My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

Only a few years ago did it suddenly dawn on me that my existential fear regarding my nation’s future and my moral outrage regarding my nation’s occupation policy are not unconnected. On the one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another people. On the other hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli condition unique. Intimidation and occupation have become the two pillars of our condition.

This is a remarkable quote. Extreme left wing people would say that Israel is an occupying force. Right wkngers would say it's being threatened. Both are true.

Most observers and analysts deny this duality. The ones on the left address occupation and overlook intimidation, while the ones on the right address intimidation and dismiss occupation. But the truth is that without incorporating both elements into one worldview, one cannot grasp Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A quote to share.

Although I always stood for peace and supported the two-state solution, I gradually became aware of the flaws and biases of the peace movement.

In Islamic countries they are a “protected people” living as second-class citizens.

Not people with equal rights as some say...

Most shtetl Jews realize that there is no future for the shtetl.

When people say it was Zionism that killed the shtetl - it wasn't. It was antisemitism that killed it.

The vast majority of the Palestinians of 1897 live in humble villages and hamlets. Their houses are nothing but dirt huts. Bowed by poverty and disease, they are hardly noticeable to a Victorian gentleman.

To all those who say Israel was prosperous before Zionism.

In seven years’ time, all that Zangwill sees now will pour out of him. In a landmark speech in New York, the world-renowned writer will shock his audience by stating that Palestine is populated.

Seven years fime shoud be in 1904. It took time for people to grasp that there was an indegenous people to the land of israel.

And yet the Bentwich delegation seeks to acquire another part of the planet not for the glory of Britain, but to save persecuted masses. They don’t really represent an empire but a deprived people seeking the help of empires. They do not intend to oppress but to liberate. They do not want to exploit the land, but to invest in it. Apart from Israel Zangwill, no member of the delegation considers their mission as a form of conquest, dispossession, or expulsion.

Although their appearance, thinking, and manners are European, these pilgrims do not represent Europe. On the contrary. They are Europe’s victims. And they are here on behalf of Europe’s ultimate victims.

After breaking free from the ghetto in which they had been imprisoned for centuries, they went forth and embraced enlightened Europe—enriching the Continent and enriching themselves. Yet as the nineteenth century draws to a close, these Jews realize that as much as they care for Europe, Europe does not care for them.

I have the same thoughts now, as antisemitism is on thd rise. I have great respesct nd admiration towards Europe, bu it doesn't love me back. It's not mutual.

Before me are the Valley of Harod and the rocky ridges of Mount Gilboa, and I can see the gentle green slopes of the Isaschar heights, with its numerous kibbutzim. It’s so quiet here. The spell of another era still hangs over the Valley of Harod.

Need to travel there sometime...

In the 1920s there were three Palestinian villages and two Palestinian hamlets in the valley. These thirty thousand dunams* were owned by the Sarsouk family of Alexandria. Most local inhabitants were their serfs.

Not all land owned by Arabs in the land of Israel was owned by local Arabs ("Palestinians").

In April 1903 an Easter pogrom took place in Moldova’s capital, Kishinev. Forty-nine Jews were murdered, hundreds brutally injured. World Jewry was in turmoil. Theodor Herzl was personally shocked. Deeply affected by Kishinev, he considered buying the property of the Sarsouk family in Palestine in order to relocate the victims of European anti-Semitism there. He had the proposal reviewed by a consultant, who concluded that the land in the Valley of Harod was exquisite, but to evacuate the serfs from the estate would require the use of force. Herzl’s Zionism of 1903 found the use of force unacceptable. But seventeen years later, Zionism was no longer so fastidious. The Great War and the Great Revolution had hardened hearts. So when the Sarsouk transaction was finally signed, in the summer of 1920, it was clear to all concerned what was required: decisive, rapid action. Action to be carried out by a new breed of Jew.

That's an interesting story.

What the American traveler John Ridgway described in the last quarter of the previous century can still be seen in the first quarter of the new century: “The valley full of harvesters, pickers and packers. Donkeys heavily laden with sacks of grain are walking by while women are busy picking whatever is left in the field. Often one hears the singing of harvesters as they bend over the stalks of grain, their bodies swaying to the rhythm of age-old chants.”

