Originally based in the north of the country, Ha-shomer gradually spread to the rest as well, reaching as far as Gedera some thirty-five miles south of Tel Aviv. However, in the absence of a developed infrastructure of roads and telecommunications the distances between one settlement and another seemed enormous. This in turn made the construction of a centralized command structure impossible. Instead the organization acted as a sort of clearinghouse for Guards including those engaged in day-to-day duties and those who were occasionally assembled for larger operations. It provided both members and nonmembers with arms, appointed them to the places where they were needed, and switched them from one settlement to another as needed. It also looked after financial affairs including, by this time, a mutual sickness fund that covered the expenses of the many who were wounded in action. By 1914 its assets, most of them in the form of horses and weapons, stood at 17,000 francs; its debts to the JCA and to private individuals amounted to 27,000 francs. Then as now, obtaining economic self-sufficiency was not exactly the strongest point of the Jewish community (Yishuv).
Though no figures are available, by 1912-1913 Ha-shomer seems to have gone a considerable way toward its goal of replacing the Circessian Guards with Jewish ones in many of the settlements. The original hunting arms had been replaced by pistols and bolt-action rifles, some of them purchased legally from merchants in Haifa, Beirut, and Damascus and others stolen from the Ottoman army. Most were old and could only take a single bullet in the breech; a few, however, were magazine-loaded and, regarded as a great innovation, much feared by the Arabs who called them Abu Hamsa (father of five).40 Then as later the greatest advantage that the organization possessed was the members’ education and the ties that they maintained with their former homeland. This even enabled them to obtain and put into operation a machine for filling spent cartridges with gunpowder, something entirely beyond the capacity of their Arab opponents. In 1912 these achievements apparently made Shochet feel confident enough to present the Jewish Agency with a proposal for creating a countrywide defense organization for the entire Jewish community. Its core was to be formed by an unspecified number of “regulars” provided by Ha-shomer; around them would cluster a much larger number of part-time “reservists,” that is, workers and farmers who would receive training, acquire or be provided with arms, and be available in the emergency.41 Given the technical obstacles, particularly the near-total lack of telecommunications, the proposal was premature.
In December 1914 a new military governor, Jamal Pasha, had arrived in Jaffa, where he doubled as commander in chief of the 4th Ottoman Army. As it happened, this was not his first encounter with the energetic Jews from Erets Yisrael, some of whom, including, besides Yisrael Shochet and Yitschak Ben Tsvi, David Ben Gurion, had been studying law in Constantinople during 1912-1913. When the Balkan wars broke out a number of them tried to volunteer for the Ottoman army, the idea being to prove their loyalty to the empire as a way of obtaining greater autonomy for the Jewish community. Understandably in view of the fact that Russia was supporting Turkey’s enemies, the idea was not well received. It fell to Jamal, a leading “Young Turk” who at that time was serving as the town’s military governor, to have them arrested on suspicion of being Russian spies. Their comrades complained to the Russian ambassador, who quickly obtained their release; however, suspicion remained.42
At the outbreak of World War I, the capitulations system, under which the citizen of foreign powers living in Palestine enjoyed certain privileges and immunities, had been abolished. This enabled Jamal to proclaim martial law and apply it to the entire population, regardless of which passports they held. He also prohibited all associations, political movements, newspapers, flags, as well as the parades to which the Guards, riding their horses in their exotic dress and firing into the air in the Arab fashion, were much addicted.43 His attitude to the Jewish community was governed by the fact that many of its members were Russian citizens and thus enemy aliens, as indeed were many of its leaders. Specifically, Ha-shomer was suspected of engaging in pro-British activities.
