My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  Ottman holds the horse’s reins while Father pushes the wagon from behind. The road is narrow, the congestion unbearable. Children shout, women scream, men weep. A rumor circulates of a mother who has lost her baby boy. A rumor circulates of a mother who has thrown away her baby girl. A Jewish jeep appears out of nowhere, its soldiers blowing its horn. Onward, onward. The Jewish soldiers shoot over their heads. There is no stopping, no going back, no looking back.

  In the great rush people took flour and rice with them rather than water. So there is no water now, and the heat is unbearable. When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out. People suck watermelons found in the fields, eggplants, anything with moisture, anything that will give momentary relief to their animalistic thirst. Most women are dressed in traditional black gowns and carry sacks on their heads. Some of the men wear traditional djellabas, some fine European suits. Every so often a family withdraws from the column and stops by the side of the road—to bury a baby that could not bear the heat; to say farewell to an old grandmother who collapsed in fatigue. After a while it gets worse. Now a mother abandons her howling baby under a tree. Ottman’s cousin deserts her boy under another tree. She cannot stand to hear the week-old baby wailing with hunger. But Ottman’s father instructs the cousin to go back to the tree and get her son. Yet Father is desperate, too. He appears to be losing his mind. Pushing the loaded wagon he curses the Jews and curses the Arabs and curses God.

  Not far from Ben Shemen there is a surprise. A group of Jews in uniform stand by two command cars watching the march. One of them calls Father’s name aloud. Father raises his eyes and walks toward the commander. The Ben Shemen graduate and the Ben Shemen vegetable supplier stand face-to-face in the summer fields, both silent. Finally, the commander tells Father he can stay. Father says that if he stays he will be considered a traitor and will be executed. The commander walks back to the command car and brings a jerry can of water, which he puts on Father’s wagon. The commander watches as Father gives water to his mother, his wife, his sisters-in-law, his sons. And he watches as Father takes the family wagon and rejoins the column heading east.

  I drive to Lydda. It’s July, and the heat is as stifling as it was back in July 1948. A thick yellow haze chokes the Lydda Valley. The small mosque was recently renovated and is locked up, but the Great Mosque is open. I walk through the same stone gate the inhabitants of Lydda entered, through the same square courtyard they crowded into, beneath the same arches of the same high-ceilinged dome they stood under for thirty-six hours. A few yards away is the regal cathedral of St. George. Across the alley is the rectory in which the military governor, Gutman, held talks with the dignitaries of Lydda.

  The area in which stood the old stone houses and olive presses and alleyways of the old city was demolished in the 1950s. But in the square kilometer of what was once Old Lydda, one still feels that something is very wrong. There is a curious ruin here, an unexplained ruin there. Amid the ugly slums, shabby market, and cheap stores, it is clear that there is still an unhealed wound in Lydda. Unlike other cities where Israel overcame Palestine, here Palestine is still felt. Unlike other places where modernity overcame the past, here the past is present.

  Do I wash my hands of Zionism? Do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the deed of Lydda? Like the brigade commander, I am faced with something too immense to deal with. Like the military governor, Gutman, I see a reality I cannot contain. Like the training group leader, I am not only sad, I am horrified. For when one opens the black box, one understands that whereas the small mosque massacre could have been a misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events, the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda were no accident. They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of our story. And when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.

  One thing is clear to me: the brigade commander and the military governor were right to get angry at the bleeding-heart Israeli liberals of later years who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed. I condemn Bulldozer. I reject the sniper. But I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the training group boys. On the contrary. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the State of Israel would not have been born. If it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.

  To the east, the silvery olive orchards are gone. The remains of the Atid factory are also gone. The fields of the long-gone Arabs of Lydda are now the withering sunflower fields of the Israeli moshav Ginton and the Israeli moshav Ben Shemen. Dr. Lehmann’s youth village is still here, but after the 1948 war and after the death of Dr. Lehmann in 1958, its spirit was lost. On the gentle slopes now stand the nondescript buildings of a nondescript educational institution. Only one group of long, red-roofed houses built for the orphans of Europe still stands in testimony to what Ben Shemen once was and what it wished to be. And the courtyard of Ben Shemen is still here. A major project is under way to preserve it.

