My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  After the battle subsides, Bulldozer goes to the local hospital, where he finds three of his buddies lying on the floor in a cold corridor—their faces alien in death, frozen in horror. As tough as he is, he is frightened. A week later, because he is the last to return from a late-night operation in some Arab village, he boards the last truck at the collection point. Half an hour later, he realizes that the boys he is with are lifeless. Once again, he feels fear. He has a sudden, rare moment of understanding of what these few months of war have done to him, what a nightmare he is living.

  In late May, he is in the Jordan Valley. He experiences one of his worst hours when he is sent with his PIAT rocket launcher to stop the invading Syrian tanks that are approaching Kibbutz Degania. He stands alone watching the first tank head toward him, watching it target him. At the very last moment he fires his PIAT first, halting the tank while wounding himself.

  He experiences another bad hour when he sees the survivors from two Jordan Valley kibbutzim who have escaped their incinerated homes. The shock of seeing kibbutz members turned refugees makes him think for the first time that defeat is possible. He realizes that the war he is participating in might end with the death of Zionism. And if Zionism dies, what will happen in the Land of Israel will be what has happened time after time in Europe. Jews will be Jews again: they will be helpless.

  By the time Bulldozer arrives in the Lydda Valley, he is exhausted. He has seen too much, done too much, killed far too much. This time he is not trigger-happy. But when the orders come, he obeys. He marches with the 3rd Regiment platoons from the silvery olive orchards into Lydda. And when the sun rises, he wanders the streets of Lydda looking for a camera shop he can loot—he so loves cameras. Suddenly, there is shooting. There are rumors of invading armored vehicles, of friends trapped in the ditch by the small mosque. When Bulldozer approaches the small mosque, he sees that there is indeed shooting. From somewhere, somehow, grenades are thrown. He instructs one of his subordinates to fire an antitank PIAT into the small mosque. When the shell-shocked soldier refuses and departs, Bulldozer takes the PIAT into his own hands. Although he knows that shooting a PIAT in the narrow alley means that the PIAT operator himself will be hurt, he decides to shoot anyway. He dismantles the door of a public lavatory situated in the narrow alley and tries to hide his huge body in the lavatory as best he can. He does not aim at the minaret from which the grenades were apparently thrown but at the mosque wall behind which he can hear human voices. He shoots his PIAT at the mosque wall from a distance of six meters, killing seventy.

  The training group was made up of 120 youth movement graduates from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa whose mission was to establish a new kibbutz on the shores of the Red Sea, close to Eilat. In the summer of 1947, the eighteen-year-old boys and girls trained for kibbutz life in an older kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee. They cleared fields, built communal housing, mended fishing nets, worked in the banana plantation and in the cowshed, took sheep out to pasture. Ten days a month, they studied topography and navigation and learned how to handle a submachine gun and assemble explosives. But for the rest of the month they maintained their communal lifestyle: they held a literature class, an arts seminar, a political economy workshop, and a course on Zionist thinking. They analyzed the inherent contradiction of capitalism, that it tramples the dignity of man; they wondered whether man makes history, or whether history makes man. They read Tagore, Zweig, Hesse, and Rosa Luxemburg; Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Buber’s I and Thou. They played and listened to music: Mendelssohn, Paganini, and Domenico Cimarosa, to whom they took a special liking. In the woods by the Sea of Galilee, sitting in a circle around a gramophone, the boys and girls of the training group listened again and again to Cimarosa’s tragic oboe, whose sad sound was echoed by the rustling of the eucalyptus trees and the lapping of the lake’s waves.

  In December 1947, a few of the training group boys join their first retaliation operation in a small Arab village in the Upper Galilee. Because women and children are accidentally killed, they decide they might as well blow up the two village homes that contain the corpses of the dead. In January 1948, the training group suffers the loss of its first boy. The girls place candles around his body, and all night they sit beside it, as if in vigil. Then another boy is killed in action. And another. Two more are killed. Some of the boys become cynical and morbid. Others leave the girls letters of last will and testament.

