My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (9 page)

But as Heifetz stretches his arm to pull the bow across the strings, I think of all that is to happen in the valley.

In three years’ time, the firstborns of Ein Harod will crouch for days in the first cement-built dairy, hiding from the gunfire of Arab neighbors.

In nine years’ time, the Arab villagers of Shatta will be forced to leave their homes by the railway station, and a new kibbutz will take their place.

In ten years’ time—to the day—the valley’s fields will be set on fire by Arabs who suddenly realize how far the Jews have come. Watching the burning fields, the firstborns of Ein Harod will harden their hearts.

In twelve years’ time, in Ein Harod, the first elite Anglo-Jewish commando unit will be founded. The unit will raid Arab villages at night, killing some of their civilian inhabitants.

A few months later, a landmark Jewish sergeants’ course will be launched in Ein Harod. The course will lay the very first foundation for Israel’s future army.

In twenty years’ time, Ein Harod—and the forces it gave birth to—will have real military might. In twenty-two years, that military might will attack the villages of Nuris, Zarin, and Komay. It will drive all Palestinian inhabitants out of the valley.

As Heifetz plays and his music reverberates in the hushed quarry, I wonder at the incredible feat of Ein Harod. I think of the incredible resilience of the naked as they faced a naked fate in a naked land. I think of the astonishing determination of the orphans to make a motherland for themselves—come hell or high water. I think of that great fire in the belly, a fire without which the valley could not have been cultivated, the land could not have been conquered, the State of the Jews could not have been founded. But I know that the fire will blaze out of control. It will burn the valley’s Palestinians and it will consume itself, too. Its smoldering remains will eventually turn Ein Harod’s exclamation point into a question mark.

I close the Heifetz file in Ein Harod’s dilapidated archives and go out into the early evening air. I have supper with my dear elderly relatives. I wander the paths of the deteriorating kibbutz. Over the last thirty years, it has lost its way. The economic base of Ein Harod collapsed and its social fabric frayed. Most of the young have left; most of the elderly are aging in despair. The collective dining room is empty, the collective children’s homes are closed, and the collective spirit is gone. Just as the kibbutz rose, the kibbutz fell. So as I look out at the spring down below and at the mountain ridge casting its shadow, I realize it’s a spring-or-mountain question: Triumphant Gideon or defeated Saul? But my question is not yet answered as the dying light caresses the darkening Valley of Harod.

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photo credit 3.1
)

O
RANGES HAD BEEN
P
ALESTINE
’
S TRADEMARK FOR CENTURIES
. I
N THE
1850s, a new variety of orange was discovered in the citrus groves of Jaffa, and by 1890 the new Shamouti orange—large, oval, and juicy—had found its way to Queen Victoria’s table. By 1897, when Herbert Bentwich disembarked at the remote port of Jaffa, the same grizzled stevedores who took him ashore were already loading thousands of crates of Shamouti oranges (now called Jaffa oranges) each winter onto Liverpool-bound ships. After World War I, the new awareness of the virtues of vitamin C brought about a dramatic rise in the demand for citrus fruit throughout Europe. In 1925 there were only 30,000 dunams of citrus groves in Palestine; two years later there were nearly twice as many, and two years after that, by 1929, they had multiplied yet again to 87,000 dunams. By 1935 there were 280,000 dunams of citrus groves in Palestine. Within a decade, citrus growing in Palestine had risen almost tenfold. The small province, now under the British Mandate, had become a powerhouse of citrus export, so much so that in 1935, one-third of the oranges imported to Great Britain were Jaffa oranges.

The colony of Rehovot discovered the virtues of citrus in the 1920s. Rehovot was founded in 1890 on 10,600 dunams of the Ottoman feudal estate of Duran, situated some fifteen miles southeast of Jaffa. After the
barren land was purchased and the Bedouins occupying it were evicted, it was taken over by Russian and Polish Jews hoping to find peace and plenty in the land of Israel. The settlers did well. Rehovot was a place where Orthodox and secular, rich and poor, Ashkenazi and Yemenite Jews lived side by side in relative harmony. Its Jewish inhabitants lived in peace with their Arab neighbors, too. By 1935 the rapidly growing colony of Rehovot was the most prosperous Jewish colony in Palestine, leading the citrus industry, which in turn was leading the country into an unprecedented boom.

Rehovot and orange groves were a perfect match. Rehovot’s loamy red
hamra
soil suited the citrus trees because its unique combination of sand, silt, and clay holds plenty of moisture but also drains well, so that sufficient air can reach the trees’ delicate roots. Rehovot’s moderate climate was also well suited to the trees, since it was not too warm when the trees blossomed in spring and not too cold or windy in winter, when they bore fruit. Rehovot was rich with the water that the citrus trees badly needed, and it was close to the port of Jaffa. Rehovot embraced free-market principles, thrived on private enterprise, and had a cheap and efficient labor force provided by neighboring Arab villages. Rehovot also benefited from the cutting-edge scientific knowledge of the mostly German-Jewish agronomists working in its newly established agricultural institute. Those agronomists introduced the efficient Californian method of cultivation. Rehovot was where Western know-how, Arab labor, and laissez-faire economics merged to make the Jaffa orange a world-renowned brand. So while Europe and America were still in the grip of the Great Depression, Jaffa oranges and quickening immigration to Palestine made Rehovot prosper. And while hundreds of thousands of uprooted Jews couldn’t find a home in Europe or America, those who had chosen Rehovot were flourishing. In Rehovot of the early 1930s, the optimal conditions of Palestine met the benign aspirations of modern Zionism.

