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The first Zionist settlement had been established in Palestine in 1882, more than a decade before Herzl’s first trip there. It was the punk corpuscle that heralds the disease, the lonely pimple that portends the general outbreak, the tiny bud that suggests the sea of wildflowers. Pick your metaphor. It was called Rishon Le-Zion and was about sixty miles south of Haifa. It’s since been subsumed in greater Tel Aviv, but you can pick out its buildings by their white walls and red roofs. Despite the name—Rishon Le-Zion means “first to Zion”—its occupants were not Zionists. They did not want to form a state, fight in an army, win a war. They were Russian Jews who wanted to get their fingers in the soil. They were like hippies. Their vision was entirely personal.
There had always been Jews in Palestine, of course, the community that survived the destruction of the Second Temple and the Expulsion by Rome. They were massacred when the Romans became Christian, and again when the Arabs became Muslim. They were killed by the Crusaders and by the armies that defeated the Crusaders. Their numbers were thinned by migration and conversion, but a remnant remained. They had a protected place under Muslim rule as a “People of the Book,” an example of other, earlier creation, like the horseshoe crab. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire began its slow decline, thirty thousand Jews were living in Palestine, mostly in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. There were smaller communities in Haifa and Tiberias. Sfad, perched on its hill, its head full of visions, remained the capital of Jewish mysticism.
When European Jews first emigrated to Palestine, they found a hodgepodge: Sephardic Jews living alongside Arabs, Greeks, and Turks; pilgrims coming and going from every Christian nation; colonies of Russians, Germans, Brits, the most devout of them living in monasteries in the sandstone cliffs. For a strange, romantic moment, different cultures, different historical eras—the West was riding a wave of innovation, was awash in machinery; the East had faded, was rotting—seemed to exist side by side.
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
The sword had been the virtue of the children of Othman, and swords had passed out of fashion nowadays, in favour of deadlier, more scientific weapons. Life was growing too complicated for this childlike people, whose strength had lain in simplicity, and patience, and in their capacity for sacrifice. They were the slowest of the races of Western Asia, little fitted to adapt to new sciences of government and life, still less to invent any new arts for themselves.*
The first Zionist settlers called themselves “Lovers of Zion.” They were ideologues, wild-eyed, touched in the head. You had to be. Think of it, traveling from the cold cities of Russia, with their brooding skies and rivers frozen mid-current, to this wide-open nowhere. They left behind families and towns, sweethearts and vistas. The first group comprised students from Kharkov. They traveled to Odessa in 1881, crossed the Black Sea to Constantinople, then got a ship for Jaffa. Of three hundred who signed up for the trip, only fifteen made it all the way. The rest got distracted. Met a girl—gone. Were moved by a line of poetry—gone. As I said, they were less interested in a political state than in the state of their own lost souls. They longed, needed, chased, craved. They did not want to live as their parents had lived. They were Russian intellectuals. They worshipped Tolstoy and believed, like Tolstoy, that a man could find salvation in physical labor. For them, the peasant, in touch with the soil, was the only holy figure of the age. They wanted to be peasants, but because they were Jews, they could not be,* so decided to go to the place where Jews had been peasants once, long ago: Palestine, where they would get their hands in the dirt and be reborn. Their quest for an authentic life grew in response to industrialization. The more monstrous the cities became, the more these Jews craved a simple existence. They built their ideology around a few paragraphs from Anna Karenina.†
In the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Jews left Russia. Most went to America; others went to Germany, France, England. A few—three or four thousand, no more—went to Palestine. Given the choice between New York or Jerusalem, money or ideology, only the crazies chose ideology. Grandpa Morris came to the Lower East Side because he had a family. Uncle Hymie went to Rehovot because he was out of his mind. That’s the back story of Israel.
That early wave came to be known as the First Aliyah, a term taken from the Hebrew word for “going up,” which in ancient times was used to describe the climb a pilgrim made to the Temple Mount. They built the first settlements, some of which grew into cities: Petach Tikva (1878), Rehovot (1890), Hadera (1891), Metulla (1896). Few members of the First Aliyah stayed in Palestine, however. They were stunned by how hard the life was. Palestine was primitive in a way that shocked even the most determined Tolstoyans. This was a world of tribe and blood and veil and no toilets or running water. Jews usually purchased land from absentee owners, rich men living in Cairo or Constantinople, who sold vast parcels with the happy glee of a sharpie unloading Florida swamp. The land was sandy, dry, next to impossible to cultivate. The first spring went by with no crop, followed by an autumn with no harvest.
This is from the diary of an early Jewish settler:
[The land is] infested with malaria and typhus, and is a quagmire of mud in the winter. It has to be drained by cutting canals, while the men working on the reclamation shake with fever.
