My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  (photo credit 4.1)

  FOUR

  Masada, 1942

  THE FIRST SHOTS WERE HEARD ON THE EVENING OF WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 1936. In the early hours of dark, approximately twenty cars were waved to a halt beside piles of rocks and tar barrels of a makeshift, unlawful checkpoint on the Tul Karem Road in the hills of Samaria. Armed men, their faces masked, demanded that every driver and passenger contribute money for rifles and ammunition for the Arab cause. But when fifty-year-old Zvi Dannenberg and seventy-year-old Israel Hazan arrived in their chicken-filled truck heading for the Tel Aviv market, the gunmen realized that they were Jews, pulled them out of the truck, and shot them. Dannenberg was killed immediately. Hazan bled to death by the idling truck.

  The next day, two khaki-clad Jews arrived at a tin hut belonging to Abu Rass in the Applebaum banana plantation in the Plain of Sharon. It was almost midnight when Abu Rass heard the knocks on his door and opened it for the unexpected guests. They fired eleven pistol bullets at him and at his Egyptian roommate. Abu Rass was killed on the spot, while the Egyptian managed to crawl for a hundred yards in the pitch-black night before collapsing and dying.

  The following day, Israel Hazan’s funeral was held in Tel Aviv’s city center. The funeral procession quickly got out of hand, becoming a demonstration of rage. Thousands rallied in the streets, calling for revenge. Several gangs tried to lynch some Arab cartmen and shoeshine men who were in town for a day’s work. “In blood and fire Judea fell,” the young nationalists cried out, “in blood and in fire Judea shall rise.”

  Two days later, a rumor swept through Jaffa that four Arabs had been murdered in neighboring Tel Aviv. Hundreds of Arabs thronged the streets, marching toward the city’s police station and government headquarters, demanding the bodies of those who were assumed to have died. Then they gathered in groups on street corners, waiting for prey. They stoned Jewish buses, Jewish taxis, and Jewish automobiles. They chased innocent Jews passing by.

  Chaim Pashigoda, twenty-three, a law clerk, was on his way to the registrar’s offices in Jaffa. Armed with stones, hammers, and knives, a Palestinian crowd attacked and murdered him. Eliezer Bisozky, an elderly Yiddish-speaking Jew, tried to escape raging Jaffa. He almost succeeded in hopping onto a horse-drawn wagon that was heading to Tel Aviv but fell off and into the hands of the mob, who pummeled him to death. Chaim Kornfeld, thirty, and Victor Koopermintz, thirty-four, were plasterers renovating a grand Arab house in the exclusive Arab quarter of Jaballiya. The mob heading down from the citrus port beat them to death. Yitzhak Frenkel and Yehuda Siman-Tov were murdered in much the same way. The electrician David Shambadal was hacked to pieces by a group of young Arab men when he arrived at a café to install a new lighting system. Zelig Levinson was mowed down by rifle bullets on the edge of Jaffa.

  The next day seven more Jews were murdered. Within three days Tel Aviv buried sixteen victims of Arab violence. Eighty wounded were treated in the city’s hospitals. Because of a blood shortage, the public was urged to donate.

  The following day, the national Palestinian leadership called for a general strike. Now violence took a new form. Fires were set in Jerusalem, in Kibbutz Kfar Menachem, and in the Balfour Forest in the north. The fields of the Valley of Harod were ablaze, and hundreds of dunams of orange groves there were uprooted or felled.

  Three weeks later, on May 13, two Jews were murdered in the Old City of Jerusalem. On May 16, three Jews in a crowd coming out of Jerusalem’s Edison Cinema house were picked off by snipers. On August 13, a gang broke into the house of an ultra-Orthodox family in Safed, killing the father, the sixteen-year-old son, the nine-year-old daughter, and the seven-year-old daughter in their beds. The next day Arabs ambushed four Jews who were driving to a quiet mountain retreat in the Carmel forest. A day later, a Jew was murdered in Sarafand, just a few miles from Rehovot. While the Sarafand victim’s funeral was under way, a bomb was thrown from a passing train onto Tel Aviv’s busy Herzl Street, wounding nineteen Jews and killing an eight-year-old Jewish boy. The following day, two young Jewish nurses were shot to death as they arrived for work at Jaffa’s state hospital. Three days later, a rifle bullet penetrated the skull of a scholar as he read an ancient Islamic manuscript in the study of his humble Jerusalem home. The day after that, one female and three male Jewish workers were murdered as they returned from work in a Kfar Sabba orange grove.