The particular orange grove whose story I will tell was planted in 1931. A small fortune bequeathed to the owner by his English-Jewish father-in-law enabled him to buy seventy dunams of land from the villagers of
Qubeibeh in the Valley of Dew on a hilly plot overlooking Rehovot, north of the railway. First he plowed the barren wasteland. Then he hired beret-wearing Jewish socialists and kaffiyeh-wearing Palestinian Arabs to rid the land of obstinate poisonous weeds. He commissioned one of the roaming bands of well diggers to dig a water well. But only when the excited diggers shouted that they had found water did he know that the land was indeed suitable for planting. He marked out the land meticulously with white ropes and wooden stakes. And every four meters he dug a half-meter hole, in which he planted lemon rootstock that he had brought over from a nearby nursery. He covered the plantlings with soil, which he tamped down and watered. Then he and his delicate, sun-shy, English-born wife stood in front of a weighty Kodak camera and took a picture of hope.

Several months later, the Rehovot farmer grafted Shamouti branches onto the lemon rootstock. He gently affixed the Shamouti to the lemon and tamped the soil again, and watered and fertilized and prayed that the winds would not hit, that the hail would not despoil. Only after a long year of apprehension did the orange grower see that the grafting had gone well: the Shamouti and lemon had become one, and the fragile saplings had been welcomed by the red soil. So he and his elegant English wife stood once again between the long rows of budding trees in front of the Kodak camera and took another picture, of a hesitant beginning: the young couple, he in a pressed khaki suit, she in a bias-cut silk dress, standing beside the tentative orange saplings that had risen from a bare land.

The orange grower, a native of Rehovot who had worked for years in other orange groves, was disciplined and particular. He saw that his trees were watered in a timely manner and fertilized judiciously. He made sure the pruning was spare and the weeding merciless. He sealed the well walls with cement, mounted a formidable diesel wheel pump atop the well, and built a large, open square pool to collect the water drawn from the well. He laid out a network of cement canals to carry the water and dug furrows in the sandy soil of the grove to receive the water from the canals. Around each Shamouti sapling he dug a wide sand bowl, so the trees would never want for water. Then he erected a modern rectangular packing house with square windows and a red tile
roof, and he built a two-story turreted house for the Arab guardian of the grove. He positioned an impressively ornate iron gate at the entrance to the grove and then waited patiently for four years for the trees to bear fruit.

In the spring of 1935, when the orange grove is about to bear fruit, so does Zionism. Now the liberation movement of the Jewish people is no longer the wild fantasy it had been when Herbert Bentwich rode by Rehovot in April 1897. Nor is it the Spartan revolutionary endeavor it had been in the Valley of Harod in September 1921. In 1935, Zionism does not demand superhuman effort and total sacrifice of its pioneers. It already has a middle class living a life of comfort and leisure. It has cities, towns, colonies, and villages. The Jewish population of Palestine now comprises more than a quarter of the overall population of Palestine, and every year the number of Jews in Palestine rises by more than ten percent. Jerusalem already has the Hebrew University, and Haifa has the Technion. Tel Aviv, now twenty-five years old, is a bustling mini-metropolis full of theaters, restaurants, cafés, and numerous publishing houses. Yes, there is much work to be done, and the task is still Herculean. But throughout the country the signs of success are palpable; the Zionist adventure is becoming a Zionist reality. Over the verdant orange groves of Rehovot the blue skies of spring seem to carry the promise of the future.

There is a feeling not only of success but of justice. In the spring of 1935, Zionism is a just national movement. Two years after Germany chose Nazism, the need for a Jewish home becomes self-evident. Now one does not need Herzl’s prophetic genius or Tabenkin’s catastrophic inclinations to envision the future. Now any reasonable person can see that Europe is becoming a death trap for Jews; and it is also clear that America would not open its gates in time to save the persecuted Jews of Europe. Only a Jewish state in Palestine can save the lives of the millions who are about to die. In 1935, Zionist justice is an absolute universal justice that cannot be refuted.

At this point in time the injustice caused to native Arabs by the Zionist project is still limited. It is true that tenant Palestinian farmers had already been uprooted from their land in the Harod Valley and in
Rehovot and in dozens of other locations in Palestine. But the lives of those farmers under their Arab masters had in many cases been worse than their lives as the field hands of the Jewish colonizers. Most of them did not have a solid right of possession under their Arab masters, and when the Jews took over, many of them were compensated with cash or land. Moreover, while some Palestinians do suffer, many of them benefit considerably as Zionism advances. In Qubeibeh, Zarnuga, and the other Arab villages surrounding Rehovot, Jewish capital, Jewish technology, and Jewish medicine are a blessing to the native population, bringing progress to desperate Palestinian communities. So the Zionists of Rehovot can still believe that the clash between the two peoples is avoidable. They cannot yet anticipate the imminent, inevitable tragedy.

The first season of the young orange grove is critical. The orange grower has to start up the formidable pump that draws water from the deep well. He has to clear out the irrigation canals into which unripe fruit has fallen in winter. He has to redig the furrows and bowls, and weed, clean, and dispose of dry thorny branches. He has to make sure that all was set for the first rains of summer.

At the end of April 1935, disaster strikes in the form of a heat wave. On April 27, the mercury climbs to 35 degrees centigrade (95 degrees Fahrenheit). On April 30, it hits 38 degrees centigrade. For ten consecutive days, dry desert winds wreak havoc with the delicate white citrus blossoms. If action is not taken immediately, half of the orange crop would be lost and the citrus season of 1935–36 would be a bust. The first watering of the young Rehovot grove is therefore an act of emergency. The pump pulls the clear water to the pool, and from there the water travels down the open, cemented canals until it emerges from the circular openings of the clay grate into the sandy furrows. The Arab guardian, his pants hiked up to his knees, his bare feet covered in mud, guides the water with a hoe from tree to tree. He quickly traps the water by each tree with a tall mound of soil so that the trees would be able to withstand the deadly dry desert winds.