My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  But during all those wanderings and during all those years, Jamal told me, he never forgot Hulda. So when I drove him in my car over the dirt road to Hulda in the spring of 1993, he smiled a wide child’s smile and murmured: Hulda, Hulda. Nothing in the world like the soil of Hulda. He took me to the site where the threshing floor for the grain harvest had been, to the pile of rubble that was once his aunt’s house, to the pile of rubble that was once his uncle’s house, and to the pile of rubble that was once his own house. He told me he didn’t know how to say what’s in his heart. Only God knows. Only Allah himself. For there is no place in the world but this place. There isn’t and there won’t be any other place. This is Jamal Munheir’s one and only place in the world.

  From the ruins of the village we drove to the Herzl forest, and I parked by the Herzl House. As we sat under the old pine trees, a gentle wind rose and caressed our faces. All around us was the forest’s silence. Jamal raised his hand and pointed to the sea of land in front of us and said, “This is my plot. This is my land. These are the hundreds of dunams of the Munheir family.”

  “You were a rich man,” I said. Immediately, I realized I have made a terrible mistake. Jamal erupted, “My heart burns when I come here. I go crazy when I come here. We were respected people. Englishmen and Jews and Arabs listened to us. Our words carried weight. But today, who are we, what are we? Beggars. No one listens to us. No one respects us. We, who owned all this land, don’t even have one grain of wheat. Only a UNRWA refugee certificate.”

  He went silent. Under the old pine trees the only sound was that of my small tape recorder recording the silence. Until Jamal turned to me again, crying, saying that from the beginning of time his forefathers lived here and died here and were buried here. They plowed this plot of land for hundreds of years. From this old well they drew water for generations. Until the Jews came to Hulda and wiped out the Munheir family. Until the Jews conquered and pillaged Hulda. “Where is Rasheed?” Jamal cried. “And where is Mahmoud, and where are all the village people? Where is our Hulda?”

  Of all the houses in the village of Hulda, only the madaffa guesthouse remains. Small and charming, it still stands at the top of the southern hill, commanding breathtaking scenery. Its black basalt stones are solid, its roof flat, its windows arched. Today, it is used as a sculptor’s workshop and is surrounded by a sculpture garden. As I approach the building, nearly twenty years after I was here with Jamal Munheir, the sound of sirens breaks the quiet. It is spring again—and it is Israel’s Memorial Day. The sirens engulfing me are the sirens of memory. So I stand at attention facing the madaffa. In the howling sirens, I see the vanished village of Hulda.

  In the two decades that have passed since Jamal Munheir led me through his Hulda, the remains of the village were obliterated. Nothing is left now but the madaffa, carob trees, a few hedgerows of prickly pear cactus, the remaining wall of a house, another wall, a pile of rubble. The Palestinian village of Hulda was succeeded by the Israeli kibbutz of Mishmar David. In recent years Mishmar David fell on hard times and ceased to be a kibbutz. So now the kibbutz that succeeded the village is gone, too. It is being replaced by an upper-middle-class community of Israel’s new bourgeoisie. A giant bulldozer razes one of the kibbutz’s old egalitarian homes. Arab workmen build villas for Jews on what used to be an Arab village, on what used to be Jamal Munheir’s home and land.

  This time I am on my own, but I make the exact same journey I made with Jamal years ago. I drive to the Herzl forest and park by the Herzl House and walk among the old pine trees. There is the same silence here, the same gentle wind.

  First I walk up the external stairs of the colonial Herzl House to the second-story porch. I look out at the forest and think of the solace that the forest was to have been for the Jews. Then I go on to the statue commemorating a well-known guard who fell here while defending the forest and the house in 1929. Then I go out of the forest and walk down the path that separated the Hulda commune’s olive tree grove from Jamal Munheir’s wheat fields. It is one of the most beautiful paths in the Plain of Judea. On each side of it is a sad row of tall palm trees marching into the horizon. The wind is soft, the skies are a constable blue. The silhouettes of the Hulda kibbutz are to my left, the silhouette of the vanished Arab Hulda to my right.

