My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  What makes the task especially difficult is the heavy load that must be lifted to the top: tents, blankets, canned goods, water, rucksacks, arms, and ammunition. The youngsters create a human chain that enables them to pass the load, hand to hand, to the top. Gutman finds the sight of the chain inspiring. “The chain was not broken” is a line from Lamdan’s poem, and Gutman is about to establish it as the generation’s motto.

  Gutman instructs his cadets not to look back, not to look down. Advance, only advance. Onward and upward the forty-six go; they reach the wall, climb the wall, then at last find themselves on Masada.

  It is Gutman’s third time at the summit, but he is just as excited as when he first stood here nine years ago. The desert ridges and the terrifying gorge and the quiet silver wavelets of the Dead Sea stir in him a feeling of unfathomable heartache. As he recalled half a century later, Gutman is bewitched by the eight Roman compounds that surround the lonely mountain. Even after being neglected for 1,869 years, the sight feels stifling. It feels to him as if the hundred thousand Roman soldiers of the 10th Roman Legion are still besieging the one thousand defiant Jews; and he feels just as clearly that mighty historic forces are once again closing in on the Jews of Palestine.

  After a few moments of looking down from the wall into the gorge, lost in thought, he shakes off his hallucination and goes back to what he must do as leader. The youngsters do not share Gutman’s profound anxiety or ecstatic vision. But they are excited to see the desert hills painted pink by the setting sun and the remnants of Herod’s buildings that have survived two thousand years at the summit. Gutman must see to it that this youthful joy does not get out of hand. It will be dark soon, so camp must be set up rapidly. Gutman divides his cadets into several work groups. Some gather firewood, some bring water from the wadi, some pitch tents within the fortress ruins. They improvise a table, a kitchen, a classroom. As the sun sets, the camp takes shape on Masada’s flat summit. And when dark descends on the mountains of Moav, Gutman feels pride in the tent camp that has risen among the ruins. The youngsters light a campfire and sing and dance.

  Then Gutman addresses the group. He tells the tale of Masada and its heroes. “Our tent, too, is pitched on the abyss,” he says. When he is done speaking, he steps back into the darkness and watches the dancing begin anew. It is a rousing performance. Eyes afire, feet as light as air. The young boys and girls of Israel have returned to Masada to dance with abandon on the abyss.

  Gutman is no dancer, but the spontaneous ritual is exactly what he wished for. For he knows that Zionism has no church and no theology and no mythology. He knows that Zionism is on the brink and needs a poignant symbol that will be a substitute for church and theology and mythology. In Masada he finds this symbol that will unite and inspire Zionism’s followers. He finds a pillar for Zionist identity that is at once concrete, mythic, and sublime. In Masada, Gutman finds both the narrative and the image that will give the young Hebrews the depth they lack. Masada will captivate them, empower them, and galvanize them for the challenge ahead. This tragic mountain will give meaning to their struggle. In the name of Masada the dancing boys and girls will fight the cataclysmic war that will save Zionism and save the Jews.

  Gutman knows that his enterprise is controversial. Even in Zionist circles, many regard the zealots of Masada as brutal extremists who robbed, murdered, and finally committed suicide. David Ben Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency, is apprehensive about the Masada tale because it is a tale of death and self-destruction. But Gutman begs to differ. He believes that what he is promoting is not a Masada complex but a Masada paradox: Only the young Hebrews willing to die will be able to ensure for themselves a secure and sovereign life. Only their willingness to fight to the end will prevent their end.

  The youngsters sing:

  A cliff we conquered and ascended

  A path we carved and cleared

  A trail we beat and blazed—to the abyss

  Gutman walks away from the singing. Carrying a flashlight, he walks alone to the ancient southeastern living quarters that still have the remnants of a mosaic floor. He continues toward the building with the two forecourts that the German archaeologist Schulten described and enters the regal edifice to the west that Schulten mistook for Herod’s palace. He goes through the square building that Schulten described as the Small Palace, then enters the giant structure at the northern end of the mountain and lingers among its many rooms. He visits the bathhouse, the tower; he walks the long corridors.

