My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  By autumn, history takes yet another turn. The immediate fear of invasion subsides. On October 23, Allied Commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery launches a counteroffensive against Rommel, who begins his retreat from El Alamein on November 4. There is no further danger of a Nazi invasion of the Land of Israel.

  But just as the Jewish community of Palestine relaxes and returns to the pleasures of an unprecedented economic boom, the news from Europe becomes grimmer. On December 17, 1942, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, declares in Westminster that Nazi Germany is exterminating European Jewry. By now, it is clear that what Hitler has in mind is not a megapogrom but a holocaust. Every single day thousands are murdered. In 1942 more than a million are murdered. By the end of the war it might turn out that European Jewry has vanished completely.

  As 1943 begins, hence, the ethos of Masada takes on new meaning. Now it’s not only a historic legend whose purpose is to prepare the Jews for a desperate war in the Land of Israel. Now Masada is a mythical, almost metaphysical metaphor for the loneliness of the Jewish people. As always, Yitzhak Tabenkin is the one to phrase the new insight in the cruelest fashion: “Our feeling is that of ultimate loneliness.… There is no way to know how many Jews will remain alive.… There is no guarantee that the Nazis will not exterminate the entire one hundred percent.… Bitter is the knowledge of our solitude and the knowledge that the world is our enemy.”

  For spiritual leaders like Tabenkin, Katznelson, and Gutman, the significance of the Holocaust is threefold: It is a human catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. It is a Jewish catastrophe on a scale not experienced since the destruction of the Second Temple. And it is a Zionist catastrophe unlike any other. For Zionism, the implications of the Holocaust are devastating. Gone are the great Jewish masses that Zionism was designed to save. Gone is the great human reservoir that was to save Zionism. Gone is Zionism’s raison d’être. For even if Hitler is defeated, he might still leave behind him a defeated Jewish people. With no Eastern European demographic backbone, Zionism becomes a bridgehead that no reinforcements will ever cross, protect, or hold.

  But Tabenkin, Katznelson, and Gutman turn disaster into mission. All three, and many others, begin to speak out about the responsibility of Hebrew youth facing the new, disastrous circumstances. “Every Hebrew boy in the Land of Israel now weighs as ten, as we have lost Jewish communities ten times as large as the Jewish community of Palestine,” writes Gutman, inspired by Tabenkin. “In the black shadow of this fact, you, the young working generation of Israel, must carry on the founders’ endeavor and be a leading torch of light to the resurrection of the nation in its land.”

  As it turns out, 1942 is far worse than anyone could have imagined. In this year, 2.7 million Jews are murdered by the Nazis. Within twelve months, every sixth Jew in the world is exterminated and every fourth European Jew dies of disease, hunger, shooting, or gas. The Jewish people will never recover from the blow. Zionism will never overcome the loss.

  But the ethos of Masada will live on. The ethos forged in Gutman’s January 1942 seminar will grow stronger and stronger as the horrors of 1942 are revealed. So those who ask whether the ethos was based merely on myth ask the wrong question. It is not Ben Yair who defined Masada, it is Gutman. What matters is not the event that did or did not take place on the fringe of history in A.D. 73, but the event that does take place in the locus of history in A.D. 1942. For the Masada ethos put forth by Gutman would define the Zionism of the 1940s and would decide the fate of 1948 and would shape the future state of Israel.

  The mid-nineteenth-century French physiologist Claude Bernard was the first to overturn the conventional understanding that life is an adjustment to environment. Adjustment to the surrounding environment is death, argued Bernard; the phenomenon of life is that of preserving an internal environment contrary to an outside environment. Between the summer of 1936 and the summer of 1942, Zionism reaches a similar conclusion. A sequence of blows, some of them almost deadly, teaches the outstanding movement that its surrounding environment is extremely cruel. The relevant historical circumstances are lethal. Under these conditions, adjustment is death. The only way to maintain life is resistance. From now on the decisive image of the Zionist enterprise is not that of swamps drained or of orange groves bearing fruit but that of a lonely desert fortress casting the shadow of awe on an arid land.

