My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (8 page)

The boys work in teams of five. Each team digs one layer of mud and then moves on so that the next team will dig deeper. Standing in a two-yard-wide ditch, each bare-chested pioneer has to stick his shovel
between the dripping walls of the canal and lift the filth above him. Once the hard soil, hidden under the marsh for a millennium, is finally exposed, there is a fury of festive shouting. Now the girls walk in, bearing baskets filled with white gravel that, since morning, they have been producing with their small, efficient chisels. Only now, when the girls’ gravel lines the boys’ canal, may lunch be served. Canned beef and loaves of bread sate their hunger.

Only a few months ago the draining project seemed unreal—as ambitious as the Suez Canal project, as dangerous as the Panama Canal. But now, day by day, the swamps retreat. Clay pipes laid in the newly dug, well-lined canals absorb the deadly subterranean waters. The July sun does the rest. Acre after acre, the marshes give way to fertile fields. Zionist planning, Zionist know-how, and Zionist labor push back the swamps that have cursed the valley for centuries. Malaria is on a dramatic decline. Even the remaining Arab neighbors benefit from the miraculous project. The desolate Valley of Harod is gradually turning green.

In years to come, historians will try to determine which is the more dominant feature of the endeavor, socialism or nationalism. Some will argue that choosing socialism at this critical stage is Zionism’s cunning way of conquering the land. Socialism gives this belated colonizing project a sense of justice and an aura of legitimacy. As the colonizers of the Valley of Harod don’t resemble at all the French masters of Algeria or the British plantation owners of Rhodesia, they are in the clear. By working the land with their bare hands and by living in poverty and undertaking a daring, unprecedented social experiment, they refute any charge that they are about to seize a land that is not theirs. Yet all this idealistic socialism is just subterfuge, future critics will claim. It is the moral camouflage of an aggressive national movement whose purpose is to obscure its colonialist, expansionist nature.

True and not true. Just before May Day 1922, a young poet living in Ein Harod translates the international socialist anthem into Hebrew. The Hebrew version gives a poignant subtext to the original words that refer to the universal working class. Now the text is not only about the world’s poor, it is also about the world’s most oppressed people. It is about the mission Ein Harod took upon itself: to destroy an old world and build another, to unload the heavy burden from a broken back. As
there is no God, no king, and no hero, we shall break through toward the light all by ourselves. We shall win the last battle of an eternal war. Yesterday, nothing; tomorrow, everything.

Tabenkin is the very incarnation of this Zionist-socialist symbiosis. In his mid-thirties, he is still an attractive man, with sensual lips and a high forehead. He is not a profound intellectual, but he has historical pathos and conviction. He doesn’t write much, but he speaks passionately and at great length. There is something truly Soviet about him. Had he not been Jewish he could have stood now by Lenin or Stalin in some remote kolkhoz or at a mass gathering of the Novosiberian proletariat.

But Tabenkin is Jewish. And he believes that in the twentieth century the Jewish people are heading for disaster. Twenty years before the Holocaust he feels and breathes the Holocaust daily. That’s why he is impossible to be with and impossible to live with. He believes that in Jewish youth lies the only remedy, that only Jewish youth can save the Jewish people from the approaching catastrophe. But he knows there is no time. And he feels that all that is being done is not enough. Palestine might not be ready in time. The valley might not be ours in time. That’s why Tabenkin is so demanding. He is as cruel to himself as he is to others. He is preachy, stringent, chastising. He says over and over again that socialist Zionism must do more, much more. He preaches over and over again that every young pioneer must achieve more, much more. The avant-garde of Ein Harod must stretch itself beyond its capabilities. Ein Harod must accomplish its mission impossible. Tabenkin is not much of a theoretician. Unlike other revolutionaries, he does not have an overall, systematic ideology. But the Ein Harod rabbi has a powerful concept: activism.