Within a few years, the majority of the early settlers were gone. Some got malaria and died, some got dysentery and died, some recovered, then left, back to Europe, or on to the United States. Most of the settlements went broke. A few were bailed out by rich European Jews, including Edmond de Rothschild, who gave millions, then used the occasion to plant the family’s first vineyard on Mount Carmel. A few survived, but only by hiring Arabs to work the fields, which, of course, defeated the whole point—to redeem the land, to become peasants. Had Jews traveled all this way just to be landlords? By 1900 most of the original settlements had been abandoned, overgrown by skunk grass and wild grape. Little evidence of the First Aliyah remained. The few Russians who persisted did so by sheer will. The land needs me, that’s what they told themselves. It has fallen like the people have fallen, because the people have fallen. But if I can redeem the land, and bring it to harvest, it will redeem all of us. No matter what else you might think of the greater project, you have to admit this is a sort of beautiful idea.
The Second Aliyah came more than a decade later, largely in response to the call made by Herzl. Its members were different from members of the First Aliyah: harder, cooler, less emotional, the little brother come to finish what the big brother had started. They were singleminded to the point of mania. They could see no side but their own. As Jabotinsky told the Arabs: You are right, but we are more right. Many carried dog-eared copies of What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which tells the story of a group of Russian noblemen who quit their position and property for a life on the land. “The pioneers of 1905 were the strangest workers the world had ever seen,” Walter Laqueur wrote. “Manual labor for them was not a necessary evil but an absolute moral value, a remedy to cure the Jewish people of its social and national ills.” David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir were members of the Second Aliyah.
You don’t need to know everything about them, just that they were radical and tough—and all had the same idea at the same time. They built the kibbutzim, invented the mechanics of settlement, houses thrown up at night, walls built, fields planted. Here’s how it worked: a group of Zionists from a city such as Bielsk or Kiev purchase a piece of land from an Arab aristocrat living in, say, Baghdad. A Jewish scout travels to Palestine, surveys the fields, draws a map and a plan. The other Zionists meet in Rehovot or Metulla or wherever, select a crop, buy saplings or seeds, load the trucks. An advance team sets off at sundown, rolling onto the land at night, checking it against the map, dividing tasks, laying out stakes, setting up huts and fences, working fast, so that, in the morning, when the Bedouin shepherd crests the hill, the settlement will seem like an established fact, as if it’s always been there.
The first kibbutz was called Deganiah. It was founded in 1909 by Russian Jews, two men and a woman. (Imagine the life of that woman!) The land, purchased by the Jewish National Fund, hugged the shore of the Galilee. From a distance, it must have looked like a painting by Mark Rothko: a green field beside a shimmering sea. The first settlers grew wheat. They worked till their bodies ached, pounding out the sin of their fraudulent old lives. Nothing was simply done; it was thought about, then done. Deganiah was a hothouse of ideology. The inhabitants considered themselves people of substance yet were consumed with the image of the Jew—that is, with what people thought. They looked at their Arab neighbors with a kind of longing, envied their freedom, how easily they seemed to live in their bodies and dwell on their land. Some Zionists wore Arab headdresses in the fields and grew the sort of pencil-thin mustaches favored by the Arab noblemen. These Jews were wannabes, or wanna-not-bes. They did not want to be Jews as Jews had been viewed in Europe. The Arabs called them Moskub, “Russians.”*
Deganiah was a breeding ground for great figures of the Zionist movement. A. D. Gordon moved there in 1919, close to fifty by then, but still working in the fields every day. At night, he sat in his cottage writing essays. In photos, he looks like the old Tolstoy: his piercing blue eyes have seen through every artifice. He was raised an Orthodox Jew in Russia, spoke of sin and redemption, but had long since lost his faith. He did not believe in God. He believed in action and human will. “The Jewish people have been cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls for two thousand years,” he wrote. “We have been accustomed to every form of life, except a life of labor—of labor done on our behalf and for its own sake. It will require the greatest effort of will for such a people to become normal again.”
His essays were saturated with Jewish history. Everything was in them: the flood, the covenant, the promise, the curse. Each was a big picture made of many other pictures. In this one, Jerusalem is in flames. In that one, Sabbatai Zevi bows before the Sultan. In this one, Theodor Herzl waves from a balcony. In that one, A. D. Gordon works in the wheat. To Gordon, the body and soul were connected by a tether. Only when the body was exhausted could the soul transcend. “We are engaged in a creative endeavor the like of which is not to be found in the whole history of mankind,” he wrote. “The rebirth and rehabilitation of a people that has been uprooted and scattered to the winds.”
Deganiah was the birthplace of Moshe Dayan, perhaps the greatest military figure in modern Israeli history. Dayan was, in fact, the second child born on the kibbutz. In other words, for one moment, in the fall of 1919, A. D. Gordon was the oldest person in Deganiah, Moshe Dayan was the youngest—this should give you a sense of the intensity of life in those settlements. Dayan’s parents came directly from Russia. For young Russian Jews, moving to Palestine was often a way less to a new life than to escape the routine of a tired old one. On the kibbutz, even the familiar took on fresh meaning, became portentous, ecstatic. The trip to the store, the cigarette at sundown, the schnapps in the evening chill—these actions became notable, important snapshots of the revolution. In this way, the quotidian stayed quotidian yet also became heroic. The old man in the fields, scythe raised high, was still an old man in the fields but was also a symbol of the Jew reclaiming his land.
