My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (13 page)

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.

The change of conscience was not only that of the leadership. The Jewish community as a whole was transformed. As a consequence of the 1936 violence, the Jews of Palestine went through a metamorphosis. Gone were the innocence, the self-deception, the moral inhibitions.
With the new, merciless perception of reality came a new, merciless determination: We shall not retreat, we shall not concede. We will do all that is needed to maintain Zionism.

The pause in violence lasted from the autumn of 1936 to the autumn of 1937. But the Arab revolt erupted again in October 1937. After my grandfather’s best friend, Avinoam Yalin, was shot dead outside the Board of Education office in Jerusalem, Jews took revenge by murdering an Arab passerby and an Armenian photographer. After five pioneers were ambushed in the Judean hills, where they were about to plant pine trees, Jews in Jerusalem murdered an Arab and then another Arab, and then two Arab women were burned to death when the car they were sitting in exploded by the city’s bustling market. In just one month, the number of innocent Arab victims surpassed the number of innocent Jewish victims.

In 1938, the great Arab revolt reached a climax and threatened to take over large parts of the country. Police stations were burned, there was chaos in the mountain regions. The clash between the Arab liberation movement and the British Empire turned brutal. More than eighteen hundred people were killed in the course of a year. Although most were casualties of British-Arab and Arab-Arab confrontations, the number of victims of Jewish-Arab hostilities rose, too. In this dance of blood, the atrocities that Arabs visited upon the Jews and the atrocities that Jews visited upon the Arabs grew ever more grisly.

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. The tide of rage triggered by the incident brought about a failed attack of Jewish extremists on an Arab bus in the Galilee. When one of the Jewish terrorists was hanged at the end of June, Jewish nationalists went mad. On July 3 and 4, several assassinations took place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. On July 6, Jews murdered eighteen Arabs by setting off time bombs in the Arab market of Haifa. On July 15, Jews murdered ten Arabs by setting off a time bomb in the market of Jerusalem’s Old City. On July 25, Jews murdered more than thirty-five Arabs by exploding a highly powerful bomb in the crowded Haifa market. On August 26, Jews murdered twenty-four Arabs by detonating a well-hidden bomb in the market of the citrus port of Jaffa.

The Arabs were not idle, either. On June 23: an onslaught on the colony of Givat Ada (three dead). On July 5: a murderous attack on orange grove workers in the village of Ein Vered (four dead). On July 21: a well-planned attack on the poor workers’ quarter of Kiryat Haroshet (five dead). On August 4: a land mine in the dirt roads of Kibbutz Ramat-Hakovesh (six dead). On August 28: an assault on Kibbutz Ein Shemer (two dead). On September 10: the lynching of electricity company workers at the Massmia junction (seven dead). On September 14: a land mine on the eastern outskirts of the Valley of Harod (three dead). On October 2: in a massacre in Tiberias, eight adults and eleven children slaughtered.

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. Most Jewish murderers were members of fringe terrorist groups who defied the policy and instructions of the elected leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine. On the other hand, some of the Jewish actions were far more lethal than the Arab ones. The summer of 1938 was different from the summer of 1936 in that the number of murdered Arab victims exceeded by far the number of murdered Jews.

The summer of carnage brought forth another dramatic turn of events. In the Valley of Harod, the iconoclastic Scottish commando warrior Col. Orde Wingate established five special night squads. The first began operating in June 1938. Formally, the squads’ task had been to protect the Iraq–Haifa oil pipeline crossing the valley, but their real task was to launch an anti-insurgency campaign, to fight Arab terror by initiating Anglo-Jewish counterterror. At first the Wingate’s Warriors set up ambushes in the valley and fought armed Arab gangs. Soon after, they began to raid Arab villages and terrorize their inhabitants.

There were more and more reports of looting and prisoner executions. In the autumn of 1938, the night squads’ brutality accelerated. After Ein Harod’s local hero, Yitzhak Sturman, was killed when his car hit a land mine, the Anglo-Jewish guerrilla units went on a rampage in the village of Paqua on the slopes of Mount Gilboa. And after the massacre of the nineteen Jews in Tiberias, they took revenge by attacking
indiscriminately on the road to Safed, in the village of Dabburiya, and in the village of Hittin. Fourteen Arabs were killed on the Safed road, fifteen were killed in Dabburiya, and scores were left dead in Hittin.

