My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  In the forty-four years that Lydda watched Zionism approach, Lydda prospered. From 1922 to 1947, the population more than doubled, from eight thousand to nineteen thousand. The leap forward was not only quantitative but qualitative. Modernization was everywhere. After the devastation caused by the 1927 earthquake, many of the old clay dwellings were replaced by new solid stone houses. By the Great Mosque and the cathedral, a commercial center and a new mosque were built. On the west side of town a new modern quarter of ruler-straight streets appeared. Lydda was a central junction of Palestine’s railway system, and the train company’s executives resided in the new English-style garden suburb, which was the city’s pride. There was electricity on some streets, running water in some houses. Two state schools and one Anglican school educated the boys and girls of Lydda separately. Two clinics, five doctors, and two pharmacies guaranteed decent medical service. The mortality rate was down to twelve out of a thousand, while the fertility rate was drastically up. A genuine social revolution had taken place in Lydda in the first half of the twentieth century.

  Lydda’s economy did well, too. The British Mandate, the indirect impact of Zionism, and a prime location enabled it to gallop ahead. Situated at the very center of Palestine, Lydda became a main transportation hub in the years of British rule. The train station in the south of town and the international airport in the north offered abundant employment opportunities to its residents. The cross-country roads passing nearby contributed to local commerce. And with its 3,200 dunams of orange groves, Lydda also benefited from the citrus boom. In the old town, hydraulic oil presses replaced manual ones. Three factories manufactured the oil and soap that Atid once produced. The town had a successful tannery and many spinning mills that made kaffiyehs and abbayahs. The cafés were crowded, and the stores were full of the best modern wares. On Mondays and Thursdays, thousands traveled from near and far to Lydda’s famous cattle market and bazaar. Alongside the wealthy landowning class rose a flourishing commercial middle class that turned Lydda into a lively, prosperous town.

  But in 1947 the question of Palestine reaches its moment of truth. In February, His Majesty’s government has had enough of the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews and decides to leave the Holy Land and let the United Nations determine its fate. In June, an eleven-member UN inquiry commission arrives in Palestine and while touring the country visits Ben Shemen and the Lydda Valley. In August the committee comes to the conclusion that there is no chance that Jews and Arabs can coexist in Palestine, and therefore suggests dividing the land into two nation-states. In November, the UN General Assembly endorses the partition plan and calls for the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state. As the Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine reject Resolution 181, violence flares throughout the country. It is clear that Arab nationalism is about to eradicate Zionism and destroy the Jewish community in Palestine by the use of brutal force. It is clear that the Jews must defend themselves, as no one else will come to their rescue. From December 1947 to May 1948, a cruel civil war between Arabs and Jews rages. After the British leave, the State of Israel is founded on May 14, 1948. The next day, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon invade and a full-scale war erupts.

  In December, a seven-car convoy en route to Ben Shemen is viciously attacked. Thirteen of its Jewish passengers are brutally murdered. In February 1948, some four hundred students of the youth village are evacuated from the Lydda Valley in a sad convoy of buses, escorted by British armored vehicles. Dr. Lehmann is heartbroken. By April, the youth village is a besieged military post. In May, the mayor of Lydda recommends that Ben Shemen surrender, but it refuses. Still, the mayor begs the commander of the Arab Legion not to attack the isolated compound, as it does not threaten Lydda in any way. When Arab fields adjacent to Ben Shemen are set ablaze, some of the youth village graduates who have remained rush to put out the fire. Even as war rages in most parts of Palestine, both Arabs and Jews regard the Lydda Valley as a zone of restricted warfare.

  But on July 4, 1948, Operation Larlar, designed to conquer Lydda, is presented to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. On July 10–11, the 8th Brigade of the IDF takes the northern parts of the Lydda Valley: the villages of Deir Tarif and Haditha, and the international airport. Simultaneously the elite Yiftach Brigade takes the southern parts of the valley: the villages of Inaba, Gimzu, Daniyal, and Dahariya. Within twenty-four hours of the Israeli Army’s first division-scale offensive, all the villages Dr. Lehmann so loved and taught his students to love are conquered. And as Zionism closes in on the valley of Lydda from the south, east, and north, it now prepares to conquer the city of Lydda itself.

