The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  He looked at them in the quiet manner of a man old enough so that it is not for himself he is concerned.

  “It is not our way,” Galil explained, “to have others do our labor for us. We are Jews of a different kind.”

  “You have new machines, and money,” the son said.

  “We have not come to make things worse for you. The land was bought in good faith. But we must think what to do so that you will not be the worse for it.”

  The discussion dragged on, and turned to questions of crops, and weather, and circled back to the question of their houses, while Zeira smiled wryly as if to say: what worth could these hovels have? Still, the three cups of coffee were consumed, and though the son became more sullen, the greeting of peace was exchanged on parting.

  Even Dr. Lubin himself came from Jaffa for the sitting. The villagers, Zeira cried, were demanding inordinate prices for their hovels, as though they were palaces of marble. And they demanded also to be paid for considerable areas of land which they claimed they still cultivated.

  “We’ve already paid for the land, hovels and all! How many times do we have to buy it!” Shabbatai was for showing strength and simply moving them off; otherwise there would be no end! If an Arab grew a single melon on a piece of land, he would claim an enormous field forever.

  On the other side, one of the young chalutzim of the new kvutsa that was to go out and settle the land said, “Why not let them stay there?” He, and his chaverim too, he was sure, had not come to Eretz to drive the Arabs from their homes. The tract of land was large enough—why not let the Arab village remain, and let the fellaheen keep the patches of land they were cultivating, while the kvutsa redeemed the rest?

  Over this, a debate arose.—It would never work!—Had it ever been tried? Why shouldn’t it work?—Were there not Jewish and Arab villages side by side near Jaffa?—But the land was bought and paid for, why should it be given back?

  —The policy of the Settlement Office on this problem, Dr. Lubin interposed, was clear. If people had to be moved from land that was acquired, then substitute land must be bought for them. Obviously, it was impossible to settle large areas without disturbing a single inhabitant, but it was better to be over-generous, even to pay both the owner and the tenant, rather than cause hatred and strife. Indeed, Yehoshua Ostrov had already spoken with the Houranis in Nazareth, and it was possible to acquire a hillside tract from them, quite suitable for the dozen families that had to be moved.

  “So we have to pay not once or twice but three times!” Zeira muttered, pulling at his fierce mustache, first one end, then the other.

  “Not if we leave them some land and let them stay where they are,” said the young idealist.

  Now Galil rose to speak. In his eager, almost sputtering, way of talking, he poured the whole future before the newcomers. What they must think about was not only this immediate problem of moving a dozen families some twenty kilometers to a site that would in any case be healthier for them, but they must think about the whole relationship of the two peoples in this land. Not long ago he and Nadina had ridden the entire length of it. It was a land sparsely populated, but it was not uninhabited. True, in ancient times this land had supported ten times the present population and more. Now much of the land was gone to ruin, and all those sitting here had come to redeem it. Wasn’t that the first object? What had he and Nadina seen? They had seen entire areas that were waste, like the shorelands, like the Emek before them where only patches were still cultivated, like the hills of upper Galilee, like the Beersheba region in the south. They had also seen areas that were well-tended and blooming, as in the region of Samaria. For what had happened in the recent past? The Arab population in the lowlands had thinned out because of poverty and disease. They had left the lowlands where swamps came in the rainy season, and it was therefore in these areas that redemption was taking place. Chedera was an example of it, Petach Tikvah was an example of it, and here before them was the whole Emek of Jezreel.

  What should be the future course? They must redeem areas and make them Jewish areas. Thus in a concentration of population, a culture could grow, a people could grow, their institutions could grow. With his whole heart, Galil declared, he believed that Jews and Arabs would live on good terms in this land, side by side, but he did not see that they would intermingle as one. “Our ways of life are different. Our ways of thinking are different. We can complement each other, but each wants to remain what he is—and to try to become a single, combined people would destroy the very ideal that brought us here, to redeem and rebuild ourselves as Jews, while we redeem and rebuild the land.” Therefore, as he saw it, even in this immediate example that faced them, the policy should be to encourage two lines of development, Jews with Jews, Arabs with Arabs. He did not mean estrangement or a principle of separation. In the towns and cities Arabs and Jews would do business together, have constant contact. But here, for the small group of Arabs themselves, how would they feel eventually in a whole area of Jewish settlement? Wouldn’t there always be the danger, as in the Baron’s early villages, of the Arabs becoming the economic dependents of the Jews, becoming the toilers of the lowest order, even alongside a communa? Therefore he was in favor of resettling these few families among Arabs near Nazareth, though it meant paying three times over.

