My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
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The beginning was dismal. Approximately a hundred thousand of the first immigrants to arrive in the free Jewish state were sent to the vacant houses of Arabs who had just fled Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Ramleh, and Lydda. Tens of thousands were settled in dozens of Palestinian ghost villages whose stone houses were deemed fit for residence. But by early 1950, the deserted properties could no longer solve the acute problem created by the astonishing human flood. More than a hundred thousand immigrants found themselves in depressing camps established in what had been British military installations, most of them surrounded by barbed wire fences. There they lived in tents, sharing toilets and showers. The camps were muddy, chaotic, and prone to disease. This was not what the immigrants had expected the Promised Land to be like. To deal with the human catastrophe, 121 ma’abarot, or refugee camps, were hastily erected throughout the country. At the end of 1949, 93,000 immigrants lived in the tin shacks of these camps. In mid-1951, their number soared to 220,000, and at the end of 1951, to 257,000. Almost every second person recently immigrated to Israel lived in one sort of makeshift installation or another; 11,500 families lived in tents, 15,000 in tiny temporary huts, 30,000 in tin shacks. At the very same time, the country slid into a deep economic crisis. Despite the harsh rationing introduced in 1949, the economy was about to collapse. Unemployment was nearly 14 percent, inflation at over 30 percent, and the government could not pay its debt. The burden of mass immigration was about to crush the young state.
The government finally took action in 1952. It halted immigration, cut the defense budget, raised taxes, and devalued the Israeli lira. Immediately afterward, Israel signed a vital reparations agreement with Germany and began to sell bonds to the Jewish community in the United States. Two years later, the emergency economic measures, German money, and American bonds produced results: inflation and unemployment declined, while growth and productivity rose. When immigration was renewed in 1954, Israel was a tiger leaping ahead with an annual growth rate of more than 10 percent. Between 1950 and 1959, Israel’s GDP climbed a staggering 165 percent.
The first national project to lead the Israeli economic miracle of the 1950s was housing. Committed to eliminating the ma’abarot and to providing every immigrant with a roof over his head, the government initiated the building of two hundred thousand apartments. At first it built cramped 24-square-meter and 32-square-meter units. Then it built more reasonable 48-square-meter and 52-square-meter apartments. Within a few years, housing estates resembling long white trains dotted the landscape. They were a cheap and functional mass solution to a mass problem. The number of inhabitants in the ma’abarot declined from 160,000 in 1952 to 88,000 in 1954 to 30,000 in 1956. Public loans enabled most newcomers to buy the new units that the government had built for them practically overnight. By 1957 the rate of Israelis who owned their homes was one of the highest in the world. The housing estate, the shikun, became the defining feature of the Israeli welfare state.
The second national project of the 1950s was agricultural settlement. From 1950 to 1951, Israel built 190 new kibbutz and moshav villages. The average rate of building was one new settlement every four days. In the years 1951–52, 110 new kibbutzim and moshavim were established. The average rate now was a new settlement per week. In its first decade as a state, the number of villages in Israel rose by 140 percent, from 290 to 680. Agricultural land use rose from 1.6 million dunams to 3.5 million dunams, irrigated field use from 300,000 dunams to 1,250,000 dunams. The rural population tripled. Agricultural production grew dramatically. While four hundred evacuated Palestinian villages were demolished, four hundred new Israeli villages shaped the new economy and the new map of Israel.
In the mid-1950s a third national project began: industrialization. After supplying basic housing to most of the population and after securing the land and the food supply, the young state turned to modern industry. Almost half of the reparations that Israel received from Germany were turned into government loans that enabled entrepreneurs to establish factories in remote areas. Some of the new enterprises failed, but many succeeded. In 1954 the first Uzi submachine gun was manufactured. In 1955 the aeronautics industry was in full swing. In 1957 Israel began planning its first scientific nuclear reactor. The bromide industry in the Dead Sea and the phosphate industry in the Negev followed, along with a metal factory in Yokneam, a tire manufacturing facility in Hadera, and a steel plant in Acre. Between 1953 and 1958 industrial production rose 180 percent. By the end of its first decade, Israel underwent a rapid and intensive industrial revolution.