Dayan’s mother had a long, complicated childbirth, in the middle of which a family friend named Moshe was sent out to find a doctor. This was late at night. Hours went by, the baby was born, and still the man did not return. At dawn, his horse wandered into the kibbutz alone, the riderless steed being everywhere an omen of a world without leaders. They found his body in the wheat. He had been killed by a militant gang of Arabs known as the Bearded Sheiks. Dayan was named after this man, the image of the bloodthirsty Arab having a place in his imagination from the beginning.
Dayan later described his childhood on the kibbutz as idyllic—swimming the breadth of the Galilee, leaving his clothes on the distant shore, hiking into the hills. He wandered through Judea using the Bible as a guide and camped above the Dead Sea, dazzled by the nearness of the stars. He went everywhere in his life, and experienced every kind of victory and defeat, but the spirit of Deganiah never left him. It’s what made him great. To Dayan, each setback was a challenge. It was good to be tested, he said, an honor to be hated, an opportunity to be attacked.
Here is a eulogy he gave in the 1950s for an Israeli soldier killed in battle:
And so let us make our reckoning today. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house. Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and await the moment when their hand will be able to reach our blood. Let us not avert our gaze, for it will weaken our hand. This is the fate of our generation. The only choice we have is to be prepared and armed, strong and resolute, or else our sword will slip from our hand and the thread of our lives will be severed.
As soon as the Jewish settlers began to establish themselves on the land, and bring in crops—this was accomplished by tricks of modern agriculture, by draining swamps and piping water onto land Arabs had sold because they considered it waste—there was conflict with the Bedouins and tribal chiefs who had long controlled the valleys. To be sure, there were some, on both sides, who looked for accommodation, who searched for good news. Such leaders saw a counterpoint in the other: established together in the land, the communities would rhyme. King Abdullah bin al-Hussein (Abdullah I), the legendary figure who ruled Arabia in the last days of the Ottoman Empire as the sharif and emir of Mecca, and was later made king of Transjordan by the British, heralded the arrival of the Jews. These are not Moskub, he said, but long-lost cousins returning with a knowledge of science that will enrich the region. (The Jew will teach the Arab how to make the most of his land; the Arab will teach the Jew how to live in his own skin.) In 1910 Hussein’s newspaper extended an official welcome to the members of the Second Aliyah, calling them, “The original sons of the country from which their Arab brethren would benefit materially as well as spiritually.”*
For Jews, accommodation would mean a binational state, a popular notion among many Zionists up to the Second World War. That is, one state for two peoples—Arabs and Jews, equal citizens under a single law. This was proposed several times by Jewish leaders, but always rejected by Arabs, who, perhaps understandably, did not think they should give half of what, as far as they were concerned, was entirely theirs. Even now, when Israel is rich and the Territories are poor, the majority of Palestinians reject a binational state, as many reject two states. Many Arabs would rather be poor without a Jewish state than rich with one, which is why, in 1951, King Hussein, who supported accommodation, was killed by a Muslim extremist while visiting the Temple Mount.†
The early Jewish settlers were harassed, shot at, ambushed—attacks most often carried out by ragtag militias, dozens of men in keffiyehs, shouldering flintlock blunderbuss rifles. The fighters were fierce, with piercing eyes. These were mostly Muslim Arabs, farmers and merchants who lived in the towns and waste places of Palestine, many of whom could trace their family trees back hundreds of years. They were recruited in mosques and town squares, and pledged to take the land back from the Jews. They aimed to make life so difficult that the interlopers would simply go home. The militias left their forlorn, mud-caked villages at sundown, in groups of six or twelve, their shadows stretching behind them. They went in search of Moskub, lingered beyond the gates of the kibbutzim, hid in the ditches along the road. They threw stones, shot up convoys, killed horses, burned fields. Their guns went ka-blam! You heard a cheer, then saw a puff of smoke.* The casualties were few, but every loss was felt keenly, because everyone knew everyone, and every name was a story.
The first organized Arab militant group was formed in 1919. Called the Black Hand, it vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. The Black Hand would, in a sense, become Fatah, Hamas, et al. The first Zionist militia was created in response to the Black Hand. It was called the Watchmen. It would, in a sense, become the Israel Defense Forces. This was the beginning of the dance in which the Zionists act, the Arabs respond, the Zionists respond to the response, the Arabs respond to the response to the response, and on and on, forever.
The Ottoman Empire, long considered the sick man of Europe, finally died in the First World War. In history books, the death is a date on a time line, a picture of an old man in a Turkish uniform. In Palestine, it was British soldiers marching from El Arish to Beersheba, in the Negev Desert, high ground from which the wounded Turkish army could be seen spread out, bleeding. The British advanced as the Ottomans fell. By December 9, 1917, the former were camped outside Jerusalem. Two days later, the city surrendered. General Edmund Allenby entered that afternoon, as the sun went down. He approached on horseback. If you go there today, a guide will show you the path he took. He will describe Allenby’s posture and bearing. Allenby was a graduate of Sandhurst, a veteran of the Boer War, a student of history, and a believer in Christ. He had been reading the Gospels. He knew what he was doing. When he reached Jaffa Gate, he got off his horse and said, “A better man than I entered this city on foot.”