  Still, not all the Arabs agreed to move, and the negotiations dragged on. It was Shabbatai Zeira who found a way to put an end to it. With Achmed Bey, the Bimbashi in Nazareth, things could be arranged. It would cost far less than the exorbitant prices the Arabs were demanding for their huts. And there would be no accusation that Jews drove them out.

  One day Achmed Bey and a troop of gendarmes appeared in the village, threatening to seize the houses and all that was in them for non-payment of taxes. Goats and sheep would also be seized. He left his two gendarmes in the village and gave the mukhtar twenty-four hours to pay the taxes, or move everyone out.

  That night, at the house of Saïd Hourani in Nazareth, the whole affair was settled, at a reasonable price, with part of the money even applied to back taxes. The next day the villagers loaded their few clay jars and cooking utensils and straw mats and small belongings onto their donkeys and, driving their meager flocks, started for the hills below Nazareth.

  Not long after the new kvutsa, Emek Yisroel, had moved onto the land, the younger Zeira, Aaron, while fetching them a cartful of sacks of oats from Sejera, found himself suddenly attacked by two mounted Arabs. Beside him was a young chaver of the kvutsa, Yitzhak. Flinging him the reins, Aaron lay prone on the sacks and returned fire. The cart arrived in the new settlement with Aaron Zeira dead, his blood soaking the seed.

  When Aaron’s body was brought home to their farm in Sejera, the first outcry from the mother of the Zeiras was, “Did he shoot back?” Aaron had kept firing as long as he lived, Yitzhak declared. Then the mother asked, “Did he kill any of them?” It was she with her spare hard flesh on strong bones who had brought her two grown boys in a wagon all the way from Turkestan after their father’s death, and taken up a farm in Sejera.

  If any of their assailants had been hit, he did not know, Yitzhak said. They had been fired on from ambush. The enemy had not come out.

  “Then one must be killed,” the mother demanded.

  She came to the emergency sitting of the Shomer, at Gilboa, standing with her surviving son Shabbatai before Galil himself, and made the demand. One must be killed.

  “Not one, but two!” roared Zev. “We didn’t avenge Yechezkiel, and this is the result. They spit on us!” It had been the same pair of bandits from Fuleh, he was sure, for only recently they had been released from the Turkish prison. “We will never be respected until we have finished with them!”

  No decision was taken. It was for Menahem first to try to find out who had done the thing.

  Shabbatai spoke little those days—they knew where he stood. But Zev would not let up. He cornered every shomer who came in for the Sabbath. At every sitting he cried out, “All they ca
n understand is strength! An eye for an eye, or better, two!”

  “Strength, but also the strength of restraint,” Galil still argued. “They will really respect us only when they know we have the power, but do not kill indiscriminately.” It was as yet far from clear who had made the attack; Menahem had consumed innumerable coffees with the neighboring Bedouin who might have heard something, and with the Houranis in Nazareth, and even with Sheikh Ibrim in Dja’adi, but whether it was the bandit brothers of Fuleh, or one of the villagers moved from the land, was still uncertain. He could bring back only words of commiseration for the brother of the fallen shomer and his mother and his young wife. Both Zeiras were respected in all Galilee for their honorable ways and their skilled horsemanship. “Like one of ourselves,” he was always told. Yet, again and again, hints were dropped to Menahem about the evil let loose in the region when the notorious bandits of Fuleh had been let out of prison.