The energy was unceasing. Wherever one went there was demolition and construction. In accordance with a national master plan devised by the government’s leading architects and civil engineers in 1950, Palestine vanished and the modern State of Israel replaced it. In addition to the new villages, thirty new towns were founded. Roads were paved, power stations erected, a new port planned. A centralized government used centralized planning to build the new Israel as if the state were a grand engineering project. At the very same time, the state built its own institutions: a parliament, an administration, a judiciary. A popular conscription army that performed many nonmilitary duties—such as teaching its new soldiers Hebrew—became a powerful melting pot of the new society. A state-run education system tripled in size within a decade. A national bank, a national social security system, a national employment service were all established. Public hospitals and public health clinics provided advanced medical care to most Israelis.
Israel of the 1950s was a state on steroids: more and more people, more and more cities, more and more villages, more and more of everything. But although development was rampant, social gaps were narrow. The government was committed to full employment. There was a genuine effort to provide every person with housing, work, education, and health care. The newborn state was one of the most egalitarian democracies in the world. The Israel of the 1950s was a just social democracy. But it was also a nation of practicality that combined modernity, nationalism, and development in an aggressive manner. There was no time, and there was no peace of mind, and therefore there was no human sensitivity. As the state became everything, the individual was marginalized. As it marched toward the future, Israel erased the past. There was no place for the previous landscape, no place for previous identities. Everything was done en masse. Everything was imposed from above. There was an artificial quality to everything. Zionism was not an organic process anymore but a futuristic coup. For its outstanding economic, social, and engineering achievements, the new Israel paid a dear moral price. There was no notion of human rights, civil rights, due process, or laissez-faire. There was no equality for the Palestinian minority and no compassion for the Palestinian refugees. There was little respect for the Jewish Diaspora and little empathy for the survivors of the Holocaust. Ben Gurion’s statism and monolithic rule compelled the nation forward.
From the port of Haifa, Svern Sternhell was sent to a Jewish Agency immigration camp in Haifa, but just days later he was sent on to the boarding school of Youth Aliyah in the small town of Magdiel. On his first night there, the sixteen-year-old threw away the European suit his Avignon aunt had sewn especially for his aliyah. On his first morning at work he was already wearing the blue workingman’s uniform and the black workingman’s boots. When he arrived at the orange grove for the very first time, he was as happy as a bird. Sun, blue skies, oranges. For the first time since his family was taken to the ghetto, the world was good.
Within weeks, Sternhell was fluent in Hebrew. Within months he was a skilled farmer. Working in the orange grove, he consumed dozens of oranges a day. Like many others, he exchanged his European given name for a Hebrew one, Ze’ev, but he refused to let go of his European last name because it was the name of his parents and sister. Yet the now seventeen-year-old survivor was determined not to wallow in pain but to suppress it. He was afraid that the weakness of over there would haunt him over here. He was afraid that the burden of the past would jeopardize the future. He
knew he must build himself anew on totally new foundations.
Sternhell’s new comrades made similar decisions. Although they studied together, worked together, and slept in the same huts, they did not talk about their pasts. Most were Holocaust survivors, a few were refugees from the Arab world. All had experienced trauma. Some had lost their parents, all had lost their homes. Yet these youngsters displayed remarkable optimism. In the sweltering heat of summer and the bone-chilling cold of winter, they did not lament or complain. They were not bitter. They did not allow themselves to think like orphans or feel like orphans. On the contrary, they were determined to turn themselves into Israelis as fast as possible. To milk cows, to work the fields, to join a kibbutz. To forget. To begin the future as if the past had never happened.
Because Sternhell was already a thinker, he conceptualized what his comrades could only intuit. He knew that the Jews needed a shelter and that Israel was that shelter. He understood that the Jews needed a roof and that Israel was their only roof. For secular Jews who had no God and no religion, Israel was also essential for their souls and identities. Without a Jewish state, secular Jews like himself would stand naked in the world. They would have no home, no collective self, and no future. Therefore, Sternhell embraced his new Israeli identity completely. Only in Israel did he not have to justify himself or hide himself. Only as an Israeli could he turn from being an object of history to being a subject of history. Only as an Israeli could he be the master of his own fate.