  In mid-January, eight of the boys carry out their first roadside ambush: they open fire with a machine gun on an Arab taxi, killing all of its innocent passengers. In mid-February some of them participate in their first commando-style raid: they blow up sixteen stone houses in a remote Galilee village, killing sixty. The mind-set changes. Values and norms begin to devolve. There are still gramophone concerts in the evenings, but the talk now is of revenge. Literary discussions and ideological debates still take place, but just before a military operation there is now a war dance. Like painted Indian warriors, like lustful Arab assassins, the Hebrew boys go round and round with daggers held high, knives between their teeth. And on the eve of May Day, they descend the mountain of Kna’an to conquer a village for the very first time. They drive away the eight hundred inhabitants, loot the village, and blow it up. They erase the village from the face of the earth.

  From the tape recorder on my desk rises the voice of one of the girls from the training group whom I know very well. She remembers the apprehension she felt as the boys went down to the village late at night. And how they returned at sunrise, riding looted donkeys, wearing looted kaffiyehs, carrying looted strings of beads. Instead of the tension they have been feeling for months, a sort of euphoria erupts. Suddenly war isn’t just serious and somber, it’s fun. The boys feel a new sense of power and liberation. Instead of khaki, spartanism, and self-discipline, they feel an unburdening, a throwing off of the yoke of morality. The rooms of the hotel they commandeer for their base are now filled with colorful cloth, strings of beads, copperware, and hookahs. On one of the doors is a handwritten sign that reads EAT, DRINK, AND LOOT, FOR TOMORROW WE DIE. It is as if not only a conquered Arab village was demolished on May Day, but with it the ethos of the socialist-Zionist edict of being humble and doing right and serving a greater good.

  Some of the boys participate in the brutal interrogation of the village prisoners. Others take the bleeding prisoners to the wadi after the interrogation is over. As the prisoners are executed, some of the boys turn their eyes away, but others watch in glee. Meanwhile, in the city of Safed, one of the boys emerges as a talented sniper. His voice on my audiocassette is remorseless. Once he shot a woman, another time a priest, then a child. And every time he felled an Arab, he carved another groove on the wooden butt of his Canadian sniper’s rifle. Fifty grooves in all, he says.

  Then comes the great battle of Safed, the emptying of Safed, and the looting that follows. “Our yard is like the yard of an Arab village,” writes one of the girls in a letter.

  There is much commotion. Hens are everywhere, clucking away. The cattle break into the yard now and then … but even in all the excitement, I see the wrong in all these looted possessions, and at the end of the day, it disgusts me, sickens me. I cannot recognize the guys anymore. All of them are drunk with victory and driven by the lust for loot. Each one of them took all that he could and in the joy of triumph they broke loose, expressing feelings of hatred and revenge, turning into real animals. They smashed, destroyed, and killed anything in their path. The thirst for revenge found its fountain and the comrades lost all humanity. I can’t believe that human beings are capable of such things: to kill dozens of people in cold blood. No, I cannot say in cold blood. With passion. Day by day, the human feelings in us become duller and duller.

  On July 11, 1948, the training group boys march on Lydda. The shooting from the eastern outskirts of town confines them to the olive groves bordering Ben Shemen. Mosquitoes buzz around them, the heat is scorching, a
nd their new iron helmets sizzle on their heads. A few are wounded, others are shell-shocked. The group’s first daylight battle is not going well. But after Dayan’s storm of fire breaks Lydda’s spirit of resistance, the training group boys are among the 3rd Regiment soldiers who penetrate Lydda. They lead the long processions of Lydda’s inhabitants, their hands in the air, to the Great Mosque and confine them there, thousands of men, young and old. They hear the shrieking, the howling, the weeping. They see the horror in the eyes of women and children.