  (photo credit 5.1)

  FIVE

  Lydda, 1948

  HOW DID ZIONISM ARRIVE IN THE VALLEY OF LYDDA? JUST AS IT ARRIVED in some of Palestine’s other valleys and plains.

  In the autumn of 1903, after the Sixth Zionist Congress, the Anglo-Palestine Bank purchased 2,330 dunams of land in the village of Haditha for 80,730 francs. Of that area, 1,946 dunams were fertile and flat, while the remaining 384 dunams were hilly and barren. Together they formed a long strip of land that stretched from the silvery olive orchards of the Arab city of Lydda to the low ridge of hills rising from the gray fields of the Lydda Valley toward Jerusalem. The Beit Arif estate became the Ben Shemen estate, one of the first plots of land purchased by Herzl’s Zionist movement in Palestine.

  Two years later, after exploring several other sites across the country, the civil engineer Nahum Wilbosh decided to establish his Atid (Hebrew for “future”) factory in the Lydda Valley. With an investment of 150,000 francs, he bought 100 dunams from the Anglo-Palestine Bank and erected a modern plant to press oil from its orchards and manufacture fine soap from the olive refuse. In its first four years, Atid was a disappointment. The oil was murky, the soap was inferior, and expenses were high. But in its fifth, sixth, and seventh years, Atid prospered. It provided its owners with respectable profits, its workers with decent livings, and its Arab neighbors with extra income from the sale of raw materials to the new Jewish industrial enterprise. But before the Great War broke out, Atid collapsed, leaving behind in the Lydda Valley nothing but the gloomy, deserted ruins of what was meant to be.

  A year after Wilbosh established his factory, a teacher named Israel Belkind built Kiryat Sefer, an agricultural school, on fifty dunams of the Ben Shemen estate, for the orphans who had survived the gruesome Kishinev pogrom three years earlier. On the top of the hill, not far from the factory, Belkind erected two-story buildings surrounding a spacious courtyard where the pogrom survivors would train to become skilled farmers. Yet after spending 43,000 francs to purchase the land and build the classrooms and dormitory, Belkind was short of funds needed to run the school, and Kiryat Sefer collapsed.

  In 1908, several years after the death of Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement decided to commemorate its founder by planting a thousand olive trees in the Valley of Lydda. Choosing the olive tree for the orchard of Herzl-Wald was both practical and symbolic. The aim was to demonstrate that the new Jews could plant olive trees that were as beautiful and deep-rooted as the ancient olive trees of the orchards of the Arabs of Lydda. As early as 1908 a nursery had been set up between the Atid factory and the Kiryat Sefer school, but an unexpected incident had taken place there: Jewish workers rallied one day and uprooted the olive trees planted by Arab workers, replanting them with their own hands in order to make a national Jewish statement. So in 1909, when Herzl-Wald was planted, all work was solely Jewish. The new Jews of Palestine planted more than twelve thousand olive trees on the gentle slope overlooking the minarets of the city of Lydda. And as the trees grew taller, it seemed that Herzl-Wald was indeed becoming a real, deep-rooted olive orchard in Palestine. But then came war, locusts, and despair. The Atid factory failed. Some of the olive trees were damaged, some perished, some were uprooted. As quickly as Herzl’s olive forest had appeared in the Valley of Lydda, it disappeared.

  In 1910, after a wave of immigration from Yemen reached Palestine, Boris Schatz, an art professor and the founder of Jerusalem’s renowned Bezalel art academy, decided to settle Yemenite artisans skilled in silver-smithing in the Lydda Valley. His intention was to establish a modest artisan colony whose resid
ents would make a living by combining twentieth-century agriculture and traditional crafts. For that purpose he built a small neighborhood of humble homes adjacent to the Ben Shemen courtyard and the Herzl-Wald forest to which he brought twelve families of impoverished Yemenite Jews who were rich in artistic tradition. For three years the families struggled to take root in the Lydda Valley, but they were ultimately defeated by the harsh conditions, the shortage of water, and the high infant mortality rate. Like Atid, Kiryat Sefer, and the olive forest, the artisan colony vanished.