In the summer of 1952, Sternhell and his comrades moved to a kibbutz up north. Ze’ev worked in the kibbutz in the mornings, studied in Haifa in the afternoons, and returned for guard duty in the kibbutz at night. A small inheritance allowed him to move to Haifa, finish high school, and pass the university entrance exams. In August 1954 he joined the Israeli Army. He went through basic training, a squad leader course, an officer training course. Ten years after he was an altar boy in Krakow, Sternhell was an outstanding combat officer in the Golani infantry brigade. In October 1956, during the Sinai campaign, the charismatic platoon commander discovered that his men were trapped in a minefield. Walking ahead, he led them out of it. Mental agility, physical strength, and fearlessness marked Svern-Ze’ev Sternhell as a son of the land. He had found his place in the world. The haunted boy from the ghetto had become a total Israeli.
From the boat, Ervin Appelfeld was taken to an immigrant camp in Atlit, and from Atlit he was sent to a Zionist youth village south of Jerusalem. On the farm, thirty-four young Holocaust survivors tried to learn the rules of life in this strange new land. They competed to see who would be the first to drive a tractor, who would be more fit and suntanned, who would be blonder, who would look the least like a Jew. They tried to pretend that the ghettos and the forests and the concentration camps had never happened. Czernowitz had never existed; there never was Vienna. Or Father, or Mother.
Appelfeld feared he was about to lose his sense of self. When the teacher would say, “Children, now we will study Hebrew and study the Bible and plant trees and water flowerbeds and everything will be fine and everything will turn out great,” the other children seemed convinced. They rapidly shed the past. On the first day they returned from the fields sunburned, and on the second day they returned sunburned, but on the third day they were tanned Israelis. But fourteen-year-old Appelfeld was different. He didn’t want to attach himself to a language and a world that were not his own. He didn’t want to lose the German language and the theater and the music of his childhood. He was terrified of losing his parents and becoming an eternal orphan. Until one day, after everybody was gone, he sat alone in the dining hall, took out a school notebook, and wrote down in large childish letters: “My father’s name—Michael; my mother’s name—Bulia; my grandfather’s name—Meir Joseph. My home is on Masarik Strasse, Czernowitz.” The next day, when Ervin read the list and added a few poignant words evoking his childhood, he felt warmth spreading inside him. “I have a home,” he thought. “I have a street. I have a father and mother and grandfather and a city and a park and a soft carpet of autumn leaves. In spite of everything, I have something to hold me in this world. I am not an orphan.”
In the 1948 war Appelfeld was a sixteen-year-old paramilitary warrior. Four years after hiding from the Nazis in Ukrainian forests he used a machine gun to defend the Zionist farm he was living on from the neighboring Arabs who were about to slaughter its youth. When the war ended he was sent to the elite Mikveh Yisrael Agricultural School to learn how to grow apples, pears, and plums. A year later he was sent to the new agricultural school of Ein Karem to teach Moroccan and Iraqi immigrant boys how to grow apples, pears, and plums. Six months later he was sent to serve as a caretaker of the girls’ agricultural school in Nahalal. In all of these schools Ervin felt totally alone, without family or community. He found no common ground with the arrogant Sabras, the Oriental newcomers, or the ill-mannered Israeli girls. In 1950 he was drafted and trained as a mortar operator. Now his loneliness became unbearable. On Shabbat, when all his fellow soldiers returned home, Ervin had no home to go to. He stayed on base by himself. On Saturday nights he would spend a few hours in the nearby town of Netanya. He would sit at a seaside café watching the people pass by. Some were Holocaust survivors, others were Arab-world survivors, but what Appelfeld saw were human wrecks. He saw the uprooted Jews of the twentieth century, whose lives had been shattered by disaster.
