We Were the Future

by Yael Neeman

  In Yehiam, they heard the noise and saw the columns of smoke, but did not know what was happening. Nor did they know exactly how many people there were in the convoy and which members of the kibbutz had joined it. (Members who had managed to get away from the kibbutz to arrange things and organize supplies, or those who were coming from Kiryat Haim for a short visit, always joined the convoy because that was their only way of getting to and from Yehiam.)

  Zvi Gerson relates that the first armored vehicle, fitted with a barricade breaker, reached Yehiam. There were fourteen fighters inside it, including the company commander, Eitan Zeid, who was killed, the severely wounded armored vehicle driver, and another wounded man. The fighters who managed to reach the kibbutz didn’t know how the rest of the convoy was faring. Neither coded nor uncoded communications reached the members in Yehiam with further information about the fate of the people who were in the other vehicles.

  Forty-seven of the fighters and passengers in the convoy were killed. The old-timers always said that, of all the terrible nights Yehiam had experienced, that one was the worst.

  After the convoy was wiped out, Yehiam came under total siege. A large number of all the weapons in the entire Western Galilee had been destroyed in the convoy, and no one knew how long the supplies and arms in Yehiam would last.

  In a letter written by Avri Sela on April 2nd, less than a week after the convoy disaster, he described the situation in Yehiam: the failed attempts to prepare a landing strip that would make airdrops of food easier; the endless barrages of bullets being fired at them; the shortage of weapons and their feeling of apprehension in the face of Qawuqji’s large army, which was concentrated on Tree Hill, 1,452 meters from the fortress. He wrote about the bereavement:

  Shall I write to you about our mood? It must surely be clear to you. There’s Haim Drori, the soul of the kibbutz, work scheduler, purchase coordinator, janitor, alert to everything going on in the kibbutz. He was so alive before that it’s difficult for me to talk about our lives without complaining that Haim didn’t do this or that the way it should be done. And Laki—only three weeks ago he came with the new car, smiling as usual. He was so good, so devoted. And Rafael, tall, wild Rafael, always writing. Such a deep thinker. We have lost three dear members in a single day. It is difficult to imagine life without them.

  Two days later, on April 4th, Qawuqji’s troops attacked Yehiam again. They opened fire just as the plane was dropping supplies and kept at it for several hours, but made no attempt to invade the kibbutz.

  Shosh Shoresh, the wireless operator and one of the few women in Yehiam during the war, said that it wasn’t until Tarshicha and the Western Galilee were conquered in the Hiram Operation on October 30, 1948, that the war in Yehiam ended. On that day, she sent the last two telegrams to Nahariya: “At 7:05, the white flag was raised on the Tarshicha mosque,” and “I’m closing the station until further notice.”

  When we were in the third grade, every Tuesday evening we would sit in our classroom with Hencha, who brought stenciled songbooks with her and taught us the songs in them. On those evenings, we didn’t sing about the Budyonny Regiment riding into battle, but we sang slower, sadder songs, like “The Fisherman’s Daughter.” We also learned new words from the song “aflutter” and “incomparable.”

  An airplane dropping supplies for Yehiam,

  when it was under siege by Arab fighters.

  Hencha would occasionally stop the singing and tell us about the first children on the kibbutz. She was those children’s first metapelet, back when the kibbutz was still in Kiryat Haim and was called Hasela. She told us that one of the things that set the kibbutz apart from its very beginning was the fact that it had children older than the kibbutz itself. And the four of them were allocated a place in the only building on the plot of land in Kiryat Haim that the members had at their disposal at the time. The first group of children was called The Rock (Hasela), the same name as the kibbutz when it was founded, before it was changed to Yehiam.

  She told us that when the War of Independence ended, they began the actual work of building the kibbutz from the ground up. The siege and the gunfire had almost completely prevented them from building the kibbutz during the war, and after it, they continued with the rock demolition up in Yehiam, in search of water sources.

