My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (16 page)

As temperatures run high, Zionist policy undergoes profound changes. On May 11, 1942, in New York’s Biltmore Hotel, Zionism’s leaders abandon the old idea of long-term organic growth and endorse the demand to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as soon as possible. In the weeks preceding and following the Biltmore convention,
the Palmach Strike Force holds its first explosives course and it exercises its first five platoons.

In June 1942, Haganah commanders are called to an emergency meeting in Tel Aviv to hear the minutes of the Masada-on-the-Carmel plan. In July, the plan is thoroughly discussed in a special gathering in the Valley of Yizrael. Initial preparations are made to stake out hiding places for arms, water, food, and shelter for a hundred thousand people in the area that lies between Haifa and the Valley. Now explicit words are spoken about turning Mount Carmel into Masada.

No wonder that between February and July 1942, Gutman’s Masada ethos takes root. The youth movement’s weekly publishes extensive reports of the Masada trek and seminar, and it puts Ben Yair’s last speech on its March 31 cover. Other Labor publications also celebrate and glorify Masada. A press conference in which Gutman promotes Masada resonates strongly in contemporary public opinion. The forty-six youth leaders do their share to pass along the Masada message to their youth movement cadets, so that the second Masada trek, held only three months after the first, includes more than two hundred youngsters. Throughout the country, Passover youth camps and youth activities are devoted to Masada. With Rommel at the gate, with Europe’s Jewry in ghettos, and with the national leadership considering extreme ideas, Gutman’s gospel of Masada spreads like fire in the woods. More and more youth movements ascend Masada. Palmach squads ascend Masada. Masada overtakes the public discourse. Within a few months, the ethos of Masada becomes the formative ethos of the young nation. Masada is now at the heart of the Zionist narrative, defining its new Palestine-born generation.

By autumn, history takes yet another turn. The immediate fear of invasion subsides. On October 23, Allied Commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery launches a counteroffensive against Rommel, who begins his retreat from El Alamein on November 4. There is no further danger of a Nazi invasion of the Land of Israel.

But just as the Jewish community of Palestine relaxes and returns to the pleasures of an unprecedented economic boom, the news from Europe becomes grimmer. On December 17, 1942, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, declares in Westminster that Nazi Germany is
exterminating European Jewry. By now, it is clear that what Hitler has in mind is not a megapogrom but a holocaust. Every single day thousands are murdered. In 1942 more than a million are murdered. By the end of the war it might turn out that European Jewry has vanished completely.

As 1943 begins, hence, the ethos of Masada takes on new meaning. Now it’s not only a historic legend whose purpose is to prepare the Jews for a desperate war in the Land of Israel. Now Masada is a mythical, almost metaphysical metaphor for the loneliness of the Jewish people. As always, Yitzhak Tabenkin is the one to phrase the new insight in the cruelest fashion: “Our feeling is that of ultimate loneliness.… There is no way to know how many Jews will remain alive.… There is no guarantee that the Nazis will not exterminate the entire one hundred percent.… Bitter is the knowledge of our solitude and the knowledge that the world is our enemy.”

For spiritual leaders like Tabenkin, Katznelson, and Gutman, the significance of the Holocaust is threefold: It is a human catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. It is a Jewish catastrophe on a scale not experienced since the destruction of the Second Temple. 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.

But Tabenkin, Katznelson, and Gutman turn disaster into mission. All three, and many others, begin to speak out about the responsibility of Hebrew youth facing the new, disastrous circumstances. “Every Hebrew boy in the Land of Israel now weighs as ten, as we have lost Jewish communities ten times as large as the Jewish community of Palestine,” writes Gutman, inspired by Tabenkin. “In the black shadow of this fact, you, the young working generation of Israel, must carry on the founders’ endeavor and be a leading torch of light to the resurrection of the nation in its land.”

As it turns out, 1942 is far worse than anyone could have imagined. In this year, 2.7 million Jews are murdered by the Nazis. Within twelve months, every sixth Jew in the world is exterminated and every fourth European Jew dies of disease, hunger, shooting, or gas. The Jewish people will never recover from the blow. Zionism will never overcome the loss.

But the ethos of Masada will live on. The ethos forged in Gutman’s January 1942 seminar will grow stronger and stronger as the horrors of 1942 are revealed. So those who ask whether the ethos was based merely on myth ask the wrong question. It is not Ben Yair who defined Masada, it is Gutman. What matters is not the event that did or did not take place on the fringe of history in
A.D
. 73, but the event that does take place in the locus of history in
A.D
. 1942. For the Masada ethos put forth by Gutman would define the Zionism of the 1940s and would decide the fate of 1948 and would shape the future state of Israel.

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. Between the summer of 1936 and the summer of 1942, Zionism reaches a similar conclusion. A sequence of blows, some of them almost deadly, teaches the outstanding movement that its surrounding environment is extremely cruel. The relevant historical circumstances are lethal. Under these conditions, adjustment is death. The only way to maintain life is resistance. From now on the decisive image of the Zionist enterprise is not that of swamps drained or of orange groves bearing fruit but that of a lonely desert fortress casting the shadow of awe on an arid land.

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photo credit 5.1
)

H
OW DID
Z
IONISM ARRIVE IN THE
V
ALLEY OF
L
YDDA
? J
UST AS IT ARRIVED
in some of Palestine’s other valleys and plains.