  From the highest point of the Ben Shemen youth village, I look out at the Lydda Valley. I see the city of Lydda and the tall minaret of the Great Mosque. I see the vanished olive orchards, the vanished Herzl forest, the vanished Atid factory, the vanished Lehmann youth village. And I think about the tragedy that took place here. Forty-five years after it came into the Lydda Valley in the name of the Kishinev pogrom, Zionism instigated a human catastrophe in the Lydda Valley. Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sent out of the Lydda Valley a column of homeless. In the heavy heat, through the haze, through the dry brown fields, I see the column marching east. So many years have passed, and yet the column is still marching east. For columns like the column of Lydda never stop marching.

  (photo credit 6.1)

  SIX

  Housing Estate, 1957

  I MEET WITH PROFESSOR ZE’EV STERNHELL IN HIS MODEST JERUSALEM apartment. Sternhell is a distinguished scholar of European fascism and a lauded political activist against Israeli fascism. He is tall and elegant, a true gentleman. For three consecutive days I listen to his life story, trying to understand my own. Listening to Sternhell, I try to understand the Jewish-Israeli tale of the twentieth century.

  “I was the beloved, pampered son-of-old-age of an affluent secular Jewish family in Galicia,” Sternhell tells me. “My grandfather was a successful textile merchant and my father was his business partner. My mother stayed home and raised me with the help of a maid and a nanny. My older sister, Ada, who was thirteen years my senior, was like a second mother to me. I was showered with love. To this day my most poignant memory is of my father holding me in his arms and pressing his cheek to mine.

  “Suddenly war broke out. I was awakened in the middle of the night. All the lights were on as my father said goodbye to us, dressed in the uniform of the Polish army. When he returned from defeat a few weeks later, everything collapsed. My father died, my grandfather died. The Russians occupied eastern Poland and took over half of our large house. We no longer had a nanny or maid. My mother had to work. My mother and my sister did the best they could to shield me. In a world that had lost all sense of stability, they were my only remaining anchor.

  “When I was six, in the summer of 1941, the Barbarossa operation began right under our house, which was built on the banks of the Wisla River. I remember the windows shattering, firebombs, the amazing might of Nazi Germany. And within hours, we saw long convoys of terrified Russian prisoners of war. A few months later we were transported to the ghetto. The transition was abrupt: from our grand house to a nook in the ghetto, with its terrible overcrowding, its stench, the hunger.

  “Then came the Actio
ns. The ghetto was liquidated in stages, and each time it was a different sort of hunt. I remember when we ourselves were hunted. My mother, Ada, and I hid for three days in an underground hole, some sort of cave. There were a few other people hiding with us, while outside, the ghetto was being decimated. There was a slit through which I watched the hunt. I saw men being shot, children being shot. I was a child of six hiding underground watching through a slit other children who were hiding in treetops as they were shot and killed and fell to the ground.

  “I cannot even say what my emotions were. I grew up in the very orderly world of a prosperous middle-class European family. And then, after five years of bliss, this world collapsed overnight. What we thought to be inviolable was violated. What we thought to be the natural order of things was overturned. And it all happened from one day to the next. In the ghetto, one lost one’s human foundation, one’s human identity. One stopped being human. I was no longer a human being. And in this postcollapse world, it was survival at all cost.

  “After the first Action came another. It was a hot summer day, and the Germans were once again hunting Jews. It was a real hunt, like a fox hunt or a hare hunt. Then came the order that everyone who did not have a work permit must assemble in a specified ghetto location. My mother and sister went. I remember it as if it happened yesterday. I remember my sister saying to my mother: we are young, we will work, we will survive. They knew they were leaving me. They knew that only God knew what would happen. But they did not want to frighten me. And they wanted to hope. They wanted to believe they would return. And I did, too. It didn’t even occur to me that they wouldn’t return, that I would never see them again. They hugged me and kissed me and left me with my aunt. I watched them walk away, becoming smaller and smaller in the distance.

