s a police station which we’re afraid the British will give them, too.” Glumly the eight Jews studied the impossible situation: only one section held by their people, and it dominated by the Crusader ruins, by the stone house and by the police station.
Then Gottesmann placed a tall book in back of the bowl. Jamming his fist on top of the book he said, “And back here, commanding everything, is the big new fortress built by the British. The Arabs are already moving in.”
Impatiently Teddy Reich reac
hed out with his one arm and swept everything aside. Book and bowl swept across the table, and the impregnable fortress, the stone house and the concrete police station were gone. “How many people are involved?” he barked.
“We have a definite count—1,214 Jews against about 13,400 Arabs. That’s 11.1 of the enemy to one of us.”
“Standard,” Reich grunted. “Will the Jews fight?”
“Two hundred and sixty might … if we can get them some guns.”
“How many have guns now?”
“One hundred and forty.”
“Better than I thought,” Reich cried. “Allon says Safad must be taken. We’ll move in that platoon hiding north of town.”
“Can a platoon do the trick?” Gottesmann asked.
“Simple,” Reich said, not looking up as he jotted notes. “Safad must be taken. To do it we can spare one platoon.” There was silence, then he added, “Gottesmann, if you left now, could you get to that platoon in the hills before dawn?”
“There’s no moon. If we push, we can make it.”
“Start now,” Reich directed as he continued his note-taking. “Tell them they must fight their way into Safad tomorrow night.”
“Very good,” was the reply, in German. If he had any emotional reaction to the difficult assignment he had just been handed, he showed nothing.
“You need any of my men?” Reich asked.
“I’ll take Ilana,” Gottesmann replied. Then he studied the four tough Ashkenazim, but decided against them. “And for our guide, Bagdadi.”
No one in the room spoke. Ilana, standing near the table, made no move.
Teddy Reich looked up from his writing, turned to inspect Ilana and Bagdadi, then nodded, after which he rose, kicked open a door and went into the bedroom, where he threw himself on the unmade bed and said, “While you’re gone we’ll use this as headquarters.” Before Gottesmann and his wife were out of the house he was asleep.
It was customary for members of the Palmach to carry, when engaged in military operations, loads of at least forty kilos each, but in view of the unusual difficulty to be encountered on this trip to Safad, Gottesmann gave himself and Bagdadi only thirty kilos each, sixty-six pounds, while Ilana volunteered to carry forty-four pounds. Normally a hike from Kfar Kerem to Safad could be handled with comfort by the well-trained Jews of the Palmach—an abbreviation for the Plugat Machatz, “striking force,” organized in 1941 to resist the threatened German invasion—for the roads were pleasant, the uphill climb invigorating and the distance only twenty-two miles; but tonight the three soldiers could not use the roads, for they were patrolled by armed Arabs who had killed several Jews attempting night missions. It was Gottesmann’s plan to start due west from Kfar Kerem, then to head north to the eastern flanks of the Horns of Hittim, cross the flat lands west of the lake and finally to penetrate the mountains on which Safad stood. It was an uphill trip of twenty-seven miles. The chances for success were not good, since four main roads had to be crossed. The countryside leading to them was rugged, and all had to be completed before four-thirty, when daylight would begin to break. If the travelers were caught in sunlight, the waiting Arabs could pick them off one by one, as they had the thirty-five Jews trapped in sunlight at Hebron.
But Gottesmann had picked Bagdadi as his third man for good reasons. The plump Iraqi was both skilled as a scout and valiant as a fighter. He knew the terrain well and had an animal sense of where an enemy might be attempting to spring a trap. Starting at a dogtrot, he quickly had his team heading away from the Sea of Galilee. Ilana, lugging a rifle and much ammunition, found no difficulty in keeping pace with the men, and whenever Gottesmann caught sight of her, head back, mouth tightly closed, he felt a rush of love for this exceptional girl who in normal times would have been at the university.
With deft maneuvers Bagdadi got his people across the first two roads leading into Tiberias from the west, then launched the hard climb up toward the Horns of Hittim, and as the sturdy trio reached the old Crusader battleground they could see below the sleeping city of Tiberias, which other Jews would try to capture within the next few days. When Gottesmann remarked on this, Ilana whispered, “May God give them victory,” but Gottesmann had already dismissed Tiberias and was thinking, as he ran, of the historic battle at Hittim which had determined so much history in this part of the world. It’s possible for a nation to make one wrong guess and lose its existence, he reflected. Is this attempt on Safad such a mistake? Bagdadi, apparently unbothered by history, pressed on, and the ancient battlefield was left behind as they headed north.
