My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (21 page)

Ottman Abu Hammed of Lydda remembers the column best. His grandfather used to work with the Jews in the Atid factory and had helped the Jews with the planting of the olive forest. His father, who used to supply the youth village with vegetables, had befriended Dr. Lehmann and would escort him when he gave anticholera vaccinations in Lydda. He himself had visited the Ben Shemen youth village quite often as a child. He loved the modern cowshed and the swimming pool, and the girls in khaki shorts, with their tanned legs.

Ottman is almost as old as the boys from the training group, but when war breaks out in 1948 he is far more innocent. Lacking a good education and any political awareness, he does not really comprehend what is going on. All he remembers is his father trying to prevent an attack on Ben Shemen; his father meeting the men of Ben Shemen in
the fields; his father being charged with treason and escaping the firing squad at the very last minute. For Ottman, Lydda in the summer of 1948 is a booming city. The many thousands of refugees who have fled Jaffa and Sarafand and Na’aneh and settled there have brought money to the town. As food and vegetable prices soar, the locals’ profits double and triple. Cafés are open late into the night and belly dancers are everywhere. There is music and fun in town, and girls who are easy to get.

Ottman remembers violence, too. A convoy of Jews on its way to Ben Shemen is attacked and its passengers murdered. The driver of a Jewish jeep is murdered on the main road. One day the corpses of two Jewish young men and one Jewish young woman are brought to town after they have been captured, raped, and murdered in one of the nearby villages. When the violated bodies are paraded in Lydda’s high street, Ottman is aghast. But neither the eighteen-year-old nor his family can imagine what is to come. They are totally shocked when Lydda is bombed by a Jewish air force on the night of July 10 and bombarded by Jewish artillery on July 11. They are flabbergasted when a Jewish armored column sweeps the streets of Lydda with fire on the afternoon of the eleventh, leaving behind dozens of corpses. The shock, the horror, the dismay.

Ottman remembers that on the night of July 11, Jewish soldiers suddenly appear in the neighborhood. Loudspeakers mounted on jeeps call for all men to go to the Great Mosque. Ottman walks there with his father, joining thousands of others in the streets. Inside the mosque it is hot and crowded, with no room to sit or lie down. Ottman is terrified. He cries. He wets himself. When news comes of some sort of massacre in the small mosque, fear intensifies. No one knows what to expect. No one knows what else the Jews are capable of. His father shuts his eyes in prayer. Ottman fears the worst. But the next day, after thirty-six nightmarish hours, the Jews come to some sort of understanding with the dignitaries. At last the men are allowed out of the mosque. Although Ottman’s father notices the loose soil where the small mosque’s victims are buried, he believes life will now go back to normal.

When they arrive home, his mother greets them as if they have returned from the dead. Minutes later, there is a knock on the door. Two soldiers stand there, shouting loudly, “
Yallah, yallah
. Pack your belongings and leave. Go to King Abdullah, to Jordan.” One of the soldiers is
sensitive and shy. It’s clear he doesn’t like what he is doing. But the other one, with a thin mustache, enjoys every moment. Father takes a letter written in Hebrew out of his pocket saying that Dr. Lehmann vouches for this decent Arab and asks that no harm will come to this friend of Ben Shemen. But the mustachioed soldier couldn’t care less. He discards the letter, presses the barrel of his gun into the father’s chest, and says, “If you don’t go right now, I will shoot.
Yallah
to Abdullah.”

Mother screams. She believes that Father is about to be shot. But Father remains speechless. He is in shock. Bowing his head, he asks Mother to pack quickly all that can be packed. Then he calls for Grandmother, the three aunts, his two sons. Under the barrels of the two Jewish soldiers’ guns, the Abu Hamda family hastily collects its belongings: flour, rice, sugar, jewelry, mattresses. They load their belongings onto a horse-drawn wagon and help Grandmother, who is half blind, to mount the donkey.

What hurts Ottman most is the humiliating way the soldiers search the women’s bodies at the checkpoint on the outskirts of Lydda. One soldier takes Ottman’s cash, another takes his wristwatch. The jute sacks of the Jewish soldiers are now filling up quickly with necklaces and earrings, silver and gold. But it is the humiliation of the women—young and old—that proves how disgraced they all are now.

Ottman holds the horse’s reins while Father pushes the wagon from behind. The road is narrow, the congestion unbearable. Children shout, women scream, men weep. A rumor circulates of a mother who has lost her baby boy. A rumor circulates of a mother who has thrown away her baby girl. A Jewish jeep appears out of nowhere, its soldiers blowing its horn. Onward, onward. The Jewish soldiers shoot over their heads. There is no stopping, no going back, no looking back.

In the great rush people took flour and rice with them rather than water. So there is no water now, and the heat is unbearable. When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out. People suck watermelons found in the fields, eggplants, anything with moisture, anything that will give momentary relief to their animalistic thirst. Most women are dressed in traditional black gowns and carry sacks on their heads. Some of the men wear traditional djellabas, some fine European suits. Every so often a family withdraws from the column and stops by the side of the road—to bury a baby that
could not bear the heat; to say farewell to an old grandmother who collapsed in fatigue. After a while it gets worse. Now a mother abandons her howling baby under a tree. Ottman’s cousin deserts her boy under another tree. She cannot stand to hear the week-old baby wailing with hunger. But Ottman’s father instructs the cousin to go back to the tree and get her son. Yet Father is desperate, too. He appears to be losing his mind. Pushing the loaded wagon he curses the Jews and curses the Arabs and curses God.