British officers were in command of Wingate’s special squads. The British soldiers were in general the more ruthless warriors, but the Haganah’s fighters were willing partners. As they endorsed the new combative ethos, they became the heroes of the young Hebrews of Palestine. On September 13, Wingate inaugurated a sergeants’ course in the amphitheater of Kibbutz Ein Harod. The deeply religious Christian commando commander had no doubt as to the significance of the event. “We are here to found the Army of Zion,” he said to the one hundred young Jews before him.

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.

On September 19, 1939, the general staff of the Haganah was founded. Well before a Jewish state was established, a well-organized Jewish army was raised. The Arab revolt was over, but the Jewish community in Palestine made the formative decision to organize a national military structure. Twenty months later, on May 15, 1941, the Palmach Strike Force was established. In between, the arms industry of the Haganah grew and diversified. Youth movement members received paramilitary training.

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.

Masada is only 63 meters above sea level. But because the Dead Sea, to the east of it, is approximately 400 meters below sea level, the mesa of Masada rises to 460 meters above its heavy, salty waters. To the west is the Judean desert, to the south, Sodom, and to the north, Ein Gedi, Ein Feshcha, and Jericho. On a very clear day, the faint silhouette of Jerusalem rises in the distance.

The slopes are steep, almost vertical. The summit is flat and rhomboid, 645 meters long and 315 meters across at its widest. The desert cliff is composed of layers of sedimentary rock topped by dolomite and limestone boulders. From afar, Masada has the appearance of a lonely desert castle, inspiring majesty and awe.

The Hasmoneans were the first to erect a man-made fortress on the natural fort that is Masada. In the second century
B.C
., they built a castle that a hundred years later was described as the mightiest of all. But it was King Herod who turned Masada into an architectural wonder. In the years from 36 to 30
B.C
. he surrounded the rock with a casemate wall, raised watchtowers and barracks, built magnificent houses and ample warehouses, carved cisterns in the stone, and capped it all with a breathtaking palace.

When the great Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire began in
A.D
. 66, Masada was the first fortress the rebels overtook. In
A.D
. 70, the Romans crushed the revolt, conquered Jerusalem, and destroyed the Temple. In the following years, a small group of Jewish zealots made Masada the last fortress of the futile revolt. In
A.D
. 72, the 10th Roman Legion closed in on Masada, and in the spring of
A.D
. 73, the legion was poised to break into the fortress. On the night before the anticipated attack, the 960 men, women, and children of Masada took their own lives rather than submit to Roman rule.

For centuries, Jewish history largely ignored Masada. The tale of its zealots was perceived as a tale of suicidal extremism, and the site
of Masada was deserted for over a thousand years. The American travelers Edward Robinson and Eli Smith were the first modern men to identify Masada in 1838. In 1842, the America missionary Samuel W. Wolcott and the English painter W. Tipping were the first to climb up Masada. In 1875, the renowned English captain Claude Reignier Conder was the first to map Masada accurately. In 1932, the German scholar Adolf Schulten conducted a comprehensive archaeological dig around the ruins.

In 1923 the only historical source of the story of Masada, Flavius Josephus’
The Jewish War
(written around
A.D
. 75) was translated into Hebrew. In 1925, the Zionist historian Joseph Klausner wrote with great affection about the zealots of Masada. Two years later, Yitzhak Lamdan published his tragic poem “Masada.” As Jewish nationalism was revived, so was interest in the remote, forgotten site and all that it embodied. High school students from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem conducted several trips to Masada in the 1920s, until one trip led to a fatal accident. And yet, until the end of the Arab revolt and the beginning of World War II in 1939, Masada did not fully capture the minds of mainstream Zionism. Only nationalistic fringe groups admired its suicidal zealots.