  In 1909, the agronomist Yitzhak Vilkansky, who first came to Ben Shemen to work in the olive tree nursery, turned Belkind’s courtyard into an exemplary agricultural enterprise. In Ben Shemen, Vilkansky established Palestine’s first modern cowshed, where he bred strong German bulls with resilient Damascus cows. Vilkansky experimented in beekeeping, almond growing, and wheat harvesting. He developed new methods of irrigation and came up with the idea of mixed farming, which would enable every family of Jewish settlers in Palestine to have a homestead run on a system of rations that would make the most of every small plot of land year-round. He trained work groups of skilled farmers, one of which settled in the deserted homes of the departed Yemenites, and established a tiny but flourishing working village. For sixteen years Vilkansky performed wonders in the Lydda Valley, proving, as the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had said, that in the Land of Israel, Hebrew hands can perform miracles.

  But in 1926 Vilkansky moved his experimental farm to the thriving orange grove colony of Rehovot. After five attempts and four failures, Zionism was faced with the questions it had faced twenty-three years earlier: how to settle the Valley of Lydda, and what to do with the strip of land descending from the rocky hills to the deserted courtyard of Ben Shemen to the ruins of Atid and the minarets rising from the Arab city of Lydda.

  Siegfried Lehmann was born in Berlin in 1892. He studied medicine and served as a doctor in the German army. Although he was the son of a wealthy family of assimilated German Jews, during the Great War he rediscovered his Jewish identity and found meaning in the endeavor of rejuvenating Judaism. In 1916 he established a center for homeless Jewish children in an East Berlin slum. In 1919 he opened a shelter for Jewish war orphans in the Lithuanian city of Kovna. Inspired by his mentors Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, Albert Einstein, and his own brother Alfred, Lehmann believed that there was no future for Jews in Germany, and that Western Jewry must renew itself by reconnecting with the masses of Eastern Jewry, with their traditions and rituals.

  By 1925 the doctor turned teacher realized that a rising wave of anti-Semitism would prevent him from maintaining his Kovna children’s home. There was no place to go but Palestine. First Lehmann intended to rebuild his unique institution on the very spot on which the Ein Harod white tent camp had been pitched in the Harod Valley in the late summer of 1921. But after learning that the swarms of Anopheles mosquitoes in the marshes might endanger the lives of his students, Einstein’s protégé changed course. On a rainy winter day, Lehmann arrived with his wife and a dozen Kovna orphans at the courtyard built by Israel Belkind for the Kishinev orphans some twenty years earlier.

  Where others had failed, Lehmann succeeded. In 1927 there were only fifteen students in Lehmann’s youth village; in 1931 there were two hundred twenty; in 1946, some six hundred students. The village’s ten dunams of cultivated land grew to over five hundred dunams. There was a fine cowshed now, a large sheep pen, a horse stable, an orange grove, a vegetable garden, wheat fields, chicken coops, apiaries, a vineyard. On the gentle slope descending from the courtyard of Kiryat Sefer to the ruins of the Atid factory, long red-roofed dormitories were built. A school was founded, a swimming pool dug, sports fields constructed. Flower gardens were planted along footpaths. The bright living quarters that Lehmann insisted upon for the children gave the school an air of familial warmth. Within ten years, the German-Jewish humanist succeeded in developing in the Lydda Valley one of Zionism’s most endearing enterprises.