  These were the soldiers’ barracks, Gutman assumes. Here lived Herod’s officers, here food was stored, here was the armory. Gutman is beside himself. His flashlight wanders along the thick walls. His hand feels the coarsely chiseled stones. As far as Gutman is concerned, this desert citadel is as wondrous as the pyramids of Giza. But what captures the mind of the Zionist revolutionary is not Herod’s genius and ingenuity. It is the thought of the rebels seeking refuge in these deserted palaces. What the amateur archaeologist is looking for with his flashlight is the remains the zealots left behind. Perhaps shekels they coined in the four years of their great revolt, or inscriptions they carved into the stone in the final days. Perhaps clay pots to collect water, crumbling sandals, torn prayer shawls, oil lamps made of clay. But all Gutman finds in the dark are round ballista stones that the rebels prepared in order to crush the skulls of the Romans, and the ballista stones that the Romans shot from afar at the rebels’ stronghold. And as he examines the stones, his thoughts are drawn to those last hours of that last night.

  In his mind, Gutman reconstructs that last dreadful night of A.D. 73. Herod’s casemate wall has already been breached. The rebels’ improvised wooden wall has already burned down. No power in the world will stop the Romans from breaking into Masada at dawn. So Elazar Ben Yair, whom Gutman worships, decides not to surrender but to die. Here, on this very spot, Ben Yair gathers the zealots and says his last famous words, as passed down through the ages by a survivor:

  It is known and written that tomorrow will come our demise, but the choice is to us to die the death of heroes, we and all those dear to us.… Perhaps from the beginning, when we stood to assert our liberty.… we should have grasped the spirit of God and realized that he has sealed the fate of the race of the Jews whom he had loved before.

  We cannot save our souls.… So let our wives die before they are violated, let our sons die before they taste the taste of slavery. Then we shall bless one another with the blessing of heroes. How good and how great it will be when we carry our freedom to our grave.

  From a distance, Gutman sees his youngsters dancing and singing around the fire. As he watches them, he contemplates what his mentor Tabenkin said recently: “In this war, we Jews are the most lonely people, the most deserted and the most just.” Gutman remembers what his other mentor, Katznelson, said when the war in Europe began: “We are orphans in this world. And as the world crumbles, our orphanhood intensifies. On the weak wings of the remnants of Israel living in Palestine was placed a heavy burden, more than we can bear. It might very well be that the entire future of Jewish history depends now on what shall happen with us. Without our being asked, the most enormous task of all was set upon us.” And Gutman thinks of what Katznelson had added just a few months ago: “The fate of Israel is about to be decided as it was not decided upon since the destruction of the Temple, since we lost our land and liberty. Our history has not known such a time when the fire of destruction will surround at once all of our Diasporas across the globe.”

  Gutman understands that these words are not empty rhetoric. Since the summer of 1940, mainstream Zionist leadership has been seriously considering the possibility of apocalypse. “If we must fall, fall we shall, here with our women and children and all that we have,” said Tabenkin that summer. Since the summer of 1941, mainstream Zionist leadership has been concerned that the British will evacuate Palestine, the Germans will invade, and a Nazi-inspired Arab uprising will terminate Zionism. “I do not wish for us to die i
n this land,” said Tabenkin. “But I do wish that we shall not depart, we shall not leave the land alive.” Since November 28, 1941, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met Adolf Hitler in Berlin, there has been an official alliance between the Arab-Palestinian movement headed by Husseini and the Third Reich. So now, in the early winter of 1942, there is growing concern in Tel Aviv regarding the possible combination of a German invasion of the land with a pro-Nazi Arab-Palestinian assault. It now appears that the distant past is merging with the present, that the mythical is coupling with the real.

  After midnight, the dancing subsides. The camp goes silent. Only Gutman is awake. In his tent, by the light of his lantern, he prepares tomorrow’s curriculum. Although his mission is one of indoctrination and reeducation, Gutman is not a one-dimensional political commissar. Although his goal is ideological, he is not a man of simplistic propaganda. He wants his cadets to study Masada seriously. He wants them to become familiar with its geology, history, archaeology—and to contribute to the scientific body of knowledge regarding it. In order for them to do so, he goes over Conder’s meticulous maps. He reads Schulten’s findings, some of which have been misinterpreted. He reads Flavius Josephus and is overwhelmed by the dry and precise manner in which Flavius described the heroic drama. Finally he reads once again Lamdan’s long, melancholic poem. The immigrant poet who lost his family in a Russian pogrom does not promise success. He does not assure the reader that the Zionist Masada of the twentieth century will evade the fate of the first century’s zealots. All that Lamdan argues is that the citadel is the very last chance. There is no other place for the Jews but Palestine, no other way but the way of Masada.

