My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

He does not see the Land as it is. Riding in the elegant carriage from Jaffa to Mikveh Yisrael, he did not see the Palestinian village of Abu Kabir. Traveling from Mikveh Yisrael to Rishon LeZion, he did not see the Palestinian village of Yazur. On his way from Rishon LeZion to Ramleh he did not see the Palestinian village of Sarafand. And in Ramleh he does not really see that Ramleh is a Palestinian town. Now, standing atop the white tower, he does not see the nearby Palestinian town of Lydda. He does not see the Palestinian village of Haditha, the Palestinian village of Gimzu, or the Palestinian village of El-Kubbab. My great-grandfather does not see, on the shoulder of Mount Gezer, the Palestinian village of Abu Shusha.

As I observe the blindness of Herbert Bentwich as he surveys the Land from the top of the tower, I understand him perfectly. My great-grandfather does not see because he is motivated by the need not to see. He does not see because if he does see, he will have to turn back. But my great-grandfather cannot turn back. So that he can carry on, my great-grandfather chooses not to see.

Is this colonialism? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.

In the decade following the Kishinev pogrom, some one million Jews fled Eastern Europe, while fewer than thirty-five thousand immigrated to Palestine. The choice was clear: the masses who wanted a life went to America. The few who wanted utopia made aliyah to the Land of Israel.

The failure of the socialist utopians in Palestine and the acute distress of Jews in Eastern Europe forced Zionism to look for new modes of action. The new idea was to colonize Palestine by establishing communist colonies that would not be small, intimate, and utopian like Degania, but large, rigid, and almost Bolshevik. The idea now was to win the land by forming a tough, determined, semimilitary Labor Brigade.

By 1921 it is clear that nonsocialist Zionism will not be able to colonize Palestine. The bourgeois Rothschild colonies, like the one Herbert Bentwich visited in 1897, are done with. They are based on liberal values, a middle-class way of life, and market forces that are not up to the task. Utopian communes like Degania will not do, either. Liberty, intimacy, and individualism are incompatible with the mission. If Zionism is to prevail, there is a need now for a well-organized, disciplined socialist structure. The twenty-nine thousand dunams bought from the Sarsouk family provide the territorial base for such a structure. For the very first time, Zionism overtakes a substantial chunk of the land by building upon it a large communist colony. A kibbutz.

As there is no father, there is no boundary and no restraint. As there is no mother, there is no ease and no comfort. As there is no God, there is no mercy. No second chance. No hope of a miracle.

Only five months after Ein Harod is founded, one of its founders cannot take it anymore. He is twenty-four when he takes his life with a shotgun. A month later the morning quiet is torn once again by the hollow sound of three more shots. A blond twenty-year-old beauty is found dead in a pool of her own blood. Lying by her side is her handsome twenty-five-year-old lifeless lover. Lust, despair, and jealousy are all at work in the camp. As conditions are extreme, so are emotions.

Two years after Germany chose Nazism, the need for a Jewish home becomes self-evident. Now one does not need Herzl’s prophetic genius or Tabenkin’s catastrophic inclinations to envision the future. Now any reasonable person can see that Europe is becoming a death trap for Jews; and it is also clear that America would not open its gates in time to save the persecuted Jews of Europe. Only a Jewish state in Palestine can save the lives of the millions who are about to die. In

For eighteen hundred years the Jews had not lived on their own land with such security, such abundance, such a deep sense of calm.

As Rehovot grows, Zarnuga grows. As Rehovot prospers, Zarnuga prospers, too. When the workers from Zarnuga arrive at the gate of the orange grove each morning, it seems that all is well. And when dozens of youngsters from Zarnuga ride into Rehovot on their bicycles each day, it seems that all would be well. There is no reason to believe that Jew and Arab could not live here together in peace. No reason to believe that one day Zarnuga will cease to be and the people of Zarnuga will be gone and loyal Abed and his family will be driven out of the Rehovot paradise. But in the far north, a great distance from the orange grove, other voices are beginning to be heard. There is nothing concrete yet, certainly nothing the orange grower could make out from his tidy terrace, but an underground movement that had begun to form years earlier is about to surface.