Appelfeld reflected on the gap between Ben Gurion’s proclaimed egalitarian and united Israel and the real Israel of the fate-stricken who were now huddled in immigrant camps and housing estates. He reflected on the gap between the pious pioneering rhetoric of Zionism and the new Israeli reality of restless drunks and gamblers and whores who could not find peace of mind. He reflected on the gap between the mobilized monolithic upstairs-Israel and the cacophony of downstairs-Israel. What he saw was an inebriated and licentious immigrants’ Israel trying to forget all that had happened.
In the last days of his army service, Appelfeld studied on his own, passed the matriculation exams, and was accepted to the Hebrew University. He rented a cheerless room in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood. The boy who never attended first grade was now the student of some of the world’s most renowned scholars: he studied Yiddish with Dov Sadan, Kabbalah with Gershom Scholem, and scriptures with Martin Buber. But Ervin was not impressed by his progress. He had no bearings. He lacked a well-grounded identity and was struggling to contain the numerous transformations he had gone through in a decade. Alone in his room in Rehavia, Appelfeld tried to decipher himself: what had happened to him and who he was; from what sea he had come and on what shore he had washed up.
The one place Appelfeld felt at ease was in Café Peter in Jerusalem’s verdant German colony. Here people spoke the Austro-Hungarian German of his childhood and served the Austro-Hungarian dishes of home. At the elegant tables sat elegant ladies who resembled his mother. Here there was no melting-pot edict. Here he could remember his mother and long for her. He imagined that though murdered, she would somehow return. In Café Peter, in 1956, Appelfeld could bring up from the cellar of his memories what the Israel of 1956 kept locked away. In his notebook he jotted down a few lines, then some sentences, then broken paragraphs. Slivers, scraps, fragments. One story, two stories, three. The story of a people gone up in smoke. The story of a world gone up in smoke. The story of a boy who witnessed pre-Holocaust, Holocaust, and post-Holocaust life. And now, a decade after the Holocaust, sitting in a Jerusalem café, he tried to collect himself. To rehabilitate himself, to define himself and to find his own voice.
When his family arrived in Jerusalem, Erik Brik had already gone through five metamorphoses: sheltered childhood in prewar Kovno; persecuted childhood in the wartime ghetto; a childhood of hiding in the wall as the war drew to a close; a refugee’s wandering childhood when the war was over; a respite in the Jewish Agency’s mansion in the years following the war. But when the Briks settled down in a small apartment on the edge of Re
havia, the eleven-year-old told himself that what was before would not be again. This is our homeland. This is the final beginning. Here he would take root.
The beginning was difficult. Erik was gentle and chubby and well-read. He loved the opera. The Israeli-born sixth-grade Sabras ridiculed him. They saw him as a weak and pale Diaspora Jew. But within months, Erik proved what he was made of. He acquired Hebrew and got rid of his Lithuanian accent. He viewed himself as someone who was born in Israel and acted accordingly. He didn’t tell anyone about Democracy Square or the Children’s Action or the ghetto or living in the wall. Within a year, it became apparent that Erik was gifted. He was brilliant in math and history, but he also became president of the student council. He was an enthusiastic boy scout, first a cub scout, then den chief, then troop leader. As president of his student council he was chosen to meet Ben Gurion at his famous retreat in the desert. Because of his role in the boy scouts he led work camps in the kibbutz and intended to settle in a kibbutz. Brik internalized the collective values of old pioneering Israel. He identified completely with the Jewish state that gave him refuge. He saw Israel as a dynamic, enlightened, and constructive entity headed for the future. The boy who changed his name to Aharon Barak was now determined to erase his Kovno past and join the Israeli future.
Not so his parents. Leah Brik had been a respected high school teacher in Lithuania, but in Israel she taught third grade in a working-class school. Zvi Brik had been the head of the Jewish Agency in Kovno, but in Israel he was just a clerk. Both felt they didn’t receive the recognition they deserved. Both were not fulfilled professionally and realized they never would be. And the Holocaust refused to let go. Zvi had lost his parents. Leah had lost her father, mother, a brother, and a sister. The family was small and sad and had few true friends. There was anguish at home, and much crying. All Leah and Zvi had was their son, on whom they were totally focused. Aharon was promise. Aharon was hope. Aharon was an arrow shot from a hopeless past to a hopeful future.