  The next day, after the Jordanian armored vehicles break into Lydda, one of the training group leaders is wounded when a hand grenade, apparently thrown from the small mosque, explodes and takes his hand clear off. This incident provokes Bulldozer to shoot the antitank PIAT into the mosque. And when the PIAT operator is himself wounded, the desire for revenge grows even stronger. Some 3rd Regiment soldiers spray the wounded in the mosque with gunfire. Others toss grenades into neighboring houses. Still others mount machine guns in the streets and shoot at anything that moves. After half an hour of revenge, there are scores of corpses in the streets, seventy corpses in the mosque. The corpses from the mosque are buried at night in a deep hole dug by some nearby Arabs, and a tractor is brought in before morning to cover the hole.

  “We were cruel,” writes another of the training group girls. “The damned war turned humans into beasts,” writes a boy. And a second boy writes, “I am tired, so tired. Tired in many respects, but especially mentally. I feel too young to carry the burden of all this.” But of all of the letters on my desk, the one that upsets me most is by another boy, whom I now know as a mentor and a friend:

  From day to day I see the devastation caused by this war to our generation, and to the next. From day to day my fear grows that this generation will not be able to carry upon its shoulders the burden of building the state and fulfilling the dream. I am all anxiety and concern. When I think of the thefts, the looting, the robberies and recklessness, I realize that these are not merely separate incidents. Together they add up to a period of corruption. The question is earnest and deep, really of historic dimensions. We will all be held accountable for this era. We shall face judgment. And I fear that justice will not be on our side. There is an impression that the quick transition to a state, and to a state of Hebrew power, drove people mad. Otherwise it is impossible to explain the behavior, the state of mind, the actions of the Hebrew youth, especially the elite youth. The moral code of the nation, forged during thousands of years of weakness, is rapidly degenerating, deteriorating, disintegrating.

  The military governor of Lydda after occupation is the Man of Masada. Although personally he is secular and rational, Shmaryahu Gutman’s approach to Zionism is almost mystical. He sees the revolutionary movement as the outburst of life of a people on the verge of extinction. He sees it as an inspired undertaking by a beaten nation that does not wait for the Messiah but takes upon itself the Messiah’s mission. He believes that for fifty years Zionism has been an outstanding success. Every time one wave of immigration subsided, another wave emerged. Every time one generation grew weak, another generation took the torch into its strong hands. But in the 1940s something changed. The Arab issue, which had always existed, suddenly put a question mark on the future. Throughout the country, Arab villages became more modern and Arab cities more prosperous. A new Arab intelligentsia developed a strong national awareness and began to crystallize a distinctive, highly dangerous Arab-Palestinian identity. So the old Zionist way of doing things was no longer relevant. There was no longer an option to buy land gradually, bring in well-trained immigrants gradually, and build the Jewish nation gradually, from the bottom up. There was a need for a different sort of action. War was inhuman, but it allowed one to do what one could not do in peace; it could solve problems that were unsolvable in peace.

  Six and a half years have passed since Gutman took his first forty-six cadets up to Masada. Since then he has taken up thousands more and single-handedly transformed a generation. Yet his work has gone beyond inspiring youth. In the intervening years, he has turned out to be a superb intelligence operator. A year after the first Masada seminar, using his Arabic, his cunning, and his sharp instincts, he began assisting in preparing intelligence files on the Arab villages. In each file he included an aerial photograph, a map, a demographic breakdown of the population and its leadership, its strengths and weaknesses, its roads and byways, its command points. Every village file contains the village’s demise.

  For years Gutman’s thinking has been clandestine. Only with his best friend, the Haganah’s chief of staff, Israel Galili, could he be candid. Only between themselves did they say what could not be said—what the mind understands, the heart whispers, and morality forbids. And when the great, inevitable war was being planned, it was clear to the two close friends that the first task in war would be to guarantee an Arab-free zone—a Jewish territorial continuum. Gutman believed the mission was possible. Knowing the Arabs well, he surmised that they did not yet have a coherent, internal structure or the spirit of a sovereign nation. Once they encountered Zionist organization, determination, and firepower, he believed, they would simply leave.