In fact opinions within the organization, as within the Jewish community as a whole, were divided. Some shomrim, notably Ben Tsvi with his excellent Arabic and genuine admiration for Arab culture, saw the war as an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the Ottoman empire; as in 1912-1913, they proposed to take out Ottoman citizenship and create an “Ottoman Legion” that would fight in its ranks. Others, to the contrary, thought the time had come to rid the country from a hopelessly backward, corrupt, and rapacious government—including not least the impositions of Jamal himself.44 In the spring of 1916 Shochet and a few of his comrades-in-arms even hatched a fantastic plot to capture Jerusalem and deliver it to the British as an Easter present.45 Overcome by gratitude, the latter, it was hoped, would help the Jews realize their own nascent national aspirations.
In any event these plans came to naught. American and even German protests to the contrary, Jamal set out to banish as many Russian immigrants as he could lay hands on; some 7,500 of them, mostly young ones, eventually reached Egypt. An order to surrender all arms went out and was, of course, disobeyed; Ha-shomer, however, was forced underground. All three of its leaders were deported, along with a considerable number of their followers. Some of the deportees got as far as eastern Turkey, from where they moved into the Caucasus and on to Russia; a few died under the harsh conditions.
In September-October 1917 the Ottomans unearthed a pro-British Jewish espionage ring known as NILI (short for Netsach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker, roughly translatable as “Israel Will Live Forever”), which was operating in Zichron Yaakov to the south of Haifa. The two organizations, though not identical, were connected, because the same people were sometimes members of both. Repeatedly, messages were passed between NILI and Hashomer’s diaspora in Egypt. Persecution was intensified and many of the remaining members were arrested, taken to Damascus, and tortured.46 By the time the war ended in late 1918 the entire country was occupied by the British, the organization was in ruins, and attempts to revive it did not prove successful.
As Moshe Dayan once said, the sum total of Ha-shomer’s deeds could easily have been carried out by a single squad of TSAHAL (Tsva Hagana-Le-Yisrael, the “Israel Defense Force”) at its best. Its members, though individually brave, are better described as a gang than an army. They had no uniforms but imitated the dress worn by their Circessian competitors; were not clearly distinct from the population at large, many of them doubling as agricultural laborers; and of course did not obey a government that was still decades away. Yet they were the first to take the military road not merely as a means to a military end but with the explicit goal of shedding the supposed characteristics of the Wandering Jew, replacing him with a new, hardy, and courageous type who would take up arms in defense of himself, his settlement, and his country. For many decades thereafter, the determination to do so was perhaps the most important factor that made for the success of this and later Jewish armed forces in Erets Yisrael. To coming generations of Israelis it provided a source of inspiration as well as a number of leaders who went on to greater things.
Founding Hagana: group of Hagana commanders in Jerusalem, 1929.
CHAPTER 2
FOUNDING HAGANA
IN PALESTINE DURING the nineteenth century most people identified themselves—and were identified by the government for the purpose of military service, taxation, and the like—by the religion to which they belonged. Hence the early clashes between the Arab and Jewish communities had little to do with nationalism; instead they were due to the prevailing unsettled conditions as well as growing Jewish economic power. Supported by the Zionist organization abroad, that power was already enormous in comparison and quite capable of buying up entire tracts of land with or without the inhabitants’ consent; nor were those inhabitants, who overnight turned from “owners” into undesirables, always well treated once the change in ownership had taken place.1 Another bone of contention was formed by the different social
systems that characterized the two peoples. Specifically, this included the much greater freedom granted to Jewish women, who, according to the Arabs, went around half-naked and did not shrink from using their charms to obtain favors from the government.2 Arab nationalism did, however, become more important after the Young Turk revolution of 1908 promised modernization and, with it, greater rights to the empire’s various peoples. Initially the new government was liberal-minded; it partially lifted censorship and permitted political discourse to be broadened.3 As part of this awakening an Arab-language press came into being for the first time, and during the last years before World War I it began to characterize Zionism as “an enemy who in the future will usurp them in an area which they believe to be purely Arab.”4 In the port cities of Haifa and Jaffa, the first associations dedicated to combating Zionism were established. Their objectives were to prevent the ongoing sale of Arab-owned lands and persuade the government to put an end to Jewish immigration.5
This early nationalism was stimulated by several factors: the collapse of Ottoman rule during World War I; the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which His Majesty’s government promised Dr. Weizman, head of the Zionist organization, to provide a national home for the Jews in Palestine; and the arrival of a third wave of Jewish immigrants in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Above all, however, there was the mandate system, the brainchild of the South African prime minister, Ian Smuts. In this system the League of Nations “mandated” Turkey’s former Middle Eastern provinces to Britain and France, thereby enabling those two powers to rule the area. For their part, the Arabs regarded the system as a violation of the promises that the British Foreign Office had given them in 1916-1917 in return for agreeing to rise against their Ottoman overlords.
