My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (12 page)

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.

As the orange grower walks into his grove, a flock of pheasants takes flight. A rabbit scampers away. A fox peeps from the thicket. Bees buzz as they circle above, then descend upon the flowering buds, suckling their nectar. The orange grower notices the fresh tracks of a mongoose and those of a jackal. The grove is a microcosm unto itself.

The orange grower finds all this inconceivable. Only six years have passed since he bought from the villagers of Qubeibeh these seventy dunams of once barren land in the Valley of Dew. Only five years have passed since he cleared the land of poisonous weed and planted a thousand saplings of Valencia and four thousand saplings of Shamouti. Now, as if in the blink of an eye, the five thousand saplings have turned into a forest. The gray, arid wasteland has given way to a rich habitat of flora and fauna that seems as if it has always been here. What the orange grower sees all around him is man-made nature.

The orange grower thinks about the rejuvenation of the Jews and the rejuvenation of the country. By now there are nearly 300,000 dunams of citrus groves in Palestine, more than half of them owned by Jews. Next year’s exports are expected to reach ten million crates of citrus fruit, and by 1939, exports are expected to reach fifteen million crates. If disaster doesn’t strike, in the 1940s Palestine is expected to export more than twenty million crates of oranges, which will make it the world’s leading citrus power. What the Jews have already accomplished in the local groves has proved that there is no limit to the amount of orange gold that can be produced in this land. There is no limit to the land’s bounty. And there is no limit to the ability of Palestine to absorb and save the Jews.

The orange grower reaches the summit of the grove and looks around. South of his grove are the reddish-white houses of Rehovot. To the west are the sleepy stone houses of the villages of Qubeibeh and Zarnuga that have learned to live in peace with the colony planted in
their midst. North of the grove is the grandiose Oriental mansion of the Palestinian landlord who has flourished alongside the flourishing Jews and their flourishing orange groves. To the east are the tall palm trees that lead the way to Ramleh, beyond which lies the faint blue silhouette of the ridge of Jerusalem. The orange grower is not naïve. He follows the news from Germany. He is attentive to the ominous rumblings coming out of the Arab cities and villages. He is aware of the fact that the Rehovot of 1936 is threatened by the great forces buffeting European Jewry and transforming Arab Palestine. But right now, as he stands at the top of his own orange grove, he sees an orange grove to the south and an orange grove to the west and an orange grove to the north and an orange grove to the east. Wherever he looks—orange groves. And the groves are young and mature, Jewish and Arab. They are all bursting out of the land the way oil bursts out of the land in Texas. So the orange grower feels that there is a blessing in the land. There is hope in the land. And the colony of Rehovot is a living testament that the Jews were right to end their two millennia of wandering in the Plain of Judea. They were right to come here and build a home and plant a tree and put down roots. Creating something from nothing. Creating this green ocean of orange groves that whispers Peace and plenty and home.

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photo credit 4.1
)

T
HE FIRST SHOTS WERE HEARD ON THE EVENING OF
W
EDNESDAY
, A
PRIL
15, 1936. In the early hours of dark, approximately twenty cars were waved to a halt beside piles of rocks and tar barrels of a makeshift, unlawful checkpoint on the Tul Karem Road in the hills of Samaria. 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.

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.

The following day, Israel Hazan’s funeral was held in Tel Aviv’s city center. The funeral procession quickly got out of hand, becoming a
demonstration of rage. Thousands rallied in the streets, calling for revenge. Several gangs tried to lynch some Arab cartmen and shoeshine men who were in town for a day’s work. “In blood and fire Judea fell,” the young nationalists cried out, “in blood and in fire Judea shall rise.”

Two days later, a rumor swept through Jaffa that four Arabs had been murdered in neighboring Tel Aviv. Hundreds of Arabs thronged the streets, marching toward the city’s police station and government headquarters, demanding the bodies of those who were assumed to have died. Then they gathered in groups on street corners, waiting for prey. They stoned Jewish buses, Jewish taxis, and Jewish automobiles. They chased innocent Jews passing by.