  Gutman spends five days and five nights with his youngsters at Masada. On the second day he shows them the casemate wall consisting of two parallel walls and explains the details of its construction. He shows them the remains of thirty of its towers. On the third day, Gutman takes his cadets along the dike, to each of the eight encampments of the Roman siege. He argues with passion that the scale of the force that the Romans assembled around the remote, desolate Masada proves that the mighty empire was truly challenged by the defiant rebels.

  On the fourth day, Gutman selects the best and the fittest to assist him in exploring Masada’s unknown quarters. Hovering over the gorge and literally risking their lives, the determined boys manage to discover patches of the lost serpentine path that had escaped the notice of previous explorers and find a hitherto unknown aqueduct leading water from the east to the mountain fortress.

  On the fifth and last day, Gutman takes his cadets back to the rampart to widen it and make it suitable for thousands to climb. He sends others to pile dry wood on some of the nearby hilltops so that the nocturnal farewell ceremony will reenact the way the first-century rebels signaled each other from hill to hill.

  But a storm descends that night, so the concluding ceremony is held in a cave resembling the rebels’ caves. Selected chapters from ancient Flavius and contemporary Lamdan are read aloud. There is much talk about the chain that binds times past with times present. The days of Masada are not over, they say. The voice of Israel’s heroes will not be silenced. No sacrifice is too dear for our freedom. We shall not be slaves again.

  When it’s time to eat, a Bedouin lamb is slaughtered as if it is Passover eve, the evening when the Masada wall was breached and the rebels decided to take their own lives. They read aloud Josephus’ descriptions of the last deeds of Ben Yair’s men on this summit:

  They hugged their women with much love and held the children to their hearts and kissed them for the very last time, tears in their eyes.… And all slaughtered their brethren. And each one lay down on the ground by his dead wife and sons and held them in his arms.… And the one left after them examined the many bodies.… And when he knew for certain that all were dead, he set fire to all corners of the king’s palace and with all the power of his hand he thrust his sword into his own flesh and fell down dead by his slaughtered loved ones.

  Gutman is hypnotized by these words. As a humanist he realizes what horror they contain. But as a Zionist Jew he also realizes what horror 1942 will contain. He is not interested in cultivating a suicidal ethos, but he feels obligated to construct an ethos of resistance. He knows that in 1942, the trial ahead is the ultimate one. But although there is a certain resemblance between Ben Yair’s Masada and Gutman’s Masada, Gutman wants his Masada tale to have a totally different ending. That’s why his motto now is “Masada shall not fall again.” That’s why he tells his youngsters not to be zealots of defeat but zealots of victory. He wants to take the ancient fortress’s determination and turn it on its head, transforming an ethos of devastation into one of triumph.

  Late at night, when the winds are howling at the mouth of the cave, the theatrical Masada ceremony comes to an end. The cadets sign a working-youth Masada scroll and seal it in a glass bottle that they bury under a headstone they erect. They call out that the chain has not been broken. They call out that Masada calls Israel to fight for its land. They sing the socialist anthem: “Strong be the hands of our brothers building the land.” They sing the national anthem: “Hope is not yet lost.” Then the youngsters dismantle the tents, and pack the rucksacks, and descend the mountain, which is now engraved in their consciousness.

  Is it true that, as Ben Yair wrote, God sealed the fate of the race of the Jews whom he had loved before? On the very same days in late January that Gutman’s Masada graduates return to Jerusalem, Field Marshal Rommel concludes his breakthrough toward Benghazi, Libya. Four months later the Wermacht’s strategic genius defeats the British at Bir al-Hakim and reaches Egypt. By June 1942, Rommel is only a hundred kilometers west of Alexandria. In Tel Aviv, Zionist leaders assume that if Alexandria falls, the British Empire will evacuate the Middle East and realign its forces in India. Some reports claim that British officers are burning secret documents in their Cairo offices. Some claim that the British are pulling elite units from Egypt. In Palestine there is much talk of Jews selling property to Arabs, preparing hideouts in monasteries, asking Christian and Muslim friends for protection. Some acquire foreign passports, others purchase poison pills.