  On July 11, two 3rd Regiment platoons advance from the conquered village of Daniyal toward the olive orchards separating Ben Shemen from Lydda. Strong machine gun fire from the outskirts of Lydda halts them. In the meantime, Moshe Dayan’s Regiment 89 arrives in Ben Shemen. By the water fountain Dr. Lehmann built for his Arab neighbors, Dayan forms the regiment into an armored column. One behind the other, they stand at the ready: a giant armored vehicle mounted with a cannon, menacing half-tracks, and machine-gun-equipped jeeps. In the late afternoon the column leaves Ben Shemen and speeds into the city of Lydda, firing at all in its way. In forty-seven minutes of blitz, more than a hundred Arab civilians are shot dead—women, children, old people. Regiment 89 loses nine of its men. In the early evening, the two 3rd Regiment platoons are able to penetrate Lydda. Within hours, their soldiers hold key positions in the city center and confine thousands of civilians in the Great Mosque, the small mosque, and the St. George’s cathedral. By evening, Zionism has taken the city of Lydda.

  The next day, two Jordanian armored vehicles enter the conquered city in error, setting off a new wave of violence. The Jordanian army is miles to the east, and the two vehicles have no military significance, but some of the citizens of Lydda mistakenly believe they are the harbingers of liberation. Some of the soldiers of the 3rd Regiment mistakenly believe them to mean that they face the imminent danger of Jordanian assault. By the small mosque, Israeli soldiers are fired upon. Among the young combatants taking cover in a ditch nearby are some of the Ben Shemen graduates, now in uniform. The brigade commander is a Ben Shemen graduate, too. He gives the order to open fire. The soldiers shoot in every direction. Some throw hand grenades into homes. One fires an antitank PIAT shell into the small mosque. In thirty minutes, at high noon, more than two hundred civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.

  When news of the bloodshed reaches the headquarters of Operation Larlar in the conquered Palestinian village of Yazzur, Yigal Allon asks Ben Gurion what to do with the Arabs. Ben Gurion waves his hand: Deport them. Hours after the fall of Lydda, operations officer Yitzhak Rabin issues a written order to the Yiftach Brigade: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”

  Over the next day, negotiations are held in the rectory of St. George’s Cathedral. Present are Shmaryahu Gutman, who is now the military governor of Lydda, and the dignitaries of the now occupied city. The bewildered dignitaries are anxious to save the lives of their flock, whereas the cunning Gutman is eager to expel the lot without giving an explicit expulsion order. When negotiations end in the late morning of July 13, 1948, it is agreed that the people of Lydda and the refugees residing there will exit Lydda immediately. By noon, a mass evacuation is under way. By evening, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs leave Lydda in a long column, marching south past the Ben Shemen youth village and disappearing into the East. Zionism obliterates the city of Lydda.

  Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be. In retrospect it’s all too clear. When Herbert Bentwich saw Lydda from the white tower of Ramleh in April 1897, he should have seen that if a J
ewish state was to exist in Palestine, an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to the Jewish state and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Herbert Bentwich did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For half a century it succeeded in hiding from itself the substantial contradiction between the Jewish national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive forest and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, contradiction struck and tragedy revealed its face. Lydda was no more.

  When, twenty years ago, I realized that Lydda was our black box, I tried to decipher its secrets. I found the brigade commander and spent long hours with him. I located the military governor and spent long days on his kibbutz with him. I spent time with soldiers from the 3rd Regiment and interviewed students from the youth village. To write this chapter, I dug out the audiocassettes I had recorded at that time and listened to them as they told the story of the death of Lydda.