  All of that took almost a year, during which the women and children remained in Kiryat Haim. When you are building a kibbutz, a year is an eternity, Hencha said. For the women who stayed down below in the Kirya, it was the very worst time. Their numbers decreased, every day something else was dismantled and someone else went up to Yehiam, and only they stayed behind. They couldn’t take part in building the kibbutz, and had to make do with hearing reports and an occasional visit.

  They were so sick of it, she said. They didn’t even have a kitchen anymore and had to eat at Kibbutz Hahotrim, whose members lived on the adjacent plot of land. It was as if they belonged to that kibbutz, not Yehiam, and they couldn’t have any social interaction of their own there.

  The first farmer and plow in Yehiam, protected by an armed guard.

  One day in early June, 1949, a taxi arrived at the Kirya, and Eliezer got out of it and ran straight to the chicks that were waiting there to be transported up to Yehiam. But Hencha had had enough; she was angry that everything and everyone else came before the children, even the chickens, as if no one up there in the fortress even remembered that they had children. That was after she had warned them again and again that the women were about to come with the children, and no one had listened to her.

  She told Eliezer that the taxi would take the children to Yehiam and his chicks could wait. She snatched the taxi right out from under him. They arrived and announced—we’re here. No one was waiting for them in Yehiam, and nothing was ready. But despite the difficulties, or maybe because of them, Hencha said, the metaplot, the members and the children were very happy that they were all together again after the long, two-and-a-half-year separation that began when the members first went up to Yehiam and the kibbutz was divided into two.

  On June 12th, one week after Hencha and the children left Kiryat Haim, the first baby was born on Yehiam itself. That was Ofer, my oldest brother, and my mother said on one of the kibbutz celebrations, or in the fiftieth anniversary film, that everyone was ecstatic. Like in fairy tales, my parents’ little shack seemed to be covered with sweets and goodies. And that was my mother’s most intense experience of togetherness, of how it is possible to fully share a joyful experience.

  Filled with happiness, everyone rushed to their house to congratulate them. Ofer was in the Grove group, the kibbutz’s second group.

  The first children on the Yehiam kibbutz,

  with the Crusader fortress in the background.

  When the winter of the children’s first year in Yehiam arrived at the end of 1949, Hencha thought that they might actually have made a serious mistake by taking them there. They couldn’t do anything with the children that winter. The entire kibbutz consisted of a small tin shed that housed the metalworking workshop and another shed where the carpentry workshop was, near the fortress, and the bakery. Everyone lived in small sheds like the shoemaking workshop, and the rain leaked in. You couldn’t wash clothes or dry out shoes. There were no paths or sidewalks, and there was a great deal of mud. The rain didn’t let up for two weeks.

  Hencha sometimes told us about the children who were on Yehiam when it first began, and then we’d go back to singing. The evening we learned “The Fisherman’s Daughter” was especially cold, and frightening claps of thunder boomed right above us. We were so deeply immersed in Hencha’s stories of the first children, the harsh winter of the kibbutz’s early days, and the new song we were learning that when we started singing again, the mountain farm blended with the seashore of the fisherman’s daughter. Even after Hencha said goodnight, closed the door and left, we kept on singing the new song we’d just learned, as if it were a prayer:

  Across the water a fisherman sai
led

  Out to the deep sea afar

  A gray-eyed young maiden stood watching

  And sent out a prayer from her heart

  Dear Lord, watch over the ocean

  And safeguard the watery ways

  For like me, boys and girls stand ashore

  And fishermen’s children are they

  Into the distance the fisherman vanished

  The wind gusted over the water

  Back on land in the darkness she stood

  All aflutter, the fisherman’s daughter

  Dear Lord, watch over the ocean

  And safeguard the watery ways

  For like me, boys and girls stand ashore

  And fishermen’s children are they

  Back to land did the fisherman row

  From wave to wave with his oar

  While she, the incomparable maiden,

  Still whispered to sea from shore

  Dear Lord, watch over the ocean

  And safeguard the watery ways

  For like me, boys and girls stand ashore

  And fishermen’s children are they

  —Lyrics by Binyamin Avigal, music by Miriam Avigal

  6

  Onward to Yehiam, hey hey hey

  Every night and every day—Yehiam (2X)

  We’ll rejoice, rejoice, rejoice in Yehiam

  We’ll rejoice, rejoice, rejoice in Yehiam.