That’s how they tell it, and there is no reason to doubt them. Such events were stage-managed then as they are stage-managed now. The victory was sold as a high-water mark of the British Empire: the Christians, gone since the Crusades, had retaken the city of Christ.
A few days later, however, Allenby returned in a Rolls-Royce convertible with leather seats and flags on the hood. It went up Jaffa Road. You could see it across the valley, ascending like an angel climbing the ramps to heaven. Allenby was in back, smoking a pipe. His eyes were blue crystals, his face was porcelain. The car stopped at the gate. The driver got out. He talked to an Arab standing at the threshold.
What’s the problem? asked Allenby.
Well, you see, sir. The car is too wide. Simply won’t fit. These gates were made with camels in mind.
Then fix it.
Fix it, General?
Get a demolition crew up here and blow it open!
A few minutes later, a British soldier set a charge in the wall next to Jaffa Gate. The general went back downhill, waited for the blast, nodded to his driver, then rode into the city. The hole was cleaned up and a proper road was laid. This remains a primary way into the old city by car.
A week or so earlier, Lord Balfour, then serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty, issued the political statement that changed everything: the Balfour Declaration. It was presented as an open letter to Lord Rothschild, because if you want to say something to all Jews, why not say it to the Jew with the most money?
Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours,
Arthur James Balfour
Why did the British issue this declaration?
To some, it proves the conspiracy that explains both the founding of Israel and its continued existence. How have the Zionists, who are just a fraction of the Jewish people—that is, a fraction of a fraction—been able to win the Great Powers, starting with Britain, continuing with France, then America, to their cause, a cause that cannot help but antagonize millions of Muslims? With their money, of course, their influence, their voodoo. That is, Jews, with the tricks of their race, seduced the British into acting against their own national interest.
To some, it was cunning propaganda. Note when the Balfour Declaration was issued: not at the beginning of the war, nor at the end, but in the middle, when it seemed Germany was winning. By promising the Jews a homeland, Lord Balfour, so goes the reasoning, would change the balance of power. If “world Jewry,” whatever that means, came to favor the British, then the big-money Jews would use their economic and political influence to choke off and defeat Germany.
Then there was Balfour himself: this is where personality enters politics, where taste determines history. Lord Balfour, educated at Eton and Cambridge, a member of Parliament descended from members of Parliament, was a fantastic Judeophile. He said the Greeks and Jews were the most talented people the world had ever produced. Taken together, they told the entire story of civilization, with reason coming from the Greeks, passion coming from the Jews. An obsessive reader of the Bible, he saw the Jew on Fleet Street as no different from the Jew in the Book of Kings. They must return. God was merely waiting for them to hear the trumpets, which were blowing, and always had been.
Lord Balfour had lunch with Chaim Weizmann most Thursdays. Weizmann, who would serve as the first president of Israel, was then working on Balfour’s General Staff. He was a chemist and served as a scientific advisor, and would brief Balfour on breakthroughs and discoveries. Weizmann was in the process of developing a new kind of TNT, acetone, that would ignite even when wet. It was said to be a factor in victory on the Western Front, as it meant the Allies could attack even in the rain. But the relationship was more than professional: Balfour and Weizmann spent hours talking about the Bible and the future of the Jews in Palestine.
Some said the Declaration was an act of hubris: Balfour wanted to attach his name to the fulfillment of prophecy, the in-gathering of the exiles, so that future generations would not be able to discuss the Jews without mentioning Balfour, as I am doing here. Some said he wrote it because he thought it was right, believed in it. Some said he wrote it to pay a debt: the general debt Christendom owed the Jews for the slander of deicide, the particular debt that Britain owed Weizmann for acetone. In other words, the Declaration, though addressed to Rothschild, was actually a gift for Chaim Weizmann, who had long lobbied for such a document.
The news was, in fact, broken first to Weizmann, who was sitting in an anteroom on Whitehall Street while the Declaration was being debated. The diplomat Mark Sykes came out first. He gripped Weizmann by the shoulder, shook his hand, and said, “Dr. Weizmann, it’s a boy!” British officials who disagreed with the policy later tried to downplay the Declaration, reinterpret it out of existence, but its meaning was clear at the time.
Here’s how it was reported in the Daily Express, November 8, 1917:
Arab crowds gathered in Palestine. Imams gave sermons, and riots broke out. Scattered attacks grew into regular attacks, then into the first Arab revolt: it was the start of the war that never ends, that only mutates, grows more brutal. (Here’s the progression: stone, stone, stone; stab, stab, stab; shoot, shoot, shoot; bomb, bomb, bomb.) Even today, when you watch a correspondent in a helmet, with the letters T V taped on her back, filing a report from Tel Aviv, where a suicide bomber has bloomed like a flower, you are seeing the front wall of a fire that burns clear back to London 1917, where Mark Sykes grips Chaim Weizmann by the shoulder, saying, “Dr. Weizmann, it’s a boy!”
The spirit behind that first revolt was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, the original Yasser Arafat. (As late as 2001, Arafat called the mufti the hero of Palestine.*) In those years, the grand mufti, more than anyone else, determined how the Arabs would respond to Zionism; he set the pattern that still dominates.