  Now Shabbatai Zeira was convinced from his own explorations that it was the brothers of Fuleh who had killed Aaron, and he threatened that if no decision was made he would take matters into his own hands. Before the decisive sitting of the inner command, Menahem found himself going through one of his darkest times, brooding and silent with Dvora, and laconic with the chaverim. He took extra night duty, preferring to be alone. He believed in the way of Galil, and yet in his own soul this time Menahem was swayed toward the view of the avengers.

  Then came another killing, unprovoked, brutal. In the kibbutz of Kinnereth, just beyond HaKeren, a young chaver, going from their new pumping station to fetch back a pot of tea from the cheder-ochel, failed to return. Hours later, searchers stumbled on his body, on the field he had had to cross, the skull crushed, his throat cut. In the morning, tracks of two horses, side by side, were picked up, but lost along the river.

  One night it was known that the commanders were meeting; they sat until dawn. The next day Shimshoni, known as “The Practical,” went with a wagon to Damascus, returning with five pistols and eight rifles hidden in sacks of grain, one of the guns so ancient that it must have come from the army of Napoleon. Some said all this was only to increase the Shomer’s show of strength, but Zev talked so much of “an action” that many believed the lot had fallen to him.

  It had, however, fallen to Shabbatai Zeira, as of his right, and with him, Menahem. The two bandits of Fuleh must be finished with, destroyed. Yet the action must be carried out in a particular way. It must be understood, yet not clearly known as an action of the Shomer—just as the murder of Aaron Zeira was now everywhere understood as the deed of those two, urged on by some of the villagers who had been discontent with the price paid for their removal.

  The best would be that the two bandits of Fuleh should vanish. Of their many victims among the Arab villages they had raided, and among the pilgrim guides they were again waylaying, any could be said to have done the deed. Yet those who needed to understand and respect the Shomer would understand.

  Shabbatai Zeira was for a direct attack, for waiting for them on one of the paths they often used out of Fuleh, and leaving their bodies for the wild dogs and hyenas. Who would retaliate for those two? They were hated by all.

  “Still, they are of the Zbeh,” Menahem cautioned.

  “An offshoot, despised for their father’s having settled in a house and gone to work for the Turkish railway,” Zeira countered.

  —Perhaps, Menahem said, but the sons had returned to the old marauding ways, they were admired for their bold feats, they had cousins on the other side of the Jordan. If their bodies were left to the wild dogs, it would be the worst of dishonors. But if they were to disappear without a trace, though the count was not yet even, the act would be well understood and yet not seem to be aggravated by insult.

  Thus it was to be done.

  The thought of the sea came to Menahem just after another carriage was waylaid at the Three Rocks. The brothers of Fuleh would surely return there again, since it was a favorite trick of theirs to wait at the rocks after a train had stopped at Samekh, and goods had been loaded onto wagons for Tiberias.

  It came to Menahem that from a small boat hidden in the reeds the rocks could be watched. And afterwards the bodies, weighted with stones, would lie deep in the water, for there were places in the Kinnereth that had never been fathomed.

  The plan appeared whole in his mind one Friday, in the middle of the night, just after he had rested in silence for a time beside Dvora and then slipped back from her cot to his own. The plan came whole, and he was somewhat ashamed that the vision came there in the same room with her. And on a Sabbath eve.

  Though he had long ago, even in the yeshiva, become an unbeliever, yet, as many of the chevreh admitted, one could not after all completely rid oneself of all vestiges of superstition. But then, if this plan for the execution had come to him with the Sabbath, and if his task was still an act of justice for the killing of Yechezkiel whom he had loved as a brother, and whom Dvoraleh had purely loved, then was this not from God?

  In his mind’s eye Menahem saw the whole of the coming action repeated and repeated. During his wanderings in America, one of the wonders Menahem had beheld was a moving picture in which a train robber raced on his horse alongside a steam engine, and like many other spectators, Menahem had sat twice, three times, watching the film, as though the next time perhaps things would happen differently and the train would race safely away.

  So in his mind the scene of what would take place at the Kinnereth now repeated itself, as though to assure him that it would indeed unalterably happen precisely in the way he envisioned, and that a different outcome was impossible.

