My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (6 page)

Meanwhile, in Europe, big events were occurring. The First World War was perceived by many Jews as Armageddon. Lenin’s October Revolution was considered a messianic event. But despite war, revolution, and postrevolution civil war, persecution was worse than ever. Pogroms were everywhere.

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.

In the summer of 1920 the Labor Brigade was founded. A year later it was hundreds of comrades strong. They felt and spoke as if they were the avant-garde of the Jewish people. They acted as if they were the revolutionary elite marching ahead of the masses they were about to liberate. No job was unworthy, no mission impossible. They would do whatever needed to be done in the name of the Zionist revolution.

I look closely at their photographs. The young men I see are indeed new Jews. They are strong, buff, beaming with certainty. It is hard to believe that the parents they left behind in Eastern Europe were shtetl merchants or ghetto scholars. Within a short period of time, the transformation among these youngsters was beyond comprehension. Now they wear egalitarian berets and caps, khakis and sleeveless shirts, khakis and no shirts at all. And their fine torsos are proudly on display. They are tanned and muscular; they look like models of revolutionary potency. From the recesses of previous generations’ humiliation, manly energy is now bursting.

The girls are surprisingly provocative. Some still wear the vestiges of trendy European fashion. Had they not landed on the Palestine shore, they would be dancing the Charleston to the music of the Roaring Twenties. But even those clad in spartan khaki are tantalizing. As there is no God and no father in Palestine, all is free. As there is no religion and no family, all is open. Under these empty blue skies there is no mercy, but there are also no limits. There is nothing to stop the most ambitious and audacious of all twentieth-century revolutions.

It is the summer of 1921, and all is quiet in the valley. Apart from the railway, what is here now is what has been here for hundreds of years. 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.”

Below the mountainside village of Nuris stand the stone houses built by the Sarsouk family for its Ein Jaloud serfs. And where Kibbutz Yizrael will be built sits the quiet village of Zarin. On one of the hills slump the mud huts of Tel Fir. Down below are hidden the scattered homes of Shatta. And over on the northern heights, the village of Komay overlooks the valley it commands.

The waters flow slowly from the lively spring of Harod to the pools of Sahneh via the old mills, as they have for a thousand years. Every so often, water trickles into the ditches that the peasants dig in order to nourish their meager crops. But these waters create the boggy marshes from which rise the poisonous vapors of malaria that have turned the old village of Rihanyah into a ghost village. Everything here, by the grave of Sheikh Hassan and around the Spring of Hassan, is idle—the torpor of an ancient land deep in ancient slumber.

And yet there are forces about to be unleashed on the quiet valley. The energy generated by Kishinev and the Great War and the Great Revolution and the pogroms. The opportunity produced by the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate and the Sarsouk transaction. The acute distress of Eastern European Jews that compels them to flee to the valley. And the new identity of the new Jews that allows them to enter the valley—to build and transform themselves in a valley inhabited by others.

On September 21, 1921, a bizarre convoy penetrates the Valley of Harod: two cars, four horses, and a number of country wagons. The dozens of Labor Brigade pioneers in the convoy are highly excited, very much aware that they are about to tilt history. In his personal journal, one of the youngsters writes:

The community of Ein Harod is imprinted on every Israeli’s psyche. In a sense it is our Source, our point of departure. But for me Ein Harod has personal significance, too. I have family here. Throughout my childhood I used to come here for the summer holidays. I was always attached to the aura of this mythological kibbutz. I loved to walk its shady pathways and enjoyed the languor of the serene afternoons of the archetypical commune. I would stand on the porch of the communal dining room and look down at the verdant valley, across the imposing Mount Gilboa.

Now I am sitting in Ein Harod’s dilapidated archives. And as I go over the records of that first day the pioneers arrived, I find all the formative elements: the heat, the spring, the Arabs, the tents, the barbed wire. The awareness of the founding fathers that what they are about to do may require violence. Their determination to conquer the valley—come what may.