Kibbutz socialism is now essential for several reasons. Without group effort, Zionist colonizers will not be able to endure the hardships involved in the colonizing process. Without the idealism of kibbutz socialism, Zionism will not have the sense of moral superiority that is essential for the colonization process to succeed. Without the communal aspect of kibbutz, socialist Zionism will lack legitimacy and will be perceived as an unjust colonialist movement. Only kibbutz socialism can give Zionism the social cohesion, the mental determination, and the moral imperative needed at this revolutionary stage. And only the Labor Brigade ethos of kibbutz socialism will enable Zionism to take the valley and to take the Land.

Hard to believe...

Kropotkin,

Didn't know him.

Yitzhak Tabenkin

Heard that name. Apparently he was one of the founders of Ein Harod.

Oranges had been Palestine’s trademark for centuries.

So does Portugal's.

Now the liberation movement of the Jewish people is no longer the wild fantasy it had been when Herbert Bentwich rode by Rehovot in April 1897. Nor is it the Spartan revolutionary endeavor it had been in the Valley of Harod in September 1921. In 1935, Zionism does not demand superhuman effort and total sacrifice of its pioneers.

At this point in time the injustice caused to native Arabs by the Zionist project is still limited. It is true that tenant Palestinian farmers had already been uprooted from their land in the Harod Valley and in Rehovot and in dozens of other locations in Palestine. But the lives of those farmers under their Arab masters had in many cases been worse than their lives as the field hands of the Jewish colonizers. Most of them did not have a solid right of possession under their Arab masters, and when the Jews took over, many of them were compensated with cash or land. Moreover, while some Palestinians do suffer, many of them benefit considerably as Zionism advances. In Qubeibeh, Zarnuga, and the other Arab villages surrounding Rehovot, Jewish capital, Jewish technology, and Jewish medicine are a blessing to the native population, bringing progress to desperate Palestinian communities. So the Zionists of Rehovot can still believe that the clash between the two peoples is avoidable. They cannot yet anticipate the imminent, inevitable tragedy.

How Arabs benefited from Zionism.

yet in the summer of 1935 the Jews of Berlin are experiencing something they had not experienced in a hundred years—pogroms.

Didn't know that there were a hundred years without a pogrom.

Izz Abd al-Kader Mustafa Yusuf ad-Din al-Kassam was born in West Syria in 1882.

Another "native" that wasn't born in the land of Israel.

On October 18, 1935, as the orange grower was preparing for his first harvest, a shipment of Belgian cement barrels arrived at the port of Jaffa. One of the barrels fell and broke, and out rolled thousands of rifle bullets. There was panic in the harbor: it was clear that the illegal ammunition was headed for the illicit Jewish defense organization, the Haganah. Within hours there was panic throughout the country. Now Palestinians felt that not only was Jewish immigration a threat but so was Jewish military buildup. After a general strike was called, al-Kassam decided the day had come for action. Some eighty miles north of the Rehovot orange grove he gave his last speech. “I taught you religion and I taught you nationhood,” he said to his followers. “Now it’s your duty to carry out jihad. Ho, Islamists, go out on jihad.”

Start of the Arabian revolt?

In one generation the Jews have totally transformed themselves, so much so that now the U.S. Department of Agriculture fears that the fast growth of the citrus industry in Palestine will destabilize the international citrus market.

Huh? That's surprising.

Armed men, their faces masked, demanded that every driver and passenger contribute money for rifles and ammunition for the Arab cause. But when fifty-year-old Zvi Dannenberg and seventy-year-old Israel Hazan arrived in their chicken-filled truck heading for the Tel Aviv market, the gunmen realized that they were Jews, pulled them out of the truck, and shot them. Dannenberg was killed immediately. Hazan bled to death by the idling truck.

Start of the Arabian revolt?