In January 1942, Shmaryahu Gutman is a thirty-three-year-old energetic, vigorous, and charismatic man. He is squat, but his body is agile and his movements are quick. There is no one to rival him in desert hiking and mountain climbing. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1909, Gutman immigrated with his family to Palestine when he was three and settled in Merhavia, on the outskirts of the Valley of Harod. In his teens he studied at the agricultural high school Mikveh Yisrael and emerged as one of the leaders of the working-youth movement. At twenty-one he founded Kibbutz Na’an. But as he was an amateur Orientalist, geographer, historian, and archaeologist, kibbutz life was not enough for the energetic young Zionist. He walked the land and led groups of youngsters on hikes. He was a pillar of the Yediat Haaretz (knowledge of the land) movement, whose ideology was studying the land, loving the land, and becoming one with the land. At the very same time, Gutman was also working closely with the leaders of Labor Zionism Berl Katznelson
and Yitzhak Tabenkin. His best friend, Israel Galili, was the strategic mastermind of the military organization the Haganah.

In the early 1940s, Gutman does not hold an official post, but in practice he is part of the inner circle of the Zionist leadership. An educator with outstanding moral authority, Gutman is privy to the innermost secrets of Zionism. He views his role as being to concentrate the minds of Hebrew youths on what lies ahead.

In January 1942, Gutman decides to take the elite of the pioneer youth movement to Masada. The trip is no ordinary excursion. Gutman, himself a zealot, wants to change the collective psyche. He wants to unify the Hebrew youth around a powerful, concrete symbol, which he recognizes in Masada. In October 1941, he led a preliminary workshop of Masada studies in Tel Aviv and then chose the forty-six youth movement leaders he would take with him to Masada in January. As he sees it, these handpicked young agents of change will be the new missionaries of Masada. They will make Masada the new locus of Zionist identity.

On Friday, January 23, 1942, Gutman and his forty-six disciples leave Jerusalem. In the early morning an Arab bus takes them to the Palestinian village of Yatta, south of Hebron. Tents, equipment, food, and water are loaded on three camels hired from local Palestinians. The guides are Palestinian Bedouins. The young men and women wear short trousers, tall boots, and rucksacks laden with rolled army blankets. Some carry walking sticks, some have tied Arab kaffiyehs around their necks, all have water canteens. When they descend the white hills into the desert of Judea, they sing loudly, with boundless enthusiasm.

Gutman is more thoughtful than the young Sabras. In fact, he is almost somber. As he is to tell me fifty years later, he knows perfectly well why the seventeen-year-olds are upbeat. Recent years have been exceptionally good for the Jews of Palestine. Since the Arab revolt was crushed and the Arab national movement disintegrated, the country has been at peace. In the early 1940s the Jewish economy has leaped forward and the Jewish organizations have gathered power and authority. A substantial industrial revolution has been taking place. ATA Ltd. is now manufacturing uniforms for the soldiers of the British army, while Elite Ltd., Liber Ltd., and Z.D. Ltd. are manufacturing chocolate bars for
them. Teva is producing medicine and medical equipment for His Majesty’s troops, Assis Ltd. is producing marmalade and jam, and the socialist conglomerate Solel Boneh is building bridges, railways, and military bases for the Crown in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. The citrus industry has fallen into crisis, but the diamond industry has replaced it as Palestine’s leading exporter. So now the Land of Israel exports not only Jaffa oranges but tents, ropes, camouflage nets, parachutes, boots, water canteens, cranes, heating ovens, shaving blades, tires, measuring equipment, plastic goods, optical equipment, medical supplies, dry ice, acetone, ether, beer, furs, telephone wire, electrical wire, and land mines. The number of Jewish employees in these industries has risen threefold in just three years. Industrial production has risen fivefold in five years. Exports have doubled in two years. The ratio between Jewish industrial production and Arab industrial production in Palestine is now six to one. Since there is full employment, wages have risen dramatically and factories are working around the clock, three shifts a day. Trade-union-owned corporations and privately held enterprises are prospering. Theaters are full, cafés are bustling. While Gutman leads his youngsters into the desert, Tel Aviv holds its fourth and most successful fashion week, which is celebrated in a glittering ball in the glamorous café Piltz. This is why the Israeli-born Sabras are so self-confident. They are the sons and daughters of a fantasy that is fulfilling itself. Their life experience is that of an astounding collective success, based on self-reliance and innovation.