  The brigade commander was born in 1923 in Kovna, where his father worked with Dr. Lehmann. He was raised in a socialist household in Tel Aviv, but at the age of fifteen he was sent to the Ben Shemen youth village, where he immediately became the favorite of his father’s old friend. On Shabbat mornings he was invited to the Lehmanns’ cottage to listen with them to rare recordings on the gramophone: Haydn, Mozart, Bach. On holidays he escorted Dr. Lehmann as he made courtesy calls in the neighboring villages. Occasionally he went with Dr. Lehmann to visit friends and schools in Lydda. He took to Lydda, its market, its olive presses, its old town. At Ben Shemen he worked in the cowshed, the vineyard, the orange grove; he played handball and developed a taste for the arts. But most of all, he loved music: classical music, popular music, folk music. One of his favorite memories of Ben Shemen is of hundreds of students sitting in silence in the great courtyard listening to an orchestra and choir perform Bach’s Peasant Cantata.

  But in addition to the humanistic, music-loving world of Ben Shemen, the seventeen-year-old lived in an alternate reality. At night, he and his friends would go to the forest beyond the youth village, where they learned to assemble and dismantle an English rifle, to shoot a machine gun, to throw a grenade. And when the music lover graduated from Ben Shemen, he joined the first platoon of the Palmach Strike Force. In the winter of 1942 he climbed Masada. In the summer of 1942 he went south to stop Rommel’s Nazis with Molotov cocktails. At the age of twenty-one he became a company commander. At twenty-three he became a commander in a nationwide training course. At twenty-four he was a regiment commander. When war breaks out at the end of 1947, the Ben Shemen graduate commands one of the elite units of Zionism.

  Is the brigade commander aware of the contradiction between his two worlds? Can he combine the Lehmann disciple with the warrior? He has no clear answers to these questions. When he speaks of the fighting up north he is surprisingly open. The voice coming out of the tape recorder says plainly that the mission was the cleansing of the Galilee before the invasion of Arab armies. The Jewish state about to be born would not survive the external battle with the armed forces of the Arab nations if it did not first rid itself of the Palestinian population that endangered it from within. So first they sweep away all the Arabs from the Tiberias-Safed region. Then, in April 1948, they conquer Tiberias, whose Arab population departs under military pressure from the superior Israeli Army. Then they conquer and demolish the Arab villages around Safed. In May they conquer Safed, whose Arab population flees under fire. Then they drive away the villagers of the Hula Valley. By the end of May 1948, the Hula Valley is cleansed of Arabs. The entire Safed-Tiberias region is cleansed of Arabs. All of the eastern Galilee is cleansed of Arabs. Under the command of Ben Shemen’s graduate, the eastern Galilee becomes an Arab-free zone, and an integral part of the new Jewish state.

  But when the brigade commander speaks of Lydda, his voice changes. Now he sounds quiet, almost agonized. He sounds cautious, perhaps not quite candid, as if when talking about Lydda he is suddenly aware of the contradiction and the tragedy. He speaks slowly as he tells me how he conquered the villages to which he used to accompany Dr. Lehmann on his Shabbat visits: Gimzu, Dahariya, Haditha. He speaks quietly as he tells me how he conquered the valley and the city of Lydda. He describes the morning he was informed that Jordanian armored vehicles had broken into the city and learned, shortly afterward, that some of the 3rd Regiment’s Ben Shemen graduates had been attacked. He tells me he was the one who gave orders to shoot anyone walking along the streets of the city, the one who gave orders to evacuate the city. He and the military governor were the ones who sent the people of Lydda out of Lydda in a long column heading east.

  The brigade commander is clearly torn. The voice coming out of the tape recorder is unconvincing. It’s not that he is purposely hiding anything from me. He himself does not know what he feels. His talk of Lydda is vague; it lacks colors, smells, details. While he remembers his Ben Shemen years vividly, he only vaguely remembers the conquest of Lydda. He does not mention the schools he visited, the families he knew, the community he was so fond of. He does not speak at all about the city he loved and destroyed. Only his muted tone surrenders what he holds back. His first apology: We were surrounded. His second apology: We were under imminent threat from within and without. His third apology: There was no time, I had to make an immediate decision. His fourth apology: Horrible things happen in war. But not one of his apologies seems to convince him, or to begin to explain the suppressed three days of Lydda’s death.