  “My aunt tried as best she could to make up for my mother’s absence. My uncle was extremely resourceful; he rescued us from the ghetto. But although my uncle and aunt tried hard to soften the blow, from the moment my mother and sister left, I was alone. From the age of seven, I had no one to talk to. I knew I had to survive on my own. Although I was a child, I knew that I could count on no one and turn to no one. It was a life of utter solitude.

  “In the next few months something happened that bordered on the miraculous. My uncle found a home owner in Lvov who had been an officer in the Polish army and was willing to assist Jews. In the terrible anti-Semitic climate of Poland at that time, this was one in a thousand. There was also a working-class family that helped us. These two families saved us. Our forged papers said we were Aryan and that our identity was Polish Catholic. So we wouldn’t get caught, my aunt taught me Catholic stories and prayers. It was crucial that the neighbors saw us living as Catholics. Gradually it stopped being a game. I liked it: Easter, Christmas, Christmas presents. The story of Jesus, the image of Mary. Catholicism is genius. You don’t stand alone the way Jews and Protestants do. Jesus sacrificed himself for you, and Mary constantly watches over you. You ask her to save you. And when you are a child in the midst of a horrific war and there is carnage all around you, and your father is dead and your mother is gone, you are easily tempted to believe in all this. You hope it will bring you salvation. And you kneel by the altar and you say what every Catholic child says.

  “Postwar Poland was dreadfully anti-Semitic. Even though the Nazis were gone, you could smell the hatred for Jews on every street corner. I remember a woman shouting at Jews: ‘Scum, you’ve come out of your holes, too bad Hitler didn’t finish you off.’ I remember Jews who returned from the camps hiding their identity, and when they were exposed, they were cursed and beaten. There were constant rumors of postwar pogroms. It was crystal clear that Jews had no future in Poland. After all we had been through and all we had seen, we knew that we could no longer be Jewish. We had to replace our old cursed identity with a new one.

  “I was officially baptized. My Polish name became Zvigniew Orlowski. I was an altar boy in the Krakow cathedral. I prayed with the priest and helped him with the holy bread. Every day I genuflected. Being the servant of God’s servant gave me proximity to God. But what was even more important than that was not to be Jewish. To be a Jew was to have to run away all the time. To conceal, to lie, to manipulate. And I cut myself off from all that. I ceased to be Jewish. I turned myself into a Catholic in order to live.

  “But in 1946, it became clear that even as a Catholic I had no future in Krakow. A Red Cross children’s transport train took me from Poland to France, from one aunt to another. I was eleven, and once again I was totally alone. When I reached France, I buried in my heart everything that had happened in Poland. I didn’t want to remember anything. I erased the Polish language, my mother tongue, from my memory. I also erased my Catholicism. I adopted a new identity, French. Within a year French became my first language. I studied in a prestigious high school in Avignon, and by the time I was fifteen I was immersed in French culture. Even my accent no longer sounded foreign. I was on the fast track to the Sorbonne.

  “France taught me liberty, equality, and human rights. I learned to embrace universalism and secularism, and the principle of separation between state and church. But I always knew that France was not home. Although I wanted to erase the past, I didn’t erase the memory of my father, mother, and sister, who were taken from me and died because they were Jewish. I felt I was different; I was from another place. As a Jew, I felt I could never be whole in France. And I was not authentically French. Between France and me there was always a barrier.