The upshot was an Arab uprising that shook Palestine, as well as neighboring Syria and Egypt, from the autumn of 1919 on. From Damascus to Cairo there was sporadic violence, rioting in various cities, and, in the countryside, small-scale guerrilla warfare organized and directed by the clans. Particularly in eastern Galilee, a remote area with wide-open borders with the neighboring French-ruled countries of Lebanon and Syria, there were attacks by armed gangs on a number of isolated Jewish settlements that had been set up in the area during World War I. With a combined population of a few hundred people those settlements could barely be reached, let alone protected, by the colonial power.
Of these attacks the best known was against the village of Tel Chai—in reality, barely more than a reinforced compound built of stone—on March 1, 1920. The defense consisted of fifteen men under Yosef Trumpeldor, a dashing, one-armed veteran of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war who also happened to be exceptionally handsome and something of a ladies’ man. Tales of the group’s heroism in clinging to this remote outpost—once established a Jewish settlement will never be surrendered, as one slogan had it—began circulating even before the main assault. When the attack finally came it brought about the deaths of seven defenders and the evacuation of the settlement. Among those killed was Trumpeldor himself, who supposedly died with the Hebrew equivalent of “sweet and becoming it is, to die for one’s country ...” on his lips.6 By so doing, he provided the Yishuv (pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine) and the yet-to-be-formed IDF with their first memorable martyr for the cause, inspiring a number of jingles (poems would be too complimentary) that were written in his honor and that children were made to sing even thirty years later.
These disturbances seem to have taken the British by surprise. The huge armies created during the war were already being demobilized as fast as possible, causing shortages of manpower. Palestine at the time was merely a small part of an enormous Middle Eastern empire, most of it newly acquired as a result of the war, that now reached from the Libyan border through Transjordan and Iraq down to Kuwait on the Persian Gulf. Most of the area in question had even fewer roads, railroads, telecommunications, and other modern amenities than Palestine did; then as now, the Jewish presence in the latter was already giving it a comparatively modern character.7 Overwhelmed by their commitments, the British took the best part of two years to restore order.
From 1919 on members of Ha-shomer as well as other Jews deported by Jamal began drifting back from exile. In Palestine they were joined by newcomers, most of them Russians belonging to a younger generation that had left the country in the wake of the revolution when the borders were still open. The preceding years had enabled members of both groups to gain a modicum of military experience. Of the Jews who now lived in Palestine—including Trumpeldor, Ben Tsvi, and David Ben Gurion—some 5,000 had served in the Jewish battalions the British established on the model of the Czech, Polish, and Finnish legions (although of the four battalions that existed at one time or another, only two had seen any real action during the winter of 1918).8 Other members of the Jewish community had served either on the eastern front during World War I or in the Russian civil war and Russian-Polish wars that followed it; a few even dated as far back as the Russo-Japanese war. Even so, many of Ha-shomer’s veteran members were now married with children to look after. Their wives understandably objected to their resuming a lifestyle that required them to move from one settlement to another as duty called, either by cart or camelback through country that was by no means secure.9
This combination of domesticity with greater military experience—as well as the nature of the very loosely coordinated Arab uprising that took place simultaneously throughout the country—called for a new type of military organization. In May 1920 Ha-shomer was formally disbanded. Of its leaders, Chankin resigned himself to the decision and continued with his land-purchasing activities for the Jewish Agency; not so Shochet and his strong-willed wife. Together with a select group of followers they retreated to kibbuts Kfar Giladi near Tel Chai in the far north, where they pursued independent arms-collecting activities for years to come. The group’s assets, such as they were, were passed on to Hagana, which took its place.