Husseini was appointed to office by the British high commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, who, curiously, considering Husseini’s views, was Jewish. Well, not so curious if you believe in the conspiracy—in which case the choice was brilliant, in that Haj Amin al-Husseini’s leadership led directly to the Arab disaster in Palestine. (As God tells the Jews in Samuel, “I will slay you, and I will slay those who slay you.”)
Husseini was born in Jerusalem in 1893, and died in Beirut in 1974. Which meant he saw his world change in ways that are almost inconceivable. In his lifetime, Palestine went from sparse, agrarian, drowsy, peaceful Turkish hinterland to ultramodern Jewish Sparta. In these years, Husseini, who wore a fez and a high clerical collar, joined secret societies and brotherhoods. His family was prominent and old, filled with landowners and politicians. He had terrible luck. In every battle, he chose the wrong side. (If history had broken another way, his face would be on T-shirts for sale in American shopping malls.) He supported the Ottomans in the First World War, the Germans in the Second. He made speeches against the Allies and threatened the Jews with extinction. In 1942, British police in Palestine issued a warrant for his arrest. He fled to Transjordan, then to Berlin, where he spent the rest of the war. He praised the Nazi Party, and sent its leaders long, flattering letters. He met with Ribbentrop and Goebbels. He drafted a document for the Germans to sign, his own chilling version of the Balfour Declaration. (They refused.) In it, the Arabs were promised “the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries . . . by the same method in which that question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”
From Husseini’s memoir, written after the war:
Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: “The Jews are yours.”
Did Husseini know what he was saying? Did he know the details of the death camps? Adolf Eichmann, at his trial in Jerusalem, said that Husseini had not merely known, but had been one of the instigators of the Final Solution.* Historians note a speech given by Husseini during the war, when there were thought to be thirteen million Jews living in the world. In it, Husseini spoke of “the eight million Jews now living,” which suggests that he not only knew the details of the Holocaust, but the minutiae.
This is expressed as an algebraic equation:
13,000,000 – X = 8,000,000
What is X?
5,000,000
On November 28, 1941, Husseini met with Adolf Hitler. There is a picture of the men seated side by side in deep, comfortable chairs. Hitler is leaning forward, talking with his hands, like a Jew, hair pushed to the side, that terrible hyphen of facial hair, a dash between before and after, beneath his nose. The mufti sits upright, his fez placed neatly on his head. In another, the mufti inspects the ranks of the Waffen SS. In this way, Husseini associated the Palestinian cause with that of the Nazis. He fled to Switzerland after the war, was captured and brought back. He was tried for war crimes and sentenced to three years in prison, but escaped and was smuggled out to Egypt, where he carried on his struggle against the Jews.
The rioting that began after the Balfour Declaration continued sporadically, with days of battle separated by months or years of peace, until 1929, when the countryside exploded into the orgy of violence that is sometimes called the real first Intifada.
It started at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem—the Bitching Wall, the Tear Your Hair Out and Curse Your Maker Wall, the last remnant of the Temple complex, which was the center of the ancient kingdom. Above it is the Dome of the Rock, planted like a flag on the grave of another people, staff driven right down into the corpse. For centuries, the Wall had been a curiosity to Muslims, a Jewish ruin. After Herzl, it became a threat. Imams who had never seen much importance in it now decided it belonged only to the Muslims. It was here, they said, that Muhammad tied his flying horse, al-Buraq, before he made his night journey to heaven. The Wall became a flashpoint. Arabs dumped trash in the alley and harassed Jews who prayed there. The British, asked to settle the dispute, promised to protect all existing rights: neither side would be allowed to upset the status quo.
Then, in early August 1929, a devout Jew put a barrier up at the Wall to separate male worshippers from female worshippers. The Muslim Authority complained; the British removed the barrier. The Zionist Federation issued a statement: If Jews are not allowed to pray as they want at the Wall, it said, then Jews will never be free. The next day, a hundred Zionists gathered at the Wall, chanted and sang, and raised a blue-and-white flag. Arabs held a counterdemonstration on the Temple Mount. That crowd then went down into the alley beside the Wall. The Zionists had gone, so the Arabs attacked Orthodox Jews who had come to pray.
On August 8, 1929, full-scale rioting broke out across the country. Jews were beaten and stabbed, shuls sacked, stores looted. The British dispatched soldiers with orders to shoot to kill. By the fifteenth of September, 133 Jews had been killed, and nearly as many Arabs. In Jerusalem, the crowds chanted: Death! Death! Death! Behind the rioters were the Bearded Sheiks and the Black Hand and the Grand Mufti, whose face drifted, laughing across the Jerusalem sky.
Hebron is among the holiest places on earth to Jews. David made his first capital there, and ruled from the city for seven years. It was home to the Ark of the Covenant. It’s also where the Hebrew patriarchs are buried, deep in a cave called Machpelah which, according to Genesis, Abraham bought from a local sheik to bury his wife (Sarah), himself, and his sons. This transaction, described in detail in the Bible, is used by Jewish settlers to prove their ownership of the city. The sheik wanted to give Abraham the cave as a gift, but the canny old Jew refused, insisting on paying full market value—four hundred shekels of silver—so there could be no argument about ownership. The bill of sale is right there in the Torah, say the modern settlers.