“Slow!” Bagdadi whispered, and the three Jews froze against the spring earth while a British scouting truck moved down the third of the main roads, its searchlight flashing aimlessly across the fields. Bagdadi kept everyone flat, and Gottesmann realized how much he appreciated the involuntary rest. When the light drifted harmlessly above them he noticed that Ilana had closed her eyes and was breathing deeply, but as soon as the truck passed, Bagdadi whispered, “We’re behind schedule,” and when they rose Gottesmann had to smile as his wife automatically brushed the sand from her khaki blouse and short khaki dress.
They now began a steady dogtrot along a fairly level course which carried them toward the hills but kept them well west of the main Tiberias–Safad road along the lake. These were the hours after midnight, and by pressing steadily Bagdadi recovered some of the time lost earlier, so that when they approached the stern hills on which Safad perched they knew that they had at least a chance of getting to the Palmach village before the sun came up. But now the going became brutal, for Safad lay nearly thirty-five hundred feet higher than Kfar Kerem, and they had to make their way through rocky fields, tempting though the nearby roadway was, but no one protested, for all could feel the still-sleeping sun almost pushing on their backs. When it rose it must not catch them in some gully.
They were now in the heart of Arab country, with small villages on every side, and Bagdadi was proving his skill in leading his team as far as possible from likely Arab marksmen. He halted the march and whispered, “From here to the last road will be difficult. Crossing it will be worse. Then we have a very steep climb. If we run into Arabs, what?”
“No firing,” Gottesmann warned. “Absolutely no firing.” He gave this order more to Bagdadi than to Ilana, for he knew her to be extremely cool under such conditions.
“No firing,” Ilana repeated, knowing what worried her husband.
“No firing,” Bagdadi promised as he started toward the road with swift head-down strides. It was difficult and painful work.
They passed one Arab village, then another, hearing only the dogs barking at the night. They came in sight of the road but held back, for it looked unusually ominous, as if snipers might be waiting, and as the three huddled in the darkness they saw something that was both exhilarating and frustrating. Above them, so close that it looked as if it could almost be touched, lay Safad, the lights of its Arab quarter brilliant in the night air. Each Jew wanted more than anything else to climb directly to the inviting town, to the critical focus of their movement, but each knew that he must duck and dodge for several more hours, must cross the dangerous road and then work his way silently into the safe hills north of the town where the Palmach waited. It was as difficult as turning away from the gates of a brightly lit dance when one was young.
“We go!” Bagdadi whispered, and they cut quickly across the exposed road and disappeared into the brown hills on the northern side, where Bagdadi kept his team running up the steep incline that would lead them eventually to the hills behind Safad.
It was now three in the morning, the eighth hour of their march, and Ilana was nearing exhaustion, but she took a small drink from a canteen that Bagdadi carried and shifted her rifle … “I’ll take it,” Gottesmann offered, but she grabbed it fiercely, bent forward and continued up the hill.
“Keep together,” Bagdadi warned. “Arab villages all around.” And for an hour, till his watch showed four, he
maintained his killing pace. Even Gottesmann was finding it difficult to stay up with the astonishing Iraqi, but to fall behind would be fatal, and they pressed forward as behind them the first gray light of dawn began to break.
Now Bagdadi’s judgment became crucial. Somewhere ahead lay the village held by the Palmach, but in between stood others filled with waiting Arabs, and to pick an accurate track through the intervening land, to avoid alerting Arab sentries and at the same time to prevent Palmach scouts from firing random shots, required delicate skill. The Iraqi moved slowly, testing the route, until Gottesmann, whose nerves were almost out of control, snapped, “God, man! Move!”
Gently, as if he were rebuking a child, Bagdadi said, “This is the time when we dare not choose wrong,” and like a clever fox smelling out the terrain he picked the only path that would take them between the waiting villages.
But as they reached a spot in the center of the Arab holdings an ugly period came when the sun, weary of night, began reaching for the horizon. It was four-twenty and twilight was about to begin. It was a moment of terror, for each of the three Jews could see the visible shape of the others … far too clearly. Ilana, wanting nothing more than to rest where she was, grew frightened as she saw her husband’s face looming out of the vanishing darkness: it was the face of a man who had driven himself to the edge of endurance, and he stopped running. He could go no more.
“We must go,” Bagdadi warned.
Gottesmann refused to move. He could drive his legs no farther, and he intended staying where he was, within the nest of Arab villages.
The Source: A Novel Page 115