Ideologically, activism means practicing revolutionary values in everyday life. Socially, activism is wrestling with human nature and changing the unjust order of things. Politically, activism is seizing the initiative and confronting the Arabs by force. But activism has an overall meaning that is far deeper than all that. Activism is the revolt of the Jews against the passivity of their past. It is the rebellion of the Jews against their tragic fate and against acceptance of their tragic fate. It is not a specific goal or target, but momentum. Activism is the momentum of doing, of moving forward. Activism is the last attempt of the Jews to
resist oblivion. Activism is the desperate rebellion of Jewish life against Jewish death.

Like Bentwich, Tabenkin is not a gentleman whose company I would enjoy. Personally, I cannot stand Soviet-type politicians, dogmatic revolutionaries, and leaders who preach but don’t practice. Yet as I go over Tabenkin’s old photographs in the Ein Harod archives, I am far more forgiving. There is something fascinating about the man. He does not have Ben Gurion’s political genius. He does not have the intellectual depth of some other founding fathers of Zionism. He does not have the impressive work ethic and moral rectitude of his fellow rank-and-file comrades in Ein Harod. But there is fire in his belly. More than any other Zionist leader in Palestine, he understands the Diaspora and feels for the Diaspora. More than any other local socialist-Zionist leader, he is Jewish. Even when he rails against Judaism, he does so as a Jew. Even when he rises up against religion, he rises up religiously. There is so much God in the godless Tabenkin as he assaults God and dismisses God and tries to create a God-free, godless world.

That’s why, in the early 1920s, Tabenkin is the link between the events in the Valley of Harod and the events in Eastern Europe. That’s why Tabenkin talks to the valley’s youth on behalf of the Diaspora, and talks to the Diaspora on behalf of the valley’s youth. That’s why, day in and day out, Tabenkin wonders whether the work being done in the valley will be sufficient, whether the valley’s youth will have enough in them to pull European Jewry from the deadly ocean in which it is drowning.

On its first anniversary, Ein Harod celebrates its success. By now the year-old kibbutz has mastered 8,390 dunams of cultivated land. Grain takes up 7,000 dunams, olive tree groves and vineyards 450 dunams, the vegetable garden 200. There are over 600 dunams of forest, with 14,000 eucalyptus trees, 2,000 pine trees, and 1,000 cypresses, which cover the inclines of Mount Gilboa with the first green shoots of hope.

There are nearly three hundred comrades in Ein Harod in the summer of 1922. Apart from Tabenkin and a few others, the age range is
from nineteen to twenty-five. Two hundred white, cone-shaped tents house a young, thriving, and energetic community that is transforming the valley and the lives of its inhabitants. Four other new kibbutzim are now flourishing in the valley. Momentum is fast and strong; there is not a force in sight to stop it.

Many now come to see the wonder. As the Ein Harod experiment becomes world famous, it attracts attention in Jewish communities and progressive circles worldwide. Some compare its revolutionary ways to those being tried in the young USSR. Some see it as providing the only example of successful, democratic socialism. When one of Zionism’s leading lights arrives for a day-long visit, he thinks in different terms. Deeply touched, the national moral leader says the following:

Yet the listening comrades are not heroes. What’s remarkable about them is their lack of heroism. Practical and down-to-earth, they know they must do whatever must be done, but there is no self-aggrandizement about them, no sentimentality, no smugness. Caught in a drama larger than themselves, they simply carry on. Another furrow, another acre, another swamp, until the valley is truly theirs. Until the land is once again the Land of Israel.

But there is one feature of the landscape that does not yet retreat. The serfs of Ein Jaloud are gone, but the serfs of Shatta remain, living by the railway station right in the center of the valley. And the villagers of Nuris menacingly overlook Ein Harod from the mountaintop. The villagers of Zarin are actually doing quite well as the valley booms. The friendly neighbors of Tel Fir and those of Komay are multiplying now,
as the anopheles mosquitoes are no longer here to take the lives of their young. The Bedouins, too, find the valley more attractive now. As summer peaks, they pitch their black tents in the northern part of the valley. Their herds of sheep foray into the fields, and their young, armed horsemen terrify the kibbutz girls. So mission is not yet accomplished. There is indeed a solid Jewish base in the valley. Five different kibbutzim have begun to establish one of the first strips of Jewish territorial continuity in the country. But the work isn’t done. The Arabs of the Harod Valley still stand in the way of the Jewish liberation movement that needs to remove them from this valley.