  But what is happening in Europe is far worse. On January 30, 1941, Hitler announces in the Berlin Sports Palace that the outcome of the war will be the annihilation of the Jews. In March 1942, the Auschwitz extermination camp goes active. A few days later, the Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps begin to bellow their unique smoke into Europe’s spring skies. On March 17, 1942, the deportation of the Jews of Lublin to Belzec begins. On March 24 the deportation of the Jews of Slovakia to Auschwitz begins. On March 27 begins the deportation of the Jews of France to Auschwitz. On March 30, the first Paris train carrying Jews arrives in Auschwitz.

  In Palestine there is little information regarding the death camps or Hitler’s mass-death project. But there is a growing understanding that Europe is experiencing a megapogrom. Similarly there is a growing understanding that if the British lose Egypt, a megapogrom will take place in Palestine. Therefore, in March 1942, the idea of establishing a modern-day Masada on Mount Carmel is seriously considered. There is no intention to commit suicide on Mount Carmel; the top-secret plan is to concentrate the Jewish population of Palestine in the mountainous region bordering the sea so that a war can be waged that might slow the Germans and convince the British not to abandon the Jews. Yet the nocturnal discussions held secretly by the Zionist leadership in the summer of 1942 on a Tel Aviv roof does not exclude the worst scenario.

  In the words of Gutman’s best friend, Israel Galili, there is “no place to retreat.… We must guarantee that we stand to the last, defend ourselves to the end, hold on even at the price of extermination.”

  In the words of Gutman’s mentor Yitzhak Tabenkin: “These half a million Jews should not retreat. Not even one of us should survive. We must stand here to the end for the future right, the self-respect, and the historic loyalty of the Jewish people. So we are
told by Masada and even before Masada. So we are told by the destruction of the Second Temple.”

  In the words of the former leader of Poland’s Zionist movement, Yitzhak Gruenbaum: “The trouble with the Jews of the Diaspora was that they preferred the life of a beaten dog to death with honor. There is no hope for survival once the Germans invade. If, God forbid, we shall reach the moment of invasion, we must see to it that we leave a Masada legend behind us.”

  Tabenkin again: “We, the Jews, have no option of retreat and evacuation. Some say that women and children must be saved. There is no place to save them. There is no justice in the demand to save women and children.… We must have no illusions: We face annihilation. Will the Germans leave behind them the Yagur Kibbutz or the Ein Harod Kibbutz or the commune of Degania?”

  As temperatures run high, Zionist policy undergoes profound changes. On May 11, 1942, in New York’s Biltmore Hotel, Zionism’s leaders abandon the old idea of long-term organic growth and endorse the demand to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as soon as possible. In the weeks preceding and following the Biltmore convention, the Palmach Strike Force holds its first explosives course and it exercises its first five platoons.

  In June 1942, Haganah commanders are called to an emergency meeting in Tel Aviv to hear the minutes of the Masada-on-the-Carmel plan. In July, the plan is thoroughly discussed in a special gathering in the Valley of Yizrael. Initial preparations are made to stake out hiding places for arms, water, food, and shelter for a hundred thousand people in the area that lies between Haifa and the Valley. Now explicit words are spoken about turning Mount Carmel into Masada.

  No wonder that between February and July 1942, Gutman’s Masada ethos takes root. The youth movement’s weekly publishes extensive reports of the Masada trek and seminar, and it puts Ben Yair’s last speech on its March 31 cover. Other Labor publications also celebrate and glorify Masada. A press conference in which Gutman promotes Masada resonates strongly in contemporary public opinion. The forty-six youth leaders do their share to pass along the Masada message to their youth movement cadets, so that the second Masada trek, held only three months after the first, includes more than two hundred youngsters. Throughout the country, Passover youth camps and youth activities are devoted to Masada. With Rommel at the gate, with Europe’s Jewry in ghettos, and with the national leadership considering extreme ideas, Gutman’s gospel of Masada spreads like fire in the woods. More and more youth movements ascend Masada. Palmach squads ascend Masada. Masada overtakes the public discourse. Within a few months, the ethos of Masada becomes the formative ethos of the young nation. Masada is now at the heart of the Zionist narrative, defining its new Palestine-born generation.