The next day, two khaki-clad Jews arrived at a tin hut belonging to Abu Rass in the Applebaum banana plantation in the Plain of Sharon. It was almost midnight when Abu Rass heard the knocks on his door and opened it for the unexpected guests. They fired eleven pistol bullets at him and at his Egyptian roommate. Abu Rass was killed on the spot, while the Egyptian managed to crawl for a hundred yards in the pitch-black night before collapsing and dying.

There were aso killings of Arabs by Jews...

The Jewish community was aghast. True, there had been violence before. In March 1920, the first Arab-Jewish confrontation erupted in the northern Galilee. In April 1920, there were riots in Jerusalem. In August 1929, there were massacres in Hebron and Safed. Yet all these incidents were short, sporadic bursts of violence. They came suddenly and passed suddenly. A British officer described them accurately as resembling the flash floods in the Negev, Palestine’s southern desert. The sustained violence of 1936 was different. It created an unprecedented, all-engulfing conflict in Palestine. And because it was coupled with a Palestinian general strike and a Palestinian national institution building drive, it could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was: a collective uprising of a national Arab-Palestinian movement.

From this moment on, the idea of “transfer”—the removal of the Arab population—became part of mainstream Zionist thinking.

Transfer - Didn't know that lord Peel was the first to bring it up. A true legacy...

“My conscience is absolutely clear regarding this matter. Better a distant neighbor than a close-by enemy. They will not lose by their transfer and we definitely will not lose. The bottom line shows that this reform would benefit both parties. For a while now, I have thought that it was the best solution, but during the riots I have become convinced that this must take place. But it never crossed my mind that the transfer would be to Nablus. I believed in the past and I believe now that they should be transferred to Syria and Iraq.”

Berl Katzenelson saw it already in 1937.

In March 1938, Arabs attacked a car en route from Haifa to Safed. They murdered six of its Jewish passengers, among them two women, a young girl, and a boy. The girl was raped, then killed and dismembered.

Nothing has changed. :(

There was a significant difference between the Jewish and Arab atrocities in the first half of 1938. While the attacks on Jewish civilians were supported by the Arab national leadership and by much of the Arab public, the attacks on Arab civilians were denounced by mainstream Zionism.

Important.

In the winter of 1938 and spring of 1939, the British suppressed the Great Arab Revolt with an iron fist. But Jewish terrorism did not abate. In February 1939, more than forty innocent Arabs were murdered when bombs went off in the Haifa train station, the Haifa market, and the Jerusalem market. On May 29, four Arab women were murdered in Bir Addas. On June 20, scores of innocent Arabs were murdered when a bomb exploded in the Arab market of Haifa. On June 29, five Arab villagers riding on a wagon into Rehovot in the early morning were shot dead. On July 20, another three Arabs were murdered in Rehovot’s orange groves.

Turns out there was also anti-Arab violence...

For Zionism had no illusions now: it realized that the brutal civil war of 1936–39 was only the beginning. The Jewish national movement was getting ready for a new round of violence. No one knew when, no one knew under what circumstances, but no one doubted that the conflict would erupt again, and viciously. The trauma of the summer of 1936 was burned deep in the heart and the lesson was learned. Zionism would never be what it was before Chaim Pashigoda, Eliezer Bisozky, Chaim Kornfeld, Victor Koopermintz, Yitzhak Frenkel, Yehuda Siman-Tov, David Shambadal, and Zelig Levinson were murdered in Jaffa on the morning of April 19, 1936. And yet the newly redefined Zionism was in need of a symbol and a shrine. As it redefined and transformed itself, it needed a new epicenter.

In March 1942, the Auschwitz extermination camp goes active. A few days later, the Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps begin to bellow their unique smoke into Europe’s spring skies. On March 17, 1942, the deportation of the Jews of Lublin to Belzec begins. On March 24 the deportation of the Jews of Slovakia to Auschwitz begins. On March 27 begins the deportation of the Jews of France to Auschwitz. On March 30, the first Paris train carrying Jews arrives in Auschwitz.

The Germans didn't waste any time... The Wansee comitee was in January 1942. Plus, I didn't know that Slovakian Jews were the first to be exterminated.