Whether or not the cave is actually the Tomb of the Patriarchs is in dispute, but it has been worshipped as such for at least two thousand years.
Josephus described it soon after the destruction of the Second Temple:
If the inhabitants are to be believed, Hebron is more ancient than any town in the country—older even than Memphis in Egypt; its age is reckoned at 2,300 years. They affirm that it was the home of Abraham, the ancestor of the Jews, after his migration from Mesopotamia, and that his descendants went down into Egypt from there. Their tombs are pointed out to this day in the little town, of the finest marble and beautifully fashioned.
Here’s how Benjamin Tudela described it in the 1200s:
At a distance of six parsings is St. Abram de Bron, which is Hebron; the old city stood on the mountain, but is now in ruins; and in the valley by the field of Machpelah lies the present city. Here there is the great church called St. Abram, and this was a Jewish place of worship at the time of Mohammedan rule, but the Gentiles have erected there six tombs, respectively called those of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah. The custodians tell the pilgrims that these are the tombs of the Patriarchs, for which information the pilgrims give them money. If a Jew comes, however, and gives a special reward, the custodian of the caves opens unto him a gate of iron, which was constructed by our forefathers, and then he is able to descend below by means of steps, holding a lighted candle in his hand. He then reaches a cave, in which nothing is to be found, and a cave beyond which is likewise empty, but when he reaches the third cave, behold there are six sepulchres. Those of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, respectively facing those of Sarah, Rebekah and Leah.
Hebron is the Middle East in a drop of rain. It had perhaps twenty thousand residents in 1929, including a sizable Jewish population. It was home to probably the oldest Jewish community in the world, which had lived in the city since the early sixth century, more than a century before Muslim rule. The life of this community ended with the riots in which sixty Jews were killed and the rest fled. It’s a Muslim city today, with a tiny minority of fanatical Jewish settlers living in a walled compound at its center. The presence of these settlers makes life miserable for Arabs. This is what the world sees. The Hebrew foot in the Muslim face. The most radical of the Jews there demand “transfer” of the Arab population from the city. As I said, the other word for this is “ethnic cleansing,” removing a population as if it never existed. You cannot be a normal, fair-minded person and believe these settlers are anything but a problem. Monstrous. They should go; they should never have been allowed to move here in the first place.
But the story is complicated. Hebron was mixed for centuries. It became Muslim only after the riots of 1929. In other words, Hebron already has been ethnically cleansed—of Jews. When the settlers came in 1968, it was, supposedly, to reestablish the oldest Jewish community in the world. Of course, these Jews were not those Jews. Those Jews had been a poor, ancient, devout community. These Jews are ideological, steely, determined, extreme. Let me address this directly to the mufti: Look what you did! You pushed out the old peaceful Jews and in their place got these wild-eyed Zealots! Who have come to fulfill the word of God! Who have come to redeem the land! Who have come to be kings among the defeated Philistines! You, with your bloodlust and riots, created the Jews, who, with their bloodlust and planes, created the Arabs, who created the Jews, who created the Arabs. The mufti gives birth to Sharon, who gives birth to Nasarallah, etc., etc.
It’s called a spiral.
Before the riots, each Jewish settlement looked after its own defense. The amateurish guards were called Watchmen. Every kibbutz was laid out in the same way: common buildings, cottages, fields, fences, towers, wilderness. It’s referred to as the fence-and-tower era of settlement. Did you ever see the John Ford movie She Wore a Yellow Ribbon? Well, it was just like that. There was inside the fence (civilization), there was outside the fence (chaos). The ultimate goal was to bring everything inside the fence. As a rule, the Watchmen “stayed inside.” It was their policy. Wait, hope, react. I can give you a picture of a Watchman: a middle-aged man named Schmuely, in peasant boots and flop-brim hat, a Russian rifle slung over his shoulder, walking the last planted field. Or a kid named Jacob sitting in a wooden tower studying the land through a pair of antique opera glasses. On the kibbutz where my cousins live—it’s called Ein Hahoresh and it’s near the sea north of Tel Aviv; I have spent many summers there—the guns are stored in a locked room to be opened only if the Arab armies break through. The key was kept, for a time, on a string around my cousin Gadi’s neck. Gadi in the dining hall, eating cucumbers, the tiny weight felt even when he was swimming (when it swung to the side, you saw the tan mark left by each notch)—to me, this is the image of the Watchmen.
Moshe Dayan described them as ragtag bands of the “we few, we happy few, we band of schnorrers” variety. Reading now, you sense, oddly, considering the violence of their lives, that they were having fun. It was only after the 1929 riots that the leaders of the movement turned these scattered militias into the professional force, the Hagana, that would eventually become the Israeli military. They built it the way you might build a national soccer team: recruiters went from town to town, meeting members of each militia, watching them train, selecting the standouts. A few weeks later, hundreds of them gathered in a field, where Zionists who had attended military academies in Russia, or Prussia, or Britain, or America, watched them run, climb, shoot, and bayonet. The British had banned all private armies in Palestine. (Merely being a member of the Hagana was a crime.) So this was all done in secret, the soldiers inducted in a ceremony known, with variation, to underground soldiers everywhere. A man on his knees in a cellar, the face of the leader flickering in the candlelight, a husky whisper. He asks three questions, then has the recruit swear an oath, right hand on a Bible, left hand on a gun.