  Onward to Yehiam, hey hey hey.

  Every night and every day Yehiam. (2X)

  The song was preceded by a countdown from ten to one, which sometimes began at the quarry junction and sometimes on the Gaaton turn-off. We don’t remember who counted or gave the signal to start the countdown that preceded the song. We weren’t strictly observant about the kibbutz anthem; we didn’t even call it that. If there was a countdown—we sang. If there wasn’t—we continued to sing canons that had no special meaning and went on forever, like, “Hey, a long and winding way, green grass and weeds the live long day. (Second voice): Li lo li lo lay, green grass and weeds the live long day.”

  We rode in a GMC back and forth to doctors in Nahariya or to Yehiam’s fields in the Kabri Valley, bouncing along in the hope that the moment we were called to work would be delayed, that the ear-nose-and-throat doctor in the Nahariya clinic would get in the way of a Katyusha rocket before we arrived. We stared at the most mysterious sign of our childhood, which stated: “Please Do Not Throw Out/Cigarettes and Matches in the Pail.” Each of us wracked our brains trying to find an answer to the riddle: How could the sentence be punctuated to avoid contradictions, and could it possibly be suggesting that cigarettes and matches should be thrown outside and not inside the pail? And where was the pail anyway?

  The song about Yehiam wasn’t a typical kibbutz song. It didn’t have any particular choreography to go with it, or even a real melody. We kind of recited it, with the “hey hey hey” coming out of nowhere, the way it does in a shepherd’s song. As if whoever wrote it had spent only half a day on it, then had gone back to work in the fields.

  Every few years, Yaakov R. was reelected kibbutz secretary, and when he held the office, he gave a speech and made a toast on Rosh Hashana and Passover. His holiday speeches were filled with the mention of crops, as were all the secretaries’ speeches, but they always had an undertone of subtle sarcasm, a sort of second voice like the one in the two-part harmony sung by the choir that was waiting to perform when he finished. “L’Haim, comrades,” the secretary said loudly, raising his eyes from the pages of crop statistics and waving his glass in the air, after he’d described how the bananas had been pounded by a barrage of hailstones and the avocados had been killed by frost. The “L’haim, comrades” was repeated a moment later, after he described the political reversal that left us, the political left, without a hope. And so it went, one blow after another, until he raised his glass again, and in a bitter voice totally unsuited to his holiday toast, repeated the words as if they were the chorus of a lament: “L’haim, comrades.”

  Yaakov R.’s sarcasm and irony expressed neither despair nor scorn. They were part of the efforts he made to illuminate the various issues he raised. Yaakov had unique control over his words: He would juggle his arguments in the air, twist them around when they were up there, stop them for a moment in mid-air so the entire kibbutz could stand beneath them and see their other side, then he’d lower them slowly until they landed on the ground.

  Since he was a man of action who also knew how to speak more eloquently than anyone else on the kibbutz (his speech wasn’t flowery, but rather almost lyrical), he’d been elected right from the beginning, as if out of nowhere, to lead, to formulate that leadership. He was the one who wrote and read aloud the Djedin scroll, in which the kibbutz members had sworn a blood oath to the place, at night, before they began their climb to Yehiam. Later, he represented the kibbutz in its dealings with the various institutions. During the War of Independence and the siege of Yehiam, he risked life and limb on his many urgent trips to Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. He had to find a way to supply Yehiam with everything it didn’t have—land, food, water, ammunition, ways of earning money, cigarettes, and everything necessary to life.