  Hulda is part of my own biography. As a child I came to this forest on winter weekends to forage for mushrooms. As an adolescent I rode my bike here with my friends, looking for adventure. As a soldier on leave I brought girlfriends here in my father’s car. Later, as a peace activist, I came to Hulda in my red VW Beetle in order to drive Amos Oz to Peace Now demonstrations. But since my visit here with Jamal Munheir in the spring of 1993, Hulda has changed for me. My homeland has changed for me. Peace has changed, too. I realize now why Israel’s peaceniks live against occupation. I understand now what brilliant use we WASPs make of the conflict’s present in order to protect ourselves from the unbearable implications of the conflict’s past. For we must protect ourselves from our past and our deeds and from Jamal Munheir. We concentrate on the occupation so that we can justify to ourselves the magnificent vineyard that stands in the midst of Hulda like some proof of wrongdoing.

  Planted in 1999, the Hulda vineyard is now one of the largest in the country. Six different varieties of grapes grow here, including Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Sauvignon Blanc. The vineyard is well tended and thriving, and at the end of every row blooms a bush of pink roses.

  Rows 1 through 190 of the vineyard are Hulda West. Here, between the kibbutz and the path, stood the Zionist olive grove. Rows 191 through 285 are Hulda East. Here, between the path and the well, lay Jamal Munheir’s wheat field. Good earth, bad earth. Earth shifting under our feet.

  I go down to the wadi. The deep water well is now blocked up. I find the square pool into which the well water was drawn. I walk up the path the Palestinian girls used to walk with earthenware jugs on their heads. I walk up the path that the Israeli soldiers climbed, under the cover of the three-inch shells that the mortar positioned by the well shot at the village. I stand once again atop the village hill, scanning the Hulda Valley. Two miles away is the yellow summit of Tel Gezer by which Herbert Bentwich settled nearly a century ago. A mile and a half away are the gray ruins of Abu Shusha, where in 1940, Yosef Weitz came to the conclusion that in order to survive, Zionism would have to cleanse the land of its native Arab inhabitants. And here is the kibbutz of Hulda rising forth from the fields. The Herzl forest, the Herzl House, the well. The Hulda vineyard. The two rows of sad palm trees marching into the horizon.

  It’s Hulda, stupid. Not Ofra, but Hulda, I tell myself. Ofra was a mistake, an aberration, insanity. But in principle, Ofra may have a solution. Hulda is the crux of the matter. Hulda is what the conflict is really about. And Hulda has no solution. Hulda is our fate.

  Our side is clear. Kibbutz Hulda’s intentions were not malevolent. It did not wish to dominate. It did not seek to exploit or dispossess or supplant. All the Hulda pioneers wanted was to form an intimate community. Their dream was to gather a family of forty or fifty free individuals who would work the land in partnership and equality and commune with nature and thereby prove that it was possible to cure the disease inflicted on the Jewish people by Diaspora life. They sought to offer a way out of modern man’s crisis of alienation and subjugation to the machine and plant in the soil of Hulda a new beginning of harmony and justice and peace.

  Could we not have come to Hulda? And then, when war came, could we not have fought for our lives in Hulda? Could we not have sent our soldiers to conquer the neighboring Arab village of Hulda? Could we not have taken the village’s houses and fields? Could we not have hardened our hearts and treated our neighbors brutally and brought calamity upon them?

  Their side, too, is clear. Could they not have protested our penetration into their valley? Could they not have attacked and burned and destroyed our colonial agricultural farm? And then, a generation later, could they have prevented the bruta
l attack on the Hulda convoy that was part of an inevitable war? And after their catastrophe could they not have hated us for conquering their village and taking their fields and sending them into exile? And can this hatred ever be overcome? Can the Palestinians be expected to give up the demand to see justice done for the village of Hulda? Can anyone expect the children and grandchildren of Jamal Munheir ever to accept the fact that we build houses on their ruined homes and grow six varieties of grapes in their pillaged fields?