In the words of the former leader of Poland’s Zionist movement, Yitzhak Gruenbaum: “The trouble with the Jews of the Diaspora was that they preferred the life of a beaten dog to death with honor. There is no hope for survival once the Germans invade. If, God forbid, we shall reach the moment of invasion, we must see to it that we leave a Masada legend behind us.”

I wonder what Israelies today would think about it...

And it is a Zionist catastrophe unlike any other. For Zionism, the implications of the Holocaust are devastating. Gone are the great Jewish masses that Zionism was designed to save. Gone is the great human reservoir that was to save Zionism. Gone is Zionism’s raison d’être. For even if Hitler is defeated, he might still leave behind him a defeated Jewish people. With no Eastern European demographic backbone, Zionism becomes a bridgehead that no reinforcements will ever cross, protect, or hold.

The mid-nineteenth-century French physiologist Claude Bernard was the first to overturn the conventional understanding that life is an adjustment to environment. Adjustment to the surrounding environment is death, argued Bernard; the phenomenon of life is that of preserving an internal environment contrary to an outside environment.

In May, the mayor of Lydda recommends that Ben Shemen surrender, but it refuses. Still, the mayor begs the commander of the Arab Legion not to attack the isolated compound, as it does not threaten Lydda in any way. When Arab fields adjacent to Ben Shemen are set ablaze, some of the youth village graduates who have remained rush to put out the fire. Even as war rages in most parts of Palestine, both Arabs and Jews regard the Lydda Valley as a zone of restricted warfare.

Didn't know this.

In forty-seven minutes of blitz, more than a hundred Arab civilians are shot dead—women, children, old people. Regiment 89 loses nine of its men. In the early evening, the two 3rd Regiment platoons are able to penetrate Lydda. Within hours, their soldiers hold key positions in the city center and confine thousands of civilians in the Great Mosque, the small mosque, and the St. George’s cathedral. By evening, Zionism has taken the city of Lydda.

Civilian Arabs who were killesd in Israeli war of independence. Battle of Lidda.

When news of the bloodshed reaches the headquarters of Operation Larlar in the conquered Palestinian village of Yazzur, Yigal Allon asks Ben Gurion what to do with the Arabs. Ben Gurion waves his hand: Deport them. Hours after the fall of Lydda, operations officer Yitzhak Rabin issues a written order to the Yiftach Brigade: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”

Expulsion of Lidda Arabs.

He experiences another bad hour when he sees the survivors from two Jordan Valley kibbutzim who have escaped their incinerated homes. The shock of seeing kibbutz members turned refugees makes him think for the first time that defeat is possible. He realizes that the war he is participating in might end with the death of Zionism. And if Zionism dies, what will happen in the Land of Israel will be what has happened time after time in Europe. Jews will be Jews again: they will be helpless.

So, there also were Jews who turned refugees in the war of independence.

War was inhuman, but it allowed one to do what one could not do in peace; it could solve problems that were unsolvable in peace.

So is haravot barzel war.

“Tabenkin was perfectly clear. He was not in a position to give specific orders, but his general instruction to Palmach headquarters was that war presented a one-time opportunity to solve the Arab problem. Yigal Allon, too, said that this was the moment. He said they must not be. Allon was a humanist, but he said that the Arabs must not remain or else there would not be a state.”

More than 75 years passed still nothing has changed. Wars lead to a one in a lifetome opportunity to do things...

If we did so there would be no victory and there would be no state. Some things were said between Ben Gurion and Allon, but there were no written orders.”

So it's a good thing they expelled the Arabs of Lydda.

small mosque massacre,

Look fr the term Lydda mosque massacre.

He sees soldiers forcing those marching to hand over cash and wristwatches and jewelry.

Shocking! IDF soldiers looting...

One day the corpses of two Jewish young men and one Jewish young woman are brought to town after they have been captured, raped, and murdered in one of the nearby villages.

Once again nothing has changed.

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.

Such a tragedy! A tragic scene!

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.

Nicely explained.

“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.

Post WW2 Antisemitism in Poland.