  During a fateful kibbutz meeting that took place during the war, on May 15, 1948, when the kibbutz was still split between Kiryat Haim and Yehiam, Yaakov posed the question that had been hovering over Yehiam from the moment it was created on a rocky, isolated hill, and later, when the Partition map placed it inside the borders of the Arab state, and it was engaged in heavy fighting and under ongoing siege:

  Is there any chance that we can live in that place, he asked? And who should man the forward post—the kibbutz or the army?

  The actual issue under discussion was whether they should stay or leave Yehiam. “Our purpose,” Yaakov said, “is the purpose of every kibbutz, first and foremost to become a cohesive group and prepare ourselves to build a functioning settlement. I asked the powers that be why they don’t take us out of Yehiam. All the answers were only strategic. They do not see us as a settlement, but rather as a position that will defend the Western Galilee. And we cannot take risks. The military knows that only a kibbutz, not army troops alone, can hold the place. They did not tell us what the political considerations of the Kibbutz Ha’artzi are, so I am not sure that the Kibbutz Ha’artzi can go to the institutions with such a demand, but that should be our purpose.”

  At the end of that discussion, it was decided that Yaakov and Abush would tell the powers that be, including Yosef Weitz, what had been discussed and what was happening in the kibbutz.

  On May 18, 1948, three days after that discussion on the kibbutz, Yosef Weitz wrote in his diary:

  The Western Galilee was liberated yesterday, after we took all of Acre, but the problem of Yehiam has yet to be solved. Abush and Yaakov, members of Yehiam, came to see me. The mood there is very dark: Very little food, water is sparse, the place is under fire by snipers almost day and night. All the airdropped items do not reach them, only about a third or a quarter, and the people there ask: What is it all for? If Yehiam is in the Arab state, then it will not be built, and why have people given their lives? And our country’s leaders say over and over again that we will not take more than the United Nations has allocated us. I found it difficult to give them an answer, since I do not share our leaders’ view. We must conquer the entire Western Galilee, for we have shed blood over it. But I agree that the members should leave, and if the commander considers it important militarily, he should send army people there and not rely on settlers. This must be clarified with the Haifa commander.

  I am enclosing pages from Yediot, published by the secretariat of the Kibbutz Ha’artzi Hashomer Hatzair, in which there is a description of the attack on Yehiam. The writer is also no longer among the living…

  He was referring to the piece written by Rafael, of the Meadow group, about the first attack on Yehiam in January 1948. Rafael was killed two months later, in March, in the Yehiam convoy.

  When t
he war ended, the kibbutz received land in Gaaton Valley and Kabri Valley. At noon, all the members gathered for a meeting with the settlement and Kibbutz Haartzi institutions. The question was, once again, whether to leave the kibbutz, only this time, they discussed the issue from the civilian, agricultural settlement point of view: Should the kibbutz be moved closer to its new lands, or remain where it was, at the foot of the fortress in Djedin-Yehiam, where there was almost no agricultural land?

  During the discussion, opposing views, both emotional and practical, were voiced. All the speakers said that so many near and dear ones had sacrificed their lives so the others could live in this place. “How can we leave now?” they asked at the meeting.

  In the end, the majority of the members voted in favor of keeping the kibbutz where it was. They didn’t want to leave because of the beauty and wildness of the place, because of the living and the dead, and so the fields remained separate and far away from the kibbutz.

  The separation between the fields and the kibbutz that was created in Yehiam was extremely unusual in the structure and agricultural-social-economic concept of kibbutzim. Based on that concept, the link and proximity to the fields were at the very heart of the kibbutz vision of the new, productive, creative man. Work was not a means or a tool for personal profit; it was perceived as an entity in and of itself, and a source of interest and renewal.

  The geographical conditions of a mountain kibbutz cut people off from their fields, as if a mountain and a valley of hardships have been placed between them and the work they do.

  Though the physical distance between Yehiam and its fields created economic and transportation problems, it did not adversely affect the connection between the members and the fields. As in all kibbutzim, the fields were the focal point of our conscience and everything we reported about ourselves revolved around them. They were the place where records were constantly being broken.