  Lehmann’s village was unique. For a reasonably long period of time it fulfilled the utopian values of its founder. The Berlin doctor, who was supported by Berlin’s liberal Jews, was no narrow-minded Zionist. Though he dedicated his life to the salvation of homeless Jewish children, he viewed his humanitarian mission in a broad historical context. He realized that the life of the Jewish people had become unbearable. He acknowledged that the displacement and detachment they experienced threatened the Jews physically, mentally, and spiritually. But Lehmann believed that in the twentieth century, displacement and detachment were not solely a Jewish malady. He saw that a sense of rootlessness was also threatening contemporary Western civilization. Lehmann wanted Zionism to suggest a cure both for the modern Jewish people and for modern man; he wanted it to fulfill an urgent national task in a manner that would benefit all of humanity. He wanted Zionism to be a settlement movement that was not tainted by colonialism, a national movement that was not scarred by chauvinism, a progressive movement that was not distorted by urban alienation. He believed that Zionism must not establish a closed-off, condescending colony in Palestine that ignored its surroundings and native neighbors; it must not be an Occidental frontier fortress commanding the Orient. On the contrary, Lehmann believed that Zionism must plant the Jews in their ancient homeland in an organic fashion. It must respect the Orient and become a bridge between East and West. Though he never said so explicitly, Lehmann saw his Lydda Valley youth village as an example of what Zionism should be: a salvation project giving home to the homeless, providing roots to the uprooted, and restoring meaning to life. Lehmann’s Ben Shemen would offer harmony to the children and to the era that had lost all harmony.

  Dr. Lehmann believed that Zionism would prevail only if it was integrated into the Middle East. In July 1927, the young doctor rushed to the traumatized Arab city of Lydda to attend to the survivors of a devastating earthquake that demolished much of the old town and killed scores of its residents. In the 1930s, because of the profound impact his work had had on the community during the disaster, Lehmann made friends among Lydda’s gentry and among the dignitaries of the neighboring Arab villages of Haditha, Dahariya, Gimzu, Daniyal, Deir Tarif, and Bayt Nabala. He saw to it that the villagers walking to and from Lydda in the scorching summer heat would enjoy cool water and refreshing shade at a specially designed welcome fountain that he built for them at the gate of the Zionist youth village. Lehmann instructed the youth village clinic to give medical assistance to Palestinians seeking it. He insisted that the students of Ben Shemen be taught to respect their neighbors and their neighbors’ culture. Almost every weekend the youth of Ben Shemen went on trips to the villages. They also frequently visited Lydda, its market, its schools. Arab musicians and dancers were invited to participate in the youth village’s festivals. An Orient fair was held, at which Arab rural civilization was studied, displayed, and celebrated.

  When the Hollywood-produced film Land was shot in Lehmann’s youth village just after World War II, the scenes it captured portrayed a humanist utopia. In black-and-white frames, the director, Helmar Lerski, and his cinematographers registered an unreal reality. Here were boys and girls who had barely escaped Germany living in a progressive, democratic educational establishment, a kind of convalescent home for the uprooted youth of an uprooted people in the land of the Bible. Here were young Hebrew shepherds herding sheep on the craggy, ancient hills between Haditha and Dahariya. Here were young weavers spinning yarn on spindles as if they were French or German villagers who had been living on the land for generations. Here was a community of orphans living a Euro-Palestinian village culture that is in peace with the land it had just descended upon. On the eve of the Sabbath, the children, wearing white shirts, gathered around white-cloth-covered tables to light candles. Although they had no parents, they had faith. Some played Bach, some sang hymns, some told Jewish legends and tales from Tolstoy. But everyone in the halls of Ben Shemen, from age eight to eighteen, took part in an exceptional ri
tual of secular youngsters reaching for the holy in the Holy Land.

  Lydda suspected nothing. Lydda did not imagine what was about to happen. For forty-four years, it watched Zionism enter the valley: first the Atid factory, then the Kiryat Sefer school, then the olive forest, the artisan colony, the tiny workers’ village, the experimental farm, and the strange youth village headed by the eccentric German doctor who was so friendly to the people of Lydda and gave medical treatment to those in need.

  The city of Lydda had two mosques and a large cathedral called St. George. But though by Christian tradition, Lydda was the city of Saint George, the people of Lydda did not see that Zionism would turn into a modern-day dragon. They did not see that while Dr. Lehmann preached peace, others taught war. While Dr. Lehmann took his students to the neighboring Palestinian villages, Shmaryahu Gutman took them to Masada. While the youth village taught humanism and brotherhood, the pine forest behind it hosted military courses training Ben Shemen’s youth to throw grenades, assemble submachine guns, and fire antitank PIAT shells. The people of Lydda did not see that the Zionism that came into the valley to give hope to a nation of orphans has become a movement of cruel resolve, determined to take the land by force.