In the beginning, the Hagana fought as the Watchmen had fought: behind the fence. But the Jewish community in Palestine, known as the Yishuv, was simply too small, its territory too meager, to stay on the defensive. If Zionism was to succeed, the Hagana needed a new strategy. Interestingly, it came not from a Jew but from an Englishman, an officer in the British army, a Judeophile filled to the brim with the Bible. His name was Orde Wingate and he was, in a sense, a perfect expression of the Empire. Wingate was born in Naini Tal, India, in 1903; his father was an army officer, his mother a missionary. And insane. Did she believe the end was near? Did she believe a Jew could be normal? Did she believe the Jews would be either saved or smote? Yes, no, yes.
Mrs. Wingate taught her son to believe in the chosen-ness of the Jews, and to regard every word of scripture as a promise. He was sent to England for school. He studied at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and dreamed of service in the Near East, the land of the Bible. He learned Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi. He used his connections, specifically his cousin Sir Reginald Wingate, the governor general of Sudan, to get posted overseas. In 1928, he commanded a battalion in the no-man’s-land between Sudan and Abyssinia. He was ordered to arrest poachers and slavers and smugglers but quickly realized his uniformed soldiers, at their checkpoints, with their trucks and fixed guns, were useless against these pirates. In considering the problem, he read books on the Roman wars and studied stories in the Bible in which Hebrew bands defeated much larger armies. He paid special attention to Gideon, who, with three hundred men, vanquished the Midianites. In this story, which appears in the Book of Judges, you find all of Wingate’s tactics: the ambush, the feint, the trick. He trained a band of elite soldiers. To beat pirates, he told them, they would have to become pirates. Ditch their uniforms and posts, vanish into the bush. This was the birth of modern counterinsurgency.
In 1936 Wingate sailed for Palestine, where the Arabs were rioting in response to increased Jewish immigration, which came with the rise of Hitler. This was called the “Arab Revolt.” It took three years to suppress. In the end, to mollify the rioters, the British issued a white paper that severely limited Jewish emigration to Palestine. At the moment the Jews of Europe most needed a way out, the last door had closed.*
Wingate was posted to the General Staff and told to learn native culture with a mind toward intelligence. He was a captain. He could be seen walking in the city at sundown, broad-nosed and solid with gray eyes, one of those reserved men who proves surprisingly strong. He impressed everyone: the way he listened, the nature of his focus. He was troubled by the violence of the rioters and asked permission to teach the Jews how best to defend themselves. To Wingate, Jewish military prowess was a precondition of a Jewish state, and a Jewish state was a precondition of the Second Coming. (He was Lawrence of Arabia for the Jews.)
If the Jews can defend themselves properly, he told his commander, Lord Archibald Wavell, then British soldiers will not have to risk their lives defending Jewish settlements.
“We heard Wingate was someone with unconventional ideas about how to deal with Arab terrorism and sabotage, and, unlike his military colleagues, thought well of Jews,” Moshe Dayan wrote. “In fact, he had become an ardent supporter of the Zionist idea.”
In the spring of 1938, Wingate met the leaders of the Hagana. If the Jews want to prevail, he told them, they have to learn to fight as the British learned to fight in Sudan. “You do not have the people, or the size, to wait for the next attack,” he explained. “Given the choice, you must fight in their towns, in their fields, not in yours.”
“Wingate taught us everything we know,” Dayan said.
The Jews took to him, in part, because his ideas meshed perfectly with the ideals of Zionism. In urging them to come out from behind the fence, he was urging them to fulfill their ideology: take possession of the land, redeem it, be redeemed. He led them through the countryside, instructed them in night fighting and weed crawling, surprise attack, psychological warfare, in timing each mission to the cycle of the moon. He taught them the art of ambush, how to read the land. Memorize the terrain until it becomes your own body and you will never be lost—this became the ethos of the new Jewish soldier.
Wingate led the Hagana on several missions. They would set out at sundown, walking single file through the darkening fields. He called them night squads. They raided villages, ambushed militias, counterattacked. If a Jew was killed, they might go into the nearest town and burn down Arab houses. “We could not guard every water pipeline from being blown up and every tree from being uprooted,” Moshe Dayan explained. “We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or family in their beds. But it was in our power to set a high price on our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying.”