  The Jewish community was aghast. True, there had been violence before. In March 1920, the first Arab-Jewish confrontation erupted in the northern Galilee. In April 1920, there were riots in Jerusalem. In August 1929, there were massacres in Hebron and Safed. Yet all these incidents were short, sporadic bursts of violence. They came suddenly and passed suddenly. A British officer described them accurately as resembling the flash floods in the Negev, Palestine’s southern desert. The sustained violence of 1936 was different. It created an unprecedented, all-engulfing conflict in Palestine. And because it was coupled with a Palestinian general strike and a Palestinian national institution building drive, it could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was: a collective uprising of a national Arab-Palestinian movement.

  In the late spring and early summer of 1936, the Zionist response was restrained. Only in the second half of August, after four months of Arab terror, were the first Jewish acts of revenge carried out. But the eighty dead and the four hundred wounded in the summer of ’36 transformed the collective psyche of the Jews. So did the scorched fields, the uprooted orange groves, the roadside ambushes, and the ongoing night shootings. The brutal events that took place between April and August 1936 pushed Zionism from a state of utopian bliss to a state of dystopian conflict. As Palestinian nationalism was asserting itself and demanding that Jewish immigration stop immediately, it was now impossible to ignore the Arabs living in the land, impossible to ignore the fact that the Arabs reviled the Zionist enterprise. The Jewish national liberation movement had to acknowledge that it was facing an Arab liberation movement that wished to disgorge the Jews from the shores they had settled on.

  Day after day the papers were filled with the names of the dead in black-bordered notices and descriptions of mass funerals turned demonstrations. But there was no sense of panic or despair in the Jewish community. On the contrary. Day by day people seemed to grow more resolute. Rather than weakening their resolve, the acknowledgment of a tragic reality emboldened them. It turned the 350,000 Jews living in Palestine in 1936 into a community of combat.

  In November a Royal Enquiry Commission arrived in Palestine headed by Lord Peel. Within weeks it realized that the evolving reality was intolerable. Eight months later, in July 1937, the Peel Commission handed its report to the British government recommending a partition of the land into two nation-states, Jewish and Arab. It also recommended that the Arabs residing in the Jewish state be “transferred” elsewhere, as will the Jews living in the Arab state. From this moment on, the idea of “transfer”—the removal of the Arab population—became part of mainstream Zionist thinking. What was unheard of in 1935 became acceptable in 1937. What was absolute heresy when Zionism was launched became common opinion when Zionism confronted a rival national movement face-to-face.

  Berl Katznelson, spiritual leader of the Labor Movement, gave a speech in November 1937: “My conscience is absolutely clear regarding this matter. Better a distant neighbor than a close-by enemy. They will not lose by their transfer and we definitely will not lose. The bottom line shows that this reform would benefit both parties. For a while now, I have thought that it was the best solution, but during the riots I have become convinced that this must take place. But it never crossed my mind that the transfer would be to Nablus. I believed in the past and I believe now that they should be transferred to Syria and Iraq.” David Ben Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, spoke in June 1938: “My approach to the solution of the question of the Arabs in the Jewish state is their transfer to Arab countries.” Later that year Ben Gurion asserted that “compulsory transfe
r will clear for us vast territories. I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”

  In December 1940, Yosef Weitz, head of the forestry division of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in his private diary, just after visiting Herbert Bentwich’s estate in Tel Gezer,