  When the 1948 war breaks out, Gutman is in charge of the Palmach’s special undercover intelligence unit. He debates fiercely with the old-guard Arabists of the Haganah, who rely on the peace treaties they signed with friendly Arab villages across the country. He claims that when push comes to shove, even the most loyal village leaders will not be able to withstand Pan-Arab pressure. They will break the treaties and turn against the Jews. While the old guard is still committed to its Arab allies who have been supportive of the Jews for years, the energetic educator and Arabist believes the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is a total one. The great war is a war of us or them.

  Gutman lives in Na’an, the kibbutz he helped to found not far from Lydda. Next to Na’an are the Arab village of Na’aneh and the Bedouin village of Sataria, established fifty-eight years earlier, when the tribe of Sataria was expelled from the estate of Duran to make way for the orange grove colony of Rehovot. In the spring of 1948 the leadership of Kibbutz Na’an meets with the leadership of the Sataria tribe, and the Jews and Bedouins pledge mutual allegiance. Yet Gutman cannot stand the hypocritical innocence of both parties. He rises to his feet. “There is a great war coming,” he says to the Bedouin chiefs. “When it reaches us, Kibbutz Na’an will not be able to stand by you and guarantee your future.” The tribal chief of Sataria immediately gets the message. The next morning, the Bedouins of Sataria leave their homes and escape to Gaza. Several weeks later, the villagers of Na’aneh do the same. Without lifting a hand, without committing any act of war, Gutman succeeds in achieving his goal. The two villages whose people he has known well and has had close neighborly ties with for fifteen years disappear.

  Unlike the brigade commander or Bulldozer or the training group, Gutman gets it. He is fully aware of the strategic and moral dilemmas he is faced with. He has always known that his generation’s mission would be to rid the country of its Arabs. And he has always known how terrible it would be to rid the country of its Arabs. That’s why he has been looking for “sophisticated” ways to get rid of them. He does not want to kill them or expel them; he wants to induce them to leave of their own accord.

  Gutman is assigned to Lydda purely by chance. On July 11, 1948, he is looking for Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin on some intelligence matter. He drives from Na’an to the old Herbert Bentwich estate near Tel-Gezer but finally finds the generals in the conquered, deserted village of Daniyal. As they watch from Daniyal the forces storming Lydda, Allon tells Gutman that he is to be the military governor of the city once it is taken. Gutman asks Allon, “What should I do with the Arabs? Do you have anything to say to me?” “I have nothing to say to you,” Allon replies. “You will see how things go, and as things go, you’ll act. Do what you think you must do.”

  At dusk Gutman arrives in Lydda and becomes its military g
overnor. In the dimness of nightfall he sees a mass of thousands flowing in silence toward the Great Mosque in order to turn themselves in under threat that whoever is found outside after curfew will be shot. By nightfall thousands of terrified human beings are gathered in the high-ceilinged house of prayer. It is hot, crowded, and stifling, with no food, no water, no air—there is no room to sit or to lie down. Within hours the ill and the young will suffocate.

  At midnight the military governor releases the women and children. Then he releases the flour mill and flour shop owners to provide flour, and the bakers to bake pita bread. He releases the water well operators to provide water. Later on he releases two hundred refugees from Na’aneh and provides them with food, water, camels, and mules so they can escape the city before all hell breaks loose. By morning he releases most of the teenagers. Yet the mosque is still crowded. Things get worse again when the 3rd Regiment takes control of the entire city in mid-morning, and more men pour into the Great Mosque, their hands up in the air, their eyes full of dread.

  The sudden shooting at noon on July 12 finds the military governor in the rectory of St. George’s, where he is negotiating with Lydda’s dignitaries. The operations officer of the 3rd Regiment is sent into town to see what the hell is going on. Minutes later, an agitated young soldier arrives, saying that grenades are being thrown at his comrades from the small mosque. The regiment commander turns to the military governor with a sarcastic smile. “What do you say, Governor? What are your orders?” he asks. The governor is neither sarcastic nor amused. He realizes that if he does not act quickly and firmly, things will get out of hand. He suggests shooting at any house from which shots are fired, shooting into every window, shooting at anyone suspected of being part of the mutiny.