At noon on April 17, 1926, the working day is cut short in the Valley of Harod, and the last blast is heard in the quarry. An hour later all harvesting stops in the fields. The young comrades of Ein Harod are called back to camp. So are the young comrades of the neighboring Tel Yosef, Gvat, Beit Alpha, and Hephzibah. Throughout the valley, kibbutz members are showering, shaving, and donning their white Shabbat outfits. Back in the quarry a wooden stage is set up. By four o’clock all is ready. The old piano is on the stage decorated with green palm leaves. By horse, by mule, by carriage, by wagon, and on foot, thousands of pioneers flock to the valley quarry turned amphitheater.

From day one, the rough Labor Brigade pioneers of Ein Harod have had a soft spot for all things musical. One of them has an explanation. “The playing of classical music fills the void in our lives,” he writes.

Just a few months earlier, in the late autumn, the first quarry concert was held. Thousands gathered from all over the valley to hear the local choir and string quartet play Beethoven, Bach, and Mendelssohn. A local teacher said that on this great day the mountains of Gilboa were revived. A young girl read Ezekiel’s Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. And all were silent as the tall, lanky violinist of Ein Harod played Bach against the backdrop of the quarry’s walls. But today is different. Today it is Jascha Heifetz who is about to play.

Heifetz was born in 1901 in the Lithuanian capital of Vilna. He began playing the violin at three, and by the time he was seven he played Mendelssohn’s concerto brilliantly in public. At the age of twelve he was considered one of Europe’s musical prodigies, and at the age of sixteen—a week before the Balfour Declaration was issued—he made his legendary American debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Now an American citizen and star, Heifetz is to the music of the twenties what Chaplin is to comedy and Einstein to physics. An astounding talent; a rare incarnation of man’s extraordinary, almost divine gift.

That’s why the Harod Valley pioneers are so excited. It’s not only that they appreciate music and regard it as almost sacred. It’s not only that music is the one thing that allows them to let go and allows suppressed pain and longing to moisten their eyes. It’s also the fact that the world’s most renowned violinist recognizes the importance of their endeavor by giving a concert in their remote quarry. It’s the fact that the best that secular Jewish Diaspora civilization has produced is about to pay homage to their audacious attempt to create a new secular Jewish civilization in the valley. Heifetz is Heifetz, but he is also Jascha, one of us. One who rose from the misery and despair of the Jewish past and the Jewish present and has distilled his genius from them. One who has escaped the hopelessness of Eastern Europe and chosen America. So when this brilliant cousin chooses to acknowledge his fellow young Jews who are escaping what he escaped in a very different way and in a very different
place, even the toughest among the Labor Brigade comrades are beside themselves. They feel that a biblical-like spectacle is about to happen.

There are thousands and thousands of them now, packing the makeshift seats of hard, gray boulders. And when Heifetz arrives at last, I watch both the maestro and his ecstatic audience. Both the violinist and the pioneers are as old as the century. Both the violinist and the pioneers will become the century’s icons. They tell the century’s Jewish tale. And when the young men and women of Harod stand up and clap and cheer, the Vilna boy, who cannot start playing until they quiet down, is truly touched. Although he is a cold, perfectionist performer, he is overwhelmed. And between the young man standing on the improvised stage and the young masses standing in the improvised amphitheater, there is suddenly an intimate dialogue. The two great forces, the two sorts of creative energies that erupted dramatically out of modern Jewish distress and that represent the two great choices of the Jewish people in the twentieth century, face each other. In the quarry of the Valley of Harod, one bows to the other.