  “The declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 aroused enormous excitement. You and people of your generation cannot grasp this,” Sternhell tells me. “Even before the war, in Poland, our family was Zionist. My aunt in Avignon was active in the Jewish National Fund. There were Zionist posters in every room. I used to read three newspapers every day to follow the drama unfolding in Palestine. As a thirteen-year-old boy I feared that the Arabs would slaughter the Jews. But the army of the Jews fought and won and the state of the Jews came to be. It was beyond imagination. Only four years had passed since the Red Army had liberated us. Only six years since the Nazis had wiped out the ghetto. And now these very same Jews who had been locked up in the ghetto and were hunted down, rose and established a state. Even to someone as secular as myself this was a historic event with a metaphysical dimension. Suddenly there were Jews who were government ministers and Jews who were military officers. A flag, a passport, a uniform. Now the Jews were no longer dependent on gentiles. Now Jews were like gentiles. They stood up for themselves. Even in retrospect, the most thrilling event of my life was the establishment of the State of Israel. I felt an almost religious exaltation.

  “In the world of the Holocaust, Jews had no dignity. Jews were human powder, human dust. They were shot as dogs and cats were never shot. They were treated worse than animals. Animals you could pity. Jews you could not pity. The Jew was subhuman. Nothing. Zero. And now, only three years after Auschwitz, the Jew is a human entity. Now, in the Land of Israel, the Jews were fighting back. And they were fighting properly. They fought to win. I saw them in magazine photographs and in cinema newsreels: young and strong and holding guns. Suddenly they were human like all humans. They were capable of fighting for their freedom as the Italians of Edmondo De Amicis’s Heart fought for their freedom. They were not creatures one could enslave and hunt down and kill. For me, in the south of France, it was a wonder. It was a miracle taking place in real, concrete history.

  “At the age of sixteen, I decided to make aliyah. I immigrated to Israel on my own, on a boat with a large transport of children coming from Marseille. It was very crowded but it was fun. I remember us standing on the upper deck, watching Mount Carmel come into view, the Land of Israel approaching. And as we disembarked, a few children knelt and kissed the ground. I didn’t kneel or kiss the ground, but I felt I had arrived. This was the last station—no more wandering, no more transformations, no more false identities. No more fraud and forgery. No more no
t being myself. For subterfuge and deceit were not needed here. Something artificial and scary fell away from me. Something that had to do with the perpetual need I felt to justify myself. But in the State of Israel I no longer had to justify or explain. It was a great relief. I didn’t speak Hebrew yet, I didn’t know what the future held. I was alone, without possessions or protection. But I was filled with the amazing feeling that the long, excruciating journey had come to an end.”

  Aharon Appelfeld is a world-renowned author whose Holocaust-related novels—Badenheim 1939, The Age of Wonders, Iron Tracks—have been translated into many languages. I sit with him in the basement studio of his Mevaseret-Zion home near Jerusalem. He is short, round-faced, and soft-spoken. Every now and then a devilish spark lights up his eyes. As I had listened to Sternhell, I listen to Appelfeld for a few days. Listening to Appelfeld I once again try to comprehend the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century.

  “I was born near Czernowitz in 1932,” Appelfeld tells me. “My father was a well-educated industrialist, a former chess champion of Vienna. My mother stayed at home, and she was absolutely beautiful. I was an only child, and my parents spoiled me with ice cream, cakes, toys, books, and folk tales. They wanted me to be a lawyer in Berlin or Vienna. In general, their eyes were always set on Vienna, with its opera, theater, and grand cafés. Judaism was some anachronistic matter of little importance to them. The future was the future of European enlightenment. Our home was spacious and prosperous. We employed a nanny and a cook. We had a piano and many books and fine paintings, multicolored vases, and a masonry stove that warmed the interiors in winter. And when our small happy family left home, we went to Vienna or Prague or the Carpathian Mountains. Wearing Austrian shorts, socks, and high boots, I loved to step on the soft carpet of autumn leaves in the Vienna parks. When we would return home, my mother would play the piano and put me to sleep with snowy tales that seeped into my dreams. On Sundays, when Father and I would play in my room with the electric train he bought me, Mother would call from the other end of the house: ‘Ervin, where are you?’ ‘I am here, Mother, I am here,’ I would call back to her.