Hagana’s first head—commander would be too strong a term—was a twenty-eight-year-old veteran of the Jewish battalions named Yosef Hecht. His outstanding qualities seem to have been obstinacy and an obsession with secretiveness, so much so that he all but removed himself from the pages of history and is not even mentioned in Hagana’s Who Is Who.10 Militarily he was neither more nor less experienced than his comrades. He was flanked by a committee of five men plus two “candidate” members on the Soviet communist model. The most important committee members were Eliyahu Golomb, head of the largest section (in Tel Aviv), and Levi Shkolnik; the latter subsequently changed his name to Eshkol and served as Israel’s prime minister from 1963 to 1969. Both men were primarily politicians and organizers and only marginally knowledgeable about military affairs proper, this being a telling comment on the way the Yishuv did business then and later.
Unlike its predecessor, Hagana was not an elitist organization but a popular militia whose ranks were open, at least in principle, to any member of the Jewish community. Also unlike Ha-shomer, it was not a private association accountable only to itself (although some Ha-shomer leaders had also been up to their necks in left-wing politics, founding and refounding microparties, all of which used “workers” in their names). Instead it was born as the result of a deliberate decision to set up a Jewish armed force that would operate in the service of the community as a whole. As such it came under the authority of the newly founded National Labor Federation, or Histadrut Ha-ovdim Ha-leumit.
Then and for decades thereafter, Histadrut was much more than a trade union. Headed by a secretary general and the Acting Council, both of which were democratically elected by the membership (women, too, had the vote from the beginning), it was the closest thing to a government that the Jewish community in Erets Yisrael possessed. It played the role of a trade union by representing workers vis-à-vis employers, but it also owned and ran a range of economic enterprises. Among them were a food-packaging and -producing plant for the agricultural settlements, a range of light industries, a construction firm,
a road-building firm, truck and bus companies, a bank, retail stores, and the like. In time these assets turned it into the largest employer in the country—a strange thing to say of any trade union, especially one that to this day has significant consequences for Israel’s economy. Histadrut also ran a huge variety of cultural associations, newspapers, schools, clinics, sickness and unemployment insurance systems, sports clubs, and even entire residential areas built by, and for, members.
As in other places where anticolonial resistance movements asserted themselves, these interlocking organizations were ideal cover for the military arm that during most of its existence remained illegal in the eyes of the British government—the more so because, although Histadrut did not constitute a government and did not possess coercive power, its leadership talked of “the duty of volunteering.” In the collective settlements membership started virtually at birth; but even in the towns the social and economic pressure it could bring to bear was usually sufficient to bring recalcitrant individuals to heel. The means used included publishing their names, firing them from their jobs, and expelling them from the ranks, which automatically put an end to any form of social insurance and benefits that they might have accumulated. When all else failed, the use of violence was not excluded.11
No sooner had Hagana been founded than it underwent its first test. In May 1921, following the British decision to separate Palestine west of the River Jordan from the area to the east, rioting started in the center of the country between Chadera and Nes Tsiona. The largest single outbreak was in Jaffa, whose inhabitants threatened to storm Tel Aviv, at the time a small “town” of mainly one- and two-story houses numbering fewer than 10,000 people, many of them recent immigrants. There were bloody casualties, including a few dead. The local Hagana organization was not very well prepared: The eight rifles, twenty pistols, and five hand grenades that the local Hagana branch had buried in the dunes to the north (then and later, a place for lovers’ trysts) could not be found under the shifting sand. Some three hundred Hagana members, most of them youngsters with little organization and less training, faced the Arabs with sticks in hand.
The Sword And The Olive Page 4