Chaim Pashigoda, twenty-three, a law clerk, was on his way to the registrar’s offices in Jaffa. Armed with stones, hammers, and knives, a Palestinian crowd attacked and murdered him. Eliezer Bisozky, an elderly Yiddish-speaking Jew, tried to escape raging Jaffa. He almost succeeded in hopping onto a horse-drawn wagon that was heading to Tel Aviv but fell off and into the hands of the mob, who pummeled him to death. Chaim Kornfeld, thirty, and Victor Koopermintz, thirty-four, were plasterers renovating a grand Arab house in the exclusive Arab quarter of Jaballiya. The mob heading down from the citrus port beat them to death. Yitzhak Frenkel and Yehuda Siman-Tov were murdered in much the same way. The electrician David Shambadal was hacked to pieces by a group of young Arab men when he arrived at a café to install a new lighting system. Zelig Levinson was mowed down by rifle bullets on the edge of Jaffa.

The next day seven more Jews were murdered. Within three days Tel Aviv buried sixteen victims of Arab violence. Eighty wounded were treated in the city’s hospitals. Because of a blood shortage, the public was urged to donate.

The following day, the national Palestinian leadership called for a general strike. Now violence took a new form. Fires were set in Jerusalem, in Kibbutz Kfar Menachem, and in the Balfour Forest in the north. The fields of the Valley of Harod were ablaze, and hundreds of dunams of orange groves there were uprooted or felled.

Three weeks later, on May 13, two Jews were murdered in the Old City of Jerusalem. On May 16, three Jews in a crowd coming out of Jerusalem’s
Edison Cinema house were picked off by snipers. On August 13, a gang broke into the house of an ultra-Orthodox family in Safed, killing the father, the sixteen-year-old son, the nine-year-old daughter, and the seven-year-old daughter in their beds. The next day Arabs ambushed four Jews who were driving to a quiet mountain retreat in the Carmel forest. A day later, a Jew was murdered in Sarafand, just a few miles from Rehovot. While the Sarafand victim’s funeral was under way, a bomb was thrown from a passing train onto Tel Aviv’s busy Herzl Street, wounding nineteen Jews and killing an eight-year-old Jewish boy. The following day, two young Jewish nurses were shot to death as they arrived for work at Jaffa’s state hospital. Three days later, a rifle bullet penetrated the skull of a scholar as he read an ancient Islamic manuscript in the study of his humble Jerusalem home. The day after that, one female and three male Jewish workers were murdered as they returned from work in a Kfar Sabba orange grove.

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.

In the late spring and early summer of 1936, the Zionist response was restrained. Only in the second half of August, after four months of Arab terror, were the first Jewish acts of revenge carried out. But the eighty dead and the four hundred wounded in the summer of ’36 transformed the collective psyche of the Jews. So did the scorched fields, the uprooted orange groves, the roadside ambushes, and the ongoing night shootings. 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. As Palestinian nationalism was asserting itself and
demanding that Jewish immigration stop immediately, it was now impossible to ignore the Arabs living in the land, impossible to ignore the fact that the Arabs reviled the Zionist enterprise. The Jewish national liberation movement had to acknowledge that it was facing an Arab liberation movement that wished to disgorge the Jews from the shores they had settled on.

Day after day the papers were filled with the names of the dead in black-bordered notices and descriptions of mass funerals turned demonstrations. But there was no sense of panic or despair in the Jewish community. On the contrary. Day by day people seemed to grow more resolute. Rather than weakening their resolve, the acknowledgment of a tragic reality emboldened them. It turned the 350,000 Jews living in Palestine in 1936 into a community of combat.

In November a Royal Enquiry Commission arrived in Palestine headed by Lord Peel. Within weeks it realized that the evolving reality was intolerable. 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. What was unheard of in 1935 became acceptable in 1937. What was absolute heresy when Zionism was launched became common opinion when Zionism confronted a rival national movement face-to-face.

Berl Katznelson, spiritual leader of the Labor Movement, gave a speech in November 1937: “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.” David Ben Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, spoke in June 1938: “My approach to the solution of the question of the Arabs in the
Jewish state is their transfer to Arab countries.” Later that year Ben Gurion asserted that “compulsory transfer will clear for us vast territories. I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”

In December 1940, Yosef Weitz, head of the forestry division of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in his private diary, just after visiting Herbert Bentwich’s estate in Tel Gezer,