  Just between us, it must be clear that there is no room in the land for the two people[s]. No development will bring us to our goal to be an independent nation in this small land. If the Arabs leave, the country will be wide and spacious for us. If the Arabs remain, the land will remain narrow and poor. The only solution is the Land of Israel, at least the western Land of Israel, with no Arabs. There is no place for compromise here. The Zionist endeavor thus far … was all well and good … but it shall not give the people of Israel a state. There is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. To transfer all, except perhaps Bethlehem, Nazareth, Old Jerusalem. Not one village is to remain, not one tribe. The transfer should target Iraq, Syria, even Trans Jordan. For this cause, funding will be found. Much funding. Only with this transfer will the land be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the question of the Jews will have a solution. There is no other way.

  In the late 1930s, the Jewish community in Palestine did not have the leverage to initiate a transfer of the Arab population. But the new idea spoke volumes about the new state of mind of the Zionist leadership. All that had been suppressed and denied since Herbert Bentwich disembarked in the port of Jaffa in 1897 now surfaced. The shocking insight of Israel Zangwill was now a part of conventional thinking. Within a year, a merciless perception of reality took root: us or them, life or death.

  The change of conscience was not only that of the leadership. The Jewish community as a whole was transformed. As a consequence of the 1936 violence, the Jews of Palestine went through a metamorphosis. Gone were the innocence, the self-deception, the moral inhibitions. With the new, merciless perception of reality came a new, merciless determination: We shall not retreat, we shall not concede. We will do all that is needed to maintain Zionism.

  The pause in violence lasted from the autumn of 1936 to the autumn of 1937. But the Arab revolt erupted again in October 1937. After my grandfather’s best friend, Avinoam Yalin, was shot dead outside the Board of Education office in Jerusalem, Jews took revenge by murdering an Arab passerby and an Armenian photographer. After five pioneers were ambushed in the Judean hills, where they were about to plant pine trees, Jews in Jerusalem murdered an Arab and then another Arab, and then two Arab women were burned to death when the car they were sitting in exploded by the city’s bustling market. In just one month, the number of innocent Arab victims surpassed the number of innocent Jewish victims.

  In 1938, the great Arab revolt reached a climax and threatened to take over large parts of the country. Police stations were burned, there was chaos in the mountain regions. The clash between the Arab liberation movement and the British Empire turned brutal. More than eighteen hundred people were killed in the course of a year. Although most were casualties of British-Arab and Arab-Arab confrontations, the number of victims of Jewish-Arab hostilities rose, too. In this dance of blood, the atrocities that Arabs visited upon the Jews and the atrocities that Jews visited upon the Arabs grew ever more grisly.

  In March 1938, Arabs attacked a car en route from Haifa to Safed. They murdered six of its Jewish passengers, among them two women, a young girl, and a boy. The girl was raped, then killed and dismembered. The tide of rage triggered by the incident brought about a failed attack of Jewish extremists on an Arab bus in the Galilee. When one of the Jewish terrorists was hanged at the end of June, Jewish nationalists went mad. On July 3 and 4, several assassinations took place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. On July 6, Jews murdered eighteen Arabs by setting off time bombs in the Arab market of Haifa. On July 15, Jews murdered ten Arabs by setting off a time bomb in the market of Jerusalem’s Old City. On July 25, Jews murdered more than thirty-five Arabs by exploding a highly powerful bomb in the crowded Haifa market. On August 26, Jews murdered twenty-four Arabs by detonating a well-hidden bomb in the market of the citrus port of Jaffa.

  The Arabs were not idle, either. On June 23: an onslaught on the colony of Givat Ada (three dead). On July 5: a murderous attack on orange grove workers in the village of Ein Vered (four dead). On July 21: a well-planned attack on the poor workers’ quarter of Kiryat Haroshet (five dead). On August 4: a land mine in the dirt roads of Kibbutz Ramat-Hakovesh (six dead). On August 28: an assault on Kibbutz Ein Shemer (two dead). On September 10: the lynching of electricity company workers at the Massmia junction (seven dead). On September 14: a land mine on the eastern outskirts of the Valley of Harod (three dead). On October 2: in a massacre in Tiberias, eight adults and eleven children slaughtered.