  Bulldozer is very different from the brigade commander. Although he, too, is traumatized by the war of ’48, his mental injury is not the same. Rough and coarse, he tends to raise his voice too much. He’s tense and quick-tempered, restless. He admits that in the damned war he lost his peace of mind. In the many years since, he has not been able to find inner calm.

  Bulldozer was also born in Eastern Europe but was raised in Tel Aviv. At seven, he was returning from school one day when an Arab threw a bomb from a passing train onto busy Herzl Street, wounding dozens and killing an eight-year-old boy standing nearby. That day it became clear to him that there would be an all-out war with the Arabs. Although as a teen he walked to Arab Jaffa and made Arab friends, he always knew that between us and them there was a sword. He always knew that eventually the land would be decided by war.

  He was exceptionally strong. He boxed, rode horses, excelled at sports. The size and strength of his body gave him his nickname and made him the boys’ leader and the girls’ favorite. At the age of fourteen he became a member of the secret Haganah. At the age of fifteen he began grenade training. At sixteen he trained at a firing range with live bullets. At seventeen he climbed Masada. When Bulldozer joined the Palmach at the age of eighteen, he did so not because he believed in some sort of kibbutz utopia, but because he wanted to be with the best of the best when war arrived.

  The first months of 1948 are easy: village raids, roadside ambushes. But after he is trained to be an antitank missile operator, warfare becomes intensive. The 3rd Regiment needs his bazookalike antitank weapon in most operations. April, May, and June are impossible, inhuman. A close friend is killed, then another, and another. Pain becomes rage, and rage becomes apathy. There is no time to comprehend, no time to mourn, no time to weep. They have to drive the Arabs from the Galilee and thwart the Syrians and Lebanese forces invading the Galilee. Conquer the Galilee, cleanse the Galilee, defend the Galilee. Ensure that the Galilee is Jewish.

  The raid on Ein Zeitun is the first time they go down into an Arab village not to take revenge but to conquer. Bulldozer vividly remembers the midnight anticipation. He remembers the assault, the firestorm, and the surprise: how easy it is to conquer a village. When the 3rd Regiment boys break into the stone houses they find only burning lanterns, warm blankets, milk boiling over from pots. They walk into homes abandoned by their inhabitants who had taken fright and r
un away into the night. He recalls the eerie feeling of witnessing a living village become a ghost village in one night.

  The first brutal deed Bulldozer remembers carrying out is the prisoner-of-war interrogations. For a moment his self-assured voice is hesitant: May one tell? But after a pause comes the flood, and the need to talk overpowers the imperative not to talk. Because he is big and strong, Bulldozer is assigned to assist the intelligence officer as he interrogates seven of the young men captured in Ein Zeitun. One by one he ties the terrified prisoners to a low bench, so that their foreheads touch the ground at one end and their feet at the other. Once he hits the head of a prisoner with a short stick, and then he hits the prisoner’s legs with a long stick. And once he starts beating the prisoners of war he begins to enjoy beating them. He feels he is avenging the dead, that he is doing what his fallen comrades would have wanted him to do. He makes the seven prisoners tell the intelligence officer all that they know. He makes them bleed so much that they cannot stand up.

  Next is the conquest of Safed, the first time the 3rd Regiment conquers a city. The beginning is difficult. Bulldozer finds himself nearly alone as an armed Arab mob storms the building he is in. The mob shouts “Slaughter the Jews.” Ammunition is running out. He feels the cold shudder of approaching death. But by morning there is a dramatic turn of events. Jewish reinforcements arrive and the Arabs retreat. With his Canadian rifle and fresh rounds of ammunition, Bulldozer hunts down the Arabs seeking refuge between the old stone houses of the ancient city. He feels delight in hunting. Delight in killing. The almost sexual pleasure of laying men down.