The night squads returned at dawn, gathered in a house on a kibbutz and talked over the mission—what could be learned from each mistake. As the men sat around, drinking coffee, Wingate read from the Bible. He was a bit of an eccentric. He wore a bathing cap in the shower and issued orders in the nude. He had an onion on a string around his neck and now and then bit it like an apple. He built missions on stories in scripture, which he read aloud before the men set off. In his diary, Lord Moran, who would serve as Winston Churchill’s private physician, described Wingate as “Hardly sane—in medical jargon, a borderline case.”*
Moshe Dayan:
[ Wingate] had an unbreakable belief in the Bible. Before going on an action, he would read the passage in the Bible relating to the places where we would be operating and find testimony to our victory—the victory of God and the Jews. At dawn, we would return to Shimron and prepare breakfast. We would enter the wooden structure which served as the communal kitchen and watch the scores of cockroaches scurry away at our approach. There we would fry omelets and potatoes on a primus stove and prepare tomato salad. While this was going on, Wingate would sit in a corner, stark naked, reading the Bible and munching raw onions as though they were the most luscious pears. Judged by ordinary standards, he would not be regarded as normal. But his own standards were far from ordinary. He was a military genius and a wonderful man.
On leave in England in 1939, Wingate spoke publicly in favor of the creation of a Jewish state, and as a result was recalled from Palestine. He had been in the country for just three years, but in that time had basically invented the modern Israeli fighting style. In the Hagana, his code name was The Friend.
He went back to Sudan to organize a guerrilla campaign against the Italians, who had invaded Ethiopia. His army of irregulars included Jewish veterans of the night squads as well as British and Sudanese. He called it the Gideon Force. He contracted malaria in the course of the campaign, which he self-treated with high doses of Atabrine, a medicine he purchased from a witch doctor. This resulted in temporary dementia. He had visions: saw faces, streets filled with blood. He tried to kill himself and was sent home. He recovered. By then, the newspapers had made him a legend. Orde Wingate, the swashbuckling guerrilla. Franklin Roosevelt was fascinated by Wingate’s theories on counterinsurgency. In 1942, the British command sent him to Burma to harass the Japanese. For this, he developed the “long-range penetration unit,” a squad of elite soldiers that would operate hundreds of miles behind the lines. He called them Chindits, Burmese for lions. He was dropped, with his men, into the jungle. On March 6, 1944, returning to India, his plane, an American B-25, was shot down. He was buried in the Naga Hills, in Burma, at the site of the wreck, inside Japanese territory.
*I like this quote because it tells more than it intends to—about what the British were like and what the Arabs were faced with.
*Since the Middle Ages, Jews had not been allowed to own land anywhere in eastern Europe.
†“[Levin] thought of nothing, desired nothing, except not to lag behind and to do the best job he could. He heard only the clang of scythes and ahead of him saw Titus’s erect figure moving on, the curved semicircle of the mowed space, grass and flower-heads bending down slowly and wavily about the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the swath, where rest would come.
“Not understanding what it was or where it came from, in the midst of his work he suddenly felt a pleasant sensation of coolness on his hot, sweaty shoulders. He glanced at the sky while his blade was being whetted. A low, heavy cloud had come over it, and big drops of rain were falling. Some muzhiks went for their caftans and put them on; others, just like Levin, merely shrugged their shoulders joyfully under the pleasant freshness.
“They finished another swath and another. They went through long swaths, short swaths, with bad grass, with good grass. Levin lost all awareness of time and had no idea whether it was late or early. A change now began to take place in his work which gave him enormous pleasure. In the midst of his work moments came to him when he forgot what he was doing and began to feel light, and in those moments his swath came out as even and good as Titus’s. But as soon as he remembered what he was doing and started trying to do better, he at once felt how hard the work was and the swath came out badly.” (Translated by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, Penguin Classics.)
*Yuri Slezkine describing Zionists at work in Palestine: “Russian shirts, Russian boots, peasants’ caps . . . the flowing Cossack forelock was one of [their] most recognizable features . . . they sang Russian folk songs and talked about Russian literature.”
*In 1918 Chaim Weizmann met King Hussein’s son Faisal in Akaba in an official, kiss-on-each-cheek, drink-tea-and-work-it-out sort of way. This is the father-and-son team portrayed in the movie Lawrence of Arabia, in which they are seen in grand Bedouin tents, which, at night, fill like sails with the cool desert wind.
†Standing with King Hussein at the time of the assassination was his grandson, the future King Hussein, who would, in 1990, finally sign a peace treaty with Israel.
*The Zionists responded by building walls and training men to guard those walls. But more walls meant more attacks, which meant still more walls. In this way, Jews were closing themselves off from the very land they meant to redeem. In 1911 Arthur Ruppin, a founder of Deganiah, called for the transfer of the Arabs of Palestine—he wanted to round them up and ship them off to land that the Jewish National Fund would purchase in Syria. (The modern term for this is “ethnic cleansing.”)
*Here’s Arafat, quoted, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. “We are not Afghanistan. We are the mighty people. Were they able to replace our hero Haj Amin al-Husseini? There were a number of attempts to get rid of Haj Amin, whom they considered an ally of the Nazis. But even so, he lived in Cairo, and participated in the 1948 war, and I was one of his troops.”
*Not the most trustworthy witness, of course.
*By rioting, the Arabs actually made the outcome they feared more likely. In the 1930s, no one would have the Jews, and millions died. Ironically, the quota enacted in response to the riots demonstrated the need for a Jewish state.
*Jerusalem Syndrome.