  There was a significant difference between the Jewish and Arab atrocities in the first half of 1938. While the attacks on Jewish civilians were supported by the Arab national leadership and by much of the Arab public, the attacks on Arab civilians were denounced by mainstream Zionism. Most Jewish murderers were members of fringe terrorist groups who defied the policy and instructions of the elected leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine. On the other hand, some of the Jewish actions were far more lethal than the Arab ones. The summer of 1938 was different from the summer of 1936 in that the number of murdered Arab victims exceeded by far the number of murdered Jews.

  The summer of carnage brought forth another dramatic turn of events. In the Valley of Harod, the iconoclastic Scottish commando warrior Col. Orde Wingate established five special night squads. The first began operating in June 1938. Formally, the squads’ task had been to protect the Iraq–Haifa oil pipeline crossing the valley, but their real task was to launch an anti-insurgency campaign, to fight Arab terror by initiating Anglo-Jewish counterterror. At first the Wingate’s Warriors set up ambushes in the valley and fought armed Arab gangs. Soon after, they began to raid Arab villages and terrorize their inhabitants.

  There were more and more reports of looting and prisoner executions. In the autumn of 1938, the night squads’ brutality accelerated. After Ein Harod’s local hero, Yitzhak Sturman, was killed when his car hit a land mine, the Anglo-Jewish guerrilla units went on a rampage in the village of Paqua on the slopes of Mount Gilboa. And after the massacre of the nineteen Jews in Tiberias, they took revenge by attacking indiscriminately on the road to Safed, in the village of Dabburiya, and in the village of Hittin. Fourteen Arabs were killed on the Safed road, fifteen were killed in Dabburiya, and scores were left dead in Hittin.

  British officers were in command of Wingate’s special squads. The British soldiers were in general the more ruthless warriors, but the Haganah’s fighters were willing partners. As they endorsed the new combative ethos, they became the heroes of the young Hebrews of Palestine. On September 13, Wingate inaugurated a sergeants’ course in the amphitheater of Kibbutz Ein Harod. The deeply religious Christian commando commander had no doubt as to the significance of the event. “We are here to found the Army of Zion,” he said to the one hundred young Jews before him.

  In the winter of 1938 and spring of 1939, the British suppressed the Great Arab Revolt with an iron fist. But Jewish terrorism did not abate. In February 1939, more than forty innocent Arabs were murdered when bombs went off in the Haifa train station, the Haifa market, and the Jerusalem market. On May 29, four Arab women were murdered in Bir Addas. On June 20, scores of innocent Arabs were murdered when a bomb exploded in the Arab market of Haifa. On June 29, five Arab villagers riding on a wagon into Rehovot in the early morning were shot dead. On July 20, another three Arabs were murdered in Rehovot’s orange groves.

  On September 19, 1939, the general staff of the Haganah was founded. Well before a Jewish state was established, a well-organized Jewish army was raised. The Arab revolt was over, but the Jewish community in Palestine made the formative decision to organize a national military structure. Twenty months later, on May 15, 1941, the Palmach Strike Force was es
tablished. In between, the arms industry of the Haganah grew and diversified. Youth movement members received paramilitary training.

  For Zionism had no illusions now: it realized that the brutal civil war of 1936–39 was only the beginning. The Jewish national movement was getting ready for a new round of violence. No one knew when, no one knew under what circumstances, but no one doubted that the conflict would erupt again, and viciously. The trauma of the summer of 1936 was burned deep in the heart and the lesson was learned. Zionism would never be what it was before Chaim Pashigoda, Eliezer Bisozky, Chaim Kornfeld, Victor Koopermintz, Yitzhak Frenkel, Yehuda Siman-Tov, David Shambadal, and Zelig Levinson were murdered in Jaffa on the morning of April 19, 1936. And yet the newly redefined Zionism was in need of a symbol and a shrine. As it redefined and transformed itself, it needed a new epicenter.