  What is needed to make peace between the two peoples of this land is probably more than humans can summon. They will not give up their demand for what they see as justice. We shall not give up our life. Arab Hulda and Jewish Hulda cannot really see each other and recognize each other and make peace. Yossi Sarid, Yossi Beilin, Ze’ev Sternhell, Menachem Brinker, Avishai Margalit, and Amos Oz put up a courageous fight against the folly of the occupation and did all they could do to bring about peace. But at the end of the day, they could not look Jamal Munheir in the eye. They could not see Hulda as it is. For the most benign reasons, their promise of peace was false.

  The one Israeli leader who saw with cruel clarity what I now see in Hulda was Moshe Dayan. In 1956, at the funeral of the young security officer Roy Rotenberg, who fell patrolling the Israeli-Gaza border, Israel’s then chief of staff said the most sincere words ever spoken about the conflict:

  Yesterday at dawn Roy was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning blinded him, and he did not see those who sought his life hiding behind the furrow. Let us not cast blame today on the murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home. It is not among the Arabs of Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roy’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate and see, in all its brutality, the fate of our generation?

  Let us today take stock of ourselves. We are a generation of settlement, and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we will not be able to plant a tree and build a house. Let us not fear to look squarely at the hatred that consumes and fills the lives of hundreds of Arabs who live around us. Let us not drop our gaze, lest our arms weaken. That is the fate of our generation. This is our choice—to be ready and armed, tough and hard—or else the sword shall fall from our hands and our lives will be cut short.

  As the years went by, Dayan’s insight has been dimmed and forgotten. Israelis could no longer bear its cruel wisdom. The Six Day War enabled us to escape its piercing sagacity. The Right nurtured its self-righteous illusions. The Left was mesmerized by its own moralistic illusion. And for two generations, the sin of Ofra obscured the sin of Hulda. But Hulda is here. Hulda is here to stay. And Hulda has no solution. Hulda says peace shall not be.

  I descend the hill to the well, the vineyard. It’s so beautiful and calm here. But the soil is hard. The land is cursed. For it is here, in the Valley of Hulda, that history’s door creaked open on April 6, 1948. It is precisely here, at the end of the Herzl forest, that the Jews crossed the threshold between the commune’s olive grove and Jamal Munheir’s fields and entered the forbidden. After eighteen hundred years of powerless existence, Jewish soldiers employed a large, organized force to take another people’s land and to conquer dozens of villages—of which Hulda was one of the first. Here, by the old well of Hulda, we moved from one phase of our history to another, from one sphere of morality to another. So all that has haunted us ever since is right here. All that will go on haunting us is right here. Generation after generation. War after war.

  (photo credit 11.1)

  ELEVEN

  J’Accuse, 1999

  ARYEH MACHLUF DERI WAS TO HAVE BEEN A PARISIAN LAWYER. HIS UPBRINGING in the northern Moroccan city of Meknes was prosperous enough to allow him to dream of a life of success and recognition in France. In the 1960s, King Hassan II extended his patronage to the Jews. There was harmony between Arabs and Jews in the young North African kingdom. Life had order and meaning and a quiet Mediterranean rhythm. The Jewish community was strong. But when Eliahu and Esther Deri realized that their five-year-old son was a mathematical genius, they expected him to spread his wings and fly beyond the happy Moroccan-Jewish community they lived in. And because they always looked to France—its modernity, its enlightenment, the equal rights accorded by France to Jews—the Deris hoped their son would find a future there. They imagined he would be a lawyer or a doctor or a math professor in Paris or Lyon or Marseille.