In the autumn of 1903, after the Sixth Zionist Congress, the Anglo-Palestine Bank purchased 2,330 dunams of land in the village of Haditha for 80,730 francs. Of that area, 1,946 dunams were fertile and flat, while the remaining 384 dunams were hilly and barren. Together they formed a long strip of land that stretched from the silvery olive orchards of the Arab city of Lydda to the low ridge of hills rising from the gray fields of the Lydda Valley toward Jerusalem. The Beit Arif estate became the Ben Shemen estate, one of the first plots of land purchased by Herzl’s Zionist movement in Palestine.

Two years later, after exploring several other sites across the country, the civil engineer Nahum Wilbosh decided to establish his Atid (Hebrew for “future”) factory in the Lydda Valley. With an investment of 150,000 francs, he bought 100 dunams from the Anglo-Palestine Bank and erected a modern plant to press oil from its orchards and manufacture fine soap from the olive refuse. In its first four years, Atid was a disappointment. The oil was murky, the soap was inferior, and expenses were high. But in its fifth, sixth, and seventh years, Atid prospered. It provided its owners with respectable profits, its workers with
decent livings, and its Arab neighbors with extra income from the sale of raw materials to the new Jewish industrial enterprise. But before the Great War broke out, Atid collapsed, leaving behind in the Lydda Valley nothing but the gloomy, deserted ruins of what was meant to be.

A year after Wilbosh established his factory, a teacher named Israel Belkind built Kiryat Sefer, an agricultural school, on fifty dunams of the Ben Shemen estate, for the orphans who had survived the gruesome Kishinev pogrom three years earlier. On the top of the hill, not far from the factory, Belkind erected two-story buildings surrounding a spacious courtyard where the pogrom survivors would train to become skilled farmers. Yet after spending 43,000 francs to purchase the land and build the classrooms and dormitory, Belkind was short of funds needed to run the school, and Kiryat Sefer collapsed.

In 1908, several years after the death of Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement decided to commemorate its founder by planting a thousand olive trees in the Valley of Lydda. Choosing the olive tree for the orchard of Herzl-Wald was both practical and symbolic. The aim was to demonstrate that the new Jews could plant olive trees that were as beautiful and deep-rooted as the ancient olive trees of the orchards of the Arabs of Lydda. As early as 1908 a nursery had been set up between the Atid factory and the Kiryat Sefer school, but an unexpected incident had taken place there: Jewish workers rallied one day and uprooted the olive trees planted by Arab workers, replanting them with their own hands in order to make a national Jewish statement. So in 1909, when Herzl-Wald was planted, all work was solely Jewish. The new Jews of Palestine planted more than twelve thousand olive trees on the gentle slope overlooking the minarets of the city of Lydda. And as the trees grew taller, it seemed that Herzl-Wald was indeed becoming a real, deep-rooted olive orchard in Palestine. But then came war, locusts, and despair. The Atid factory failed. Some of the olive trees were damaged, some perished, some were uprooted. As quickly as Herzl’s olive forest had appeared in the Valley of Lydda, it disappeared.

In 1910, after a wave of immigration from Yemen reached Palestine, Boris Schatz, an art professor and the founder of Jerusalem’s renowned Bezalel art academy, decided to settle Yemenite artisans skilled in silver-smithing in the Lydda Valley. His intention was to establish a modest artisan colony whose residents would make a living by combining
twentieth-century agriculture and traditional crafts. For that purpose he built a small neighborhood of humble homes adjacent to the Ben Shemen courtyard and the Herzl-Wald forest to which he brought twelve families of impoverished Yemenite Jews who were rich in artistic tradition. For three years the families struggled to take root in the Lydda Valley, but they were ultimately defeated by the harsh conditions, the shortage of water, and the high infant mortality rate. Like Atid, Kiryat Sefer, and the olive forest, the artisan colony vanished.

In 1909, the agronomist Yitzhak Vilkansky, who first came to Ben Shemen to work in the olive tree nursery, turned Belkind’s courtyard into an exemplary agricultural enterprise. In Ben Shemen, Vilkansky established Palestine’s first modern cowshed, where he bred strong German bulls with resilient Damascus cows. Vilkansky experimented in beekeeping, almond growing, and wheat harvesting. He developed new methods of irrigation and came up with the idea of mixed farming, which would enable every family of Jewish settlers in Palestine to have a homestead run on a system of rations that would make the most of every small plot of land year-round. He trained work groups of skilled farmers, one of which settled in the deserted homes of the departed Yemenites, and established a tiny but flourishing working village. For sixteen years Vilkansky performed wonders in the Lydda Valley, proving, as the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had said, that in the Land of Israel, Hebrew hands can perform miracles.

But in 1926 Vilkansky moved his experimental farm to the thriving orange grove colony of Rehovot. After five attempts and four failures, Zionism was faced with the questions it had faced twenty-three years earlier: how to settle the Valley of Lydda, and what to do with the strip of land descending from the rocky hills to the deserted courtyard of Ben Shemen to the ruins of Atid and the minarets rising from the Arab city of Lydda.

Siegfried Lehmann was born in Berlin in 1892. He studied medicine and served as a doctor in the German army. Although he was the son of a wealthy family of assimilated German Jews, during the Great War he rediscovered his Jewish identity and found meaning in the endeavor of rejuvenating Judaism. In 1916 he established a center for homeless Jewish
children in an East Berlin slum. In 1919 he opened a shelter for Jewish war orphans in the Lithuanian city of Kovna. Inspired by his mentors Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, Albert Einstein, and his own brother Alfred, Lehmann believed that there was no future for Jews in Germany, and that Western Jewry must renew itself by reconnecting with the masses of Eastern Jewry, with their traditions and rituals.