In 1925 al-Kassam forged a five-phase plan: preparing the minds for revolution; establishing clandestine revolutionary cells; assembling arms, money, and intelligence; killing Jews; and launching an overall armed struggle. By 1930 the plan was implemented and a web of secretive cells formed in northern Palestine.

There is harmony here: man and woman, Yemenite and Ashkenazi, Jew and Arab. The two peoples of the land are working side by side,

He wonders about the mysterious bond between Jews and oranges. Both arrived in Palestine around the same time. Both took root in the same coastal plain. Both needed this loamy soil, this sun, these blue skies. The moderate weather, the life by the sea. Neither Jews nor oranges could have prospered if the British had not ruled over Palestine. And now, in early April 1936, the Jews and the oranges of the Land of Israel are both flourishing.

The brutal events that took place between April and August 1936 pushed Zionism from a state of utopian bliss to a state of dystopian conflict.

Eight months later, in July 1937, the Peel Commission handed its report to the British government recommending a partition of the land into two nation-states, Jewish and Arab. It also recommended that the Arabs residing in the Jewish state be “transferred” elsewhere, as will the Jews living in the Arab state. From this moment on, the idea of “transfer”—the removal of the Arab population—became part of mainstream Zionist thinking.

In the late 1930s, the Jewish community in Palestine did not have the leverage to initiate a transfer of the Arab population. But the new idea spoke volumes about the new state of mind of the Zionist leadership. All that had been suppressed and denied since Herbert Bentwich disembarked in the port of Jaffa in 1897 now surfaced. The shocking insight of Israel Zangwill was now a part of conventional thinking. Within a year, a merciless perception of reality took root: us or them, life or death.

In November, the UN General Assembly endorses the partition plan and calls for the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state. As the Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine reject Resolution 181, violence flares throughout the country. It is clear that Arab nationalism is about to eradicate Zionism and destroy the Jewish community in Palestine by the use of brutal force. It is clear that the Jews must defend themselves, as no one else will come to their rescue.

From December 1947 to May 1948, a cruel civil war between Arabs and Jews rages. After the British leave, the State of Israel is founded on May 14, 1948. The next day, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon invade and a full-scale war erupts.

Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.

Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be. In retrospect it’s all too clear. When Herbert Bentwich saw Lydda from the white tower of Ramleh in April 1897, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine, an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center.

Bulldozer was also born in Eastern Europe but was raised in Tel Aviv. At seven, he was returning from school one day when an Arab threw a bomb from a passing train onto busy Herzl Street, wounding dozens and killing an eight-year-old boy standing nearby. That day it became clear to him that there would be an all-out war with the Arabs.

But in the 1940s something changed. The Arab issue, which had always existed, suddenly put a question mark on the future. Throughout the country, Arab villages became more modern and Arab cities more prosperous. A new Arab intelligentsia developed a strong national awareness and began to crystallize a distinctive, highly dangerous Arab-Palestinian identity. So the old Zionist way of doing things was no longer relevant. There was no longer an option to buy land gradually, bring in well-trained immigrants gradually, and build the Jewish nation gradually, from the bottom up. There was a need for a different sort of action. 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.

“Operation Larlar was conducted by the State of Israel. In July 1948, David Ben Gurion was already the prime minister of a sovereign nation. The troops attacking Lydda were the troops of the just-born Israel Defense Forces. The Holocaust was in the background. Prime Minister Ben Gurion could not instruct the IDF to get rid of the Arabs. Yigal Allon, too, was a farsighted Jew. He understood that Ben Gurion could not give an expulsion order. As a state we do not expel. On the other hand, both Ben Gurion and Allon knew it was impossible to allow an Arab Lydda to remain by the international airport, not far from Tel Aviv. 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.”

“Officers are human beings, too,” says the brigade commander. “And as a human being you suddenly face a chasm. On the one hand is the noble legacy of the youth movement, the youth village, Dr. Lehmann. On the other hand is the brutal reality of Lydda. You are surprised by your own surprise. For years you’ve trained for this day. You’ve prepared the village files. You’ve been told there is an inevitable war coming. You’ve been told that the Arabs will have to go. And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well-trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing. And you see the Jewish soldiers, and you see the marching Arabs, and you feel heavy, and deeply sad. You feel like you’re facing something so immense you cannot deal with, you cannot even grasp.”

“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.