I am no judge. I am an observer. And at this critical point I choose not to zoom in on the single dimension of Jew and Arab, us and them,
Israel and its other. Rather, I widen my scope of vision and see how the different dimensions of the Zionist tale interplay in the Valley of Harod.

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.

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.

The move is not only brilliant, it is brave. The young Labor Brigade comrades settling in the Valley of Harod do not ask themselves how the eighty thousand Jews living in Palestine in 1921 will deal with more than six hundred thousand Arabs. They do not ask themselves how a tiny avant-garde of Palestine socialists will lead the fifteen million of the Jewish Diaspora on an audacious historical adventure. Like Herbert Bentwich, the seventy-four Ein Harod pioneers are blessed and cursed with convenient blindness. They see the Arabs but they don’t. They see the marshes but they ignore them. They know that historic circumstances are unfavorable but they believe they will overcome them. Their ethos is one of steely defiance. Against all odds they set up camp in the valley and create Ein Harod.

They are rebels, of course. But their revolution is at least sixfold.
The seventy-four twenty-year-olds launching Ein Harod rebel against the daunting Jewish past of persecution and wandering. They rebel against the moldering Jewish past of a people living an unproductive life, at the mercy of others. They rebel against Christian Europe. They rebel against the capitalist world order. They rebel against Palestine’s marshes and boulders. They rebel against Palestine’s indigenous population. The Labor Brigade pioneers rebel against all forces that are jeopardizing Jewish existence in the twentieth century as they pitch their tents by the spring of Harod.

I watch the encampment grow. First it is located by the spring, so that it will have absolute control over the valley’s water source. Weeks later, when the serfs of the Ein Jaloud hamlet give up and leave, the encampment is transplanted to the mountain slope, right next to the deserted stone houses. By now there are 150 comrades in the Labor Brigade kibbutz of Ein Harod. They occupy seventy cone-shaped white tents.

At the center of each tent is a red iron pole from which hangs a kerosene lamp. Three metal beds covered with gray-brown military blankets surround the pole. There are no desks or chairs, but by each bed stands an improvised cupboard made of old wooden fruit boxes in which each pioneer places his or her few personal belongings. There is also one rifle in every tent, along with some ammunition. The barren soil is covered with white gravel, and a deep trench is dug around each tent to protect it from the rains soon to fall. Metal pegs secure each tent to the ground with taut military ropes.

The young founders of Ein Harod are ecstatic. “It’s all astounding,” writes one of them. “I cannot but think of the sons of Israel in their tents in the desert. But this is our last stop. Here our wandering ends.” The excitement is not only personal but collective. The brigade builds the land shoulder to shoulder, male and female. The collective also dances and sings. At night, young legs are thrust up in the air. Young hands are bound together. Faces glow, eyes glitter. They dance in circles around a bonfire, as if dance is prayer. They dance as if the act of settling in the valley is of biblical significance. Shots of celebration pierce the air.

The pitch-black night is now reddened by fire. The downtrodden villagers wonder who are these newcomers singing, dancing, shooting in the air. The astonished valley wonders where these nomads came from to pitch tents and dance wildly into the night, to awaken the dormant valley from its thousand-year sleep. Yet the gaiety of the dancing is misleading. The exhausted young pioneers who retire to their tents and collapse onto their metal beds are all orphans. They have cut themselves off from their roots and have turned their backs on their parents. Now they are fatherless, motherless, and godless. Their camp on the slopes of the Gilboa is very much an orphanage.

After all, Zionism was an orphans’ movement, a desperate crusade of Europe’s orphans. As the unwanted sons and daughters of the Christian Continent fled the hatred of their surrogate mother, they discovered they were all alone in the world. Godless, parentless, and homeless, they had to survive. Having lost one civilization, they had to construct another. Having lost their homeland, they had to invent another. That is why they came to Palestine, and why they now cling to the land with such desperate determination.

But in Ein Harod the sense of orphanhood is even deeper. It occupies the hearts and dreams of every pioneer. “When immigrating to this land,” writes one of the youngsters,