Not far from Ben Shemen there is a surprise. A group of Jews in uniform stand by two command cars watching the march. One of them calls Father’s name aloud. Father raises his eyes and walks toward the commander. The Ben Shemen graduate and the Ben Shemen vegetable supplier stand face-to-face in the summer fields, both silent. Finally, the commander tells Father he can stay. Father says that if he stays he will be considered a traitor and will be executed. The commander walks back to the command car and brings a jerry can of water, which he puts on Father’s wagon. The commander watches as Father gives water to his mother, his wife, his sisters-in-law, his sons. And he watches as Father takes the family wagon and rejoins the column heading east.

I drive to Lydda. It’s July, and the heat is as stifling as it was back in July 1948. A thick yellow haze chokes the Lydda Valley. The small mosque was recently renovated and is locked up, but the Great Mosque is open. I walk through the same stone gate the inhabitants of Lydda entered, through the same square courtyard they crowded into, beneath the same arches of the same high-ceilinged dome they stood under for thirty-six hours. A few yards away is the regal cathedral of St. George. Across the alley is the rectory in which the military governor, Gutman, held talks with the dignitaries of Lydda.

The area in which stood the old stone houses and olive presses and alleyways of the old city was demolished in the 1950s. But in the square kilometer of what was once Old Lydda, one still feels that something is very wrong. There is a curious ruin here, an unexplained ruin there. Amid the ugly slums, shabby market, and cheap stores, it is clear that there is still an unhealed wound in Lydda. Unlike other cities where
Israel overcame Palestine, here Palestine is still felt. Unlike other places where modernity overcame the past, here the past is present.

Do I wash my hands of Zionism? Do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the deed of Lydda? Like the brigade commander, I am faced with something too immense to deal with. Like the military governor, Gutman, I see a reality I cannot contain. Like the training group leader, I am not only sad, I am horrified. For when one opens the black box, one understands that whereas the small mosque massacre could have been a misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events, the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda were no accident. They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of our story. And when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.

One thing is clear to me: the brigade commander and the military governor were right to get angry at the bleeding-heart Israeli liberals of later years who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed. I condemn Bulldozer. I reject the sniper. But I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the training group boys. On the contrary. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the State of Israel would not have been born. If it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.

To the east, the silvery olive orchards are gone. The remains of the Atid factory are also gone. The fields of the long-gone Arabs of Lydda are now the withering sunflower fields of the Israeli moshav Ginton and the Israeli moshav Ben Shemen. Dr. Lehmann’s youth village is still here, but after the 1948 war and after the death of Dr. Lehmann in 1958, its spirit was lost. On the gentle slopes now stand the nondescript buildings of a nondescript educational institution. Only one group of long, red-roofed houses built for the orphans of Europe still stands in testimony to what Ben Shemen once was and what it wished to be. And the courtyard of Ben Shemen is still here. A major project is under way to preserve it.

From the highest point of the Ben Shemen youth village, I look out at the Lydda Valley. I see the city of Lydda and the tall minaret of the Great Mosque. I see the vanished olive orchards, the vanished Herzl forest, the vanished Atid factory, the vanished Lehmann youth village. And I think about the tragedy that took place here. Forty-five years after it came into the Lydda Valley in the name of the Kishinev pogrom, Zionism instigated a human catastrophe in the Lydda Valley. Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sent out of the Lydda Valley a column of homeless. In the heavy heat, through the haze, through the dry brown fields, I see the column marching east. So many years have passed, and yet the column is still marching east. For columns like the column of Lydda never stop marching.

(
photo credit 6.1
)

I
MEET WITH
P
ROFESSOR
Z
E
’
EV
S
TERNHELL IN HIS MODEST
J
ERUSALEM
apartment. Sternhell is a distinguished scholar of European fascism and a lauded political activist against Israeli fascism. He is tall and elegant, a true gentleman. For three consecutive days I listen to his life story, trying to understand my own. Listening to Sternhell, I try to understand the Jewish-Israeli tale of the twentieth century.

“I was the beloved, pampered son-of-old-age of an affluent secular Jewish family in Galicia,” Sternhell tells me. “My grandfather was a successful textile merchant and my father was his business partner. My mother stayed home and raised me with the help of a maid and a nanny. My older sister, Ada, who was thirteen years my senior, was like a second mother to me. I was showered with love. To this day my most poignant memory is of my father holding me in his arms and pressing his cheek to mine.

“Suddenly war broke out. I was awakened in the middle of the night. All the lights were on as my father said goodbye to us, dressed in the uniform of the Polish army. When he returned from defeat a few weeks later, everything collapsed. My father died, my grandfather died. The Russians occupied eastern Poland and took over half of our large house. We no longer had a nanny or maid. My mother had to work. My mother
and my sister did the best they could to shield me. In a world that had lost all sense of stability, they were my only remaining anchor.

“When I was six, in the summer of 1941, the Barbarossa operation began right under our house, which was built on the banks of the Wisla River. I remember the windows shattering, firebombs, the amazing might of Nazi Germany. And within hours, we saw long convoys of terrified Russian prisoners of war. A few months later we were transported to the ghetto. The transition was abrupt: from our grand house to a nook in the ghetto, with its terrible overcrowding, its stench, the hunger.

“Then came the Actions. The ghetto was liquidated in stages, and each time it was a different sort of hunt. I remember when we ourselves were hunted. My mother, Ada, and I hid for three days in an underground hole, some sort of cave. There were a few other people hiding with us, while outside, the ghetto was being decimated. There was a slit through which I watched the hunt. I saw men being shot, children being shot. I was a child of six hiding underground watching through a slit other children who were hiding in treetops as they were shot and killed and fell to the ground.