  Eliahu Deri was orphaned at the age of ten. One morning he found his beloved mother lying lifeless in the bed next to him. The following ten years were difficult for him. He was bullied by his older brothers, and he worked for sixteen hours a day as a tailor’s apprentice, sewing and ironing uniforms for the French army. But as he got older and married and became his own man, Eliahu did well. He opened a shop in the center of Meknes and became a successful tailor. The rapid modernization of North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s doubled and tripled the demand for the high-quality European suits that were his forte, and politicians, businessmen, and officers all called on his shop. Within a short time, the penniless orphan from the crowded Jewish ghetto, the mlach, was able to move his young family to the well-to-do Ville Nouvelle, the new city, to a spacious apartment in a smart building with a concierge. They had two maids, a television, gilded furniture, and summer vacations in the best resorts of Tangier. While Esther’s Arab servants cooked and cleaned and tended to the children, she would sneak off to the cinema across the street to watch Humphrey Bogart films. Aryeh grew up like a prince, playing soccer and swimming and devouring Jules Verne novels. On the high holidays, Eliahu Deri would take his two older sons to synagogue dressed in well-cut suits and silk bow ties so that everyone could see just how far the poor orphan had come. The Deris lived a comfortable life of promise typical of the postwar Jewish-Moroccan bourgeoisie.

  There was a delicate balance in Meknes. On one hand, the mlach preserved the Jewish community and Jewish identity; on the other hand, the Ville Nouvelle offered the riches of France. The Deri family, and many like them, attended synagogue on Sabbath mornings, but their children played soccer and went to the cinema on Saturday afternoons. They maintained a close relationship with the Arab majority, all the while vigilantly safeguarding the uniqueness of their own identity. In the postwar years, postcolonial Meknes managed to keep alive the semi-colonial harmony of the enchanting Levant, where Arabism, Judaism, and French culture were woven together into a modern yet traditional fabric.

  The Six Day War tore this fabric apart. Overnight, in the summer of 1967, everything changed. Arab customers stopped calling on Eliahu Deri’s shop. Arab employees started whispering behind his back. One day a passerby spat on Deri’s elegant suit and muttered “Sale Juif,” dirty Jew. Deri came home incensed. “We are going to Israel,” he announced. Without letting the neighbors know, they sold all they could sell. They put their furniture into a shipping container, transferred money with the help of the Jewish Agency, hid cash in the double linings that Eliahu sewed into the children’s winter coats, and told friends they were going on vacation to France. They summoned a taxi late one night and drove to Casablanca. From Casablanca they flew to Marseille, where they boarded a ship to Haifa.

  Esther Deri remembers that when they left Meknes she cried. And when they boarded the plane in Casablanca she cried again. Life had been good in Morocco. But though she begged and cajoled her husband to return, he didn’t listen. The Arabs’ sudden change of heart had humiliated him. Only at the transit camp in Marseille did he begin to regret his hasty decision, and only at the port of Haifa did he begin to understand what he had done. When it turned out that their baggage hadn’t arrived, he lost his temper. When he didn’t receive the housing promised to him in Marseille, his wife and five children watched with horror as an enraged Eliahu Deri overturned a ta
ble.

  Aryeh Machluf Deri remembers that in the transit camp in Marseille there was already tension between his parents. But they hoped for the best and bought everything needed to make life in Israel easier: a refrigerator, a washing machine, a mixer. The ship was actually fun. The kids went wild on deck, and in the evenings the grown-ups danced the tango and the pasodoble. But when they disembarked in Haifa, his father was a different person: loud, tense, lost. He was incapable of understanding the rules of the new world he had chosen so hastily. He would raise his voice, shouting and crying. He lost his dignity.

  The family was sent to the coastal town of Rishon LeZion, south of Tel Aviv. Their apartment was tiny and bare: Jewish Agency metal beds, army blankets, and nothing else. When their money didn’t arrive, Eliahu went to the bank every day. When their container didn’t arrive, he went to the Jewish Agency every day. He demanded a better apartment in a better location with better conditions. He became enraged. His blood pressure rose. He shut himself in his room and didn’t come out. He lay in bed all day crying.

  Three months later, the family moved from the fifty-square-meter apartment in Rishon LeZion to a hundred-square-meter apartment in Bat Yam. There was a little more room now, but the neighborhood was bad. Many of the immigrant Libyan families in the Eli Cohen housing estate lived on the edge of society. Some neighbors were decent and hardworking, but others were petty criminals. There were drugs, prostitution, street gangs. Because of Eliahu Deri’s debilitating depression, it was up to Esther Deri to protect her four sons and her daughter. She locked them up at home so they would not learn the ways of the street.