  And exactly as he had seen it, and made preparations with Shabbatai Zeira for doing it, the thing took place, so that in the doing Menahem felt himself little more than a spectator.

  The boat required for the task would be the little bark that lay in the cove once used by Tateh Yankel Chaimovitch as his mikveh. The vessel had been left there by Araleh and was occasionally used by the boys for fishing.

  A few times, in preparation, Menahem took Dvora and the baby on Sabbath visits to the grandparents, though the first time Nadina made such a fuss about their removing little Yechezkiel from the Infants’ House for a night, that a whole meeting had to be held to discuss the principe of the matter. The cause was finally won on the double argument that on Sabbath a child was to be with the parents, and also that from earliest infancy a child born in Eretz should feel the whole of the land as his home.

  Once at the Chaimovitches’, Menahem would leave the women in the house enjoying the infant Yechezkiel and endlessly comparing his traits with those of his little uncle Mati when at the same age. Meanwhile, with Gidon, Menahem would go off to fish. Thus the sight of him in the Chaimovitch boat would become familiar.

  Perhaps Gidon understood the intention. In another few years, when Schmulik would be able to take over his work on the farm, Gidon thought of joining the Shomer, and already he was as good as accepted.

  On the second fishing trip, Gidon came out with a question. If he were to become a shomer, he said, there was one thing he wondered whether he would be able to do if it fell to his lot to do it.

  “And what is that?” Menahem asked.

  Gidon wondered if he would be able to hunt down a man. Then all at once he asked directly, “Did you ever shoot down a man? Doesn’t a shomer have to do that sometimes?”

  “I have shot and they have shot!” Menahem said. “But it has never yet happened to me that I took aim and shot and saw a man fall dead.”

  Around Fuleh the brothers showed themselves boldly, and it was quite simple for Menahem to learn the hoofmarks of their mounts, as the Bedouin had taught him. The brothers rode most often side by side rather than in file, so that he came to recognize their tracks at a glance. Exactly as after the murder at Kinnereth.

  Early on a Sabbath, Menahem caught sight of their tracks where they had galloped along the ridge of Mount Yavniel and then gone down the slope. Let it b
e so. On a Sabbath it would be less likely to be thought of as a Jewish affair. Perhaps it was pilgrims they were after, pilgrims on their way to spend Sunday at the Christian sites.

  Before Menahem picked up Shabbatai Zeira at Sejera, much of the morning had passed. The aged Turkestan mother, coming to the gate to watch them ride off, muttered a blessing in her home language; Menahem caught the name of Aaron alev hasholem. She understood.

  Separately, he and Shabbatai made their way over Jewish fields, meeting at the boat. The coil of rope had already weeks before been placed in the bark, and good-sized fieldstones lay nearby in readiness. Now Shabbatai lifted the stones to Menahem who placed them evenly.

  The sun was already downward though not far enough to come into their eyes as they moved out onto the water. With satisfaction Menahem saw that the entire southern portion of the Kinnereth was empty of fishermen; he had counted on this likelihood, since those of Tiberias seldom came this far.

  Everything happened exactly as in the moving picture he had watched in his mind. When the vessel slid among the reeds, he saw at once that the Fuleh brothers were still there at the rocks, dismounted, smoking, waiting. A swath of sunlight came between the boulders and gleamed on the gilded circlet each wore with his white keffiyah. The target must be sited directly below this headband, at the ear. Fortunately too, the horses were not in the way; they stood nose to nose in the shade.

  Since the troubles had resumed, few carriages or wagons chanced the road alone when passing the Three Rocks. The bandits were waiting, surely, for the sound of perhaps only two carriages together. The brother who sat closest to the road drew on his cupped cigarette and let out his smoke carefully, dispersing it with his hand, reminding Menahem startlingly of how he had gone with Yechezkiel once on a Sabbath to visit Dvora, and they had had a smoke in the yard, and Yechezkiel had kept making the same dispersal movement with his hand, fearing to offend old Yankel Chaimovitch with his smoking on the Sabbath.