Losing Israel (14 page)

The first section of the book concerns the earliest days of the kibbutz, and the memories of its oldest founder members provide a stark account of the hardships the kibbutzniks faced at the beginning, both ideological and physical. The founding of Beit Hashita followed the typical pattern of Jewish settlement in the Jezreel Valley: the building of a hasty tower-and-stockade structure, and the pitching of tents; then a few huts, shared rooms, a makeshift shower. For nearly seven years, members of the Beit Hashita
kvutza
, the founding group of the new settlement, had waited, camped, at nearby Kibbutz Ein Harod, for the Jewish National Fund to purchase land for the future kibbutz. At last, in 1935, thirteen years before the 1948 war, they were able to take possession of the new land bought on their behalf.

In the early days of the kibbutz, there was no money, no income. The valley was swampy in places, and malarial, and malaria cycled through the kibbutz ‘pioneers’. Many died in the first few years; others, in despair at the hardship, the reality for which their political ideology had not prepared them, committed suicide.

The fields had to be cleared of rocks, wells dug and citrus and olive groves planted, but there was no financial support, so some of the founding members went elsewhere in search of work in order to bring in money for the new community. In
Kibbutz Makom
, Saul and other founding members describe the terrible poverty and hardship, how they all lived in mud and tents and then flimsy little huts, clearing the land and building with their bare hands and only rudimentary tools. The strict communitarian social structure, in which everything was owned collectively, was expressed most acutely by ‘Storehouse A’, where new arrivals relinquished everything they owned and wore, and each member was allocated a parcel of clothes and a pair of shoes for the week.

When, at seventeen, I had gone to Kibbutz Regavim to do my ulpan, we too had cleared fields of rocks; we too had laboured on the land, redeeming its stony stubbornness, as we thought, like those early pioneers: and I, not so much new immigrant as returning kibbutz daughter, was walking in my mother’s footsteps, my grandparents’ footsteps, experiencing, like them, the nature of ‘real’ work. Reading those accounts of early hardship woke in me all the romantic adolescent longing of that peasant self-image.

The descriptions of fighting also fired in me again the drama of embattled heroics that I’d absorbed then: by day the kibbutzniks cleared fields, ploughed, irrigated, planted, built – shelters, the first children’s house, a dining room, permanent showers. By night they fought off their neighbours, who came as intruders, raiders and saboteurs. It was the height of the Arab Rising of the 1930s, and members also served in the Palestine Police Auxiliaries, my grand-father among them. Interviewees in
Kibbutz Makom
, and accounts in individual memorial books that Tomer, the archivist, gave me, recall the early and endless conflicts with Arab neighbours, the tense relationships, the deep mistrust, and the shady dealings. When Tomer told me what she remembered about the atmosphere of her childhood – the perimeter fence, the armed guards on the roof of the children’s house – it all confirmed what I already knew, although I don’t recall my mother telling me about it.

It was land that caused open conflict – the purchase and then cultivation by Jews of Arab land. From the beginning of the British Mandate onwards, land ownership and use was the most contested, fractious matter for the colonial authority, and efforts to control and legislate land ownership and land sales caused one kind of political uproar after another. Land ownership, and land-use rights, had changed under Ottoman law in the 1850s and again in 1871, and wealthy landowners, who lived at a distance, had possession of large estates in the area. They willingly sold land to Jewish land companies, which caused increasing landlessness among the fellahin, the Arab peasants. Under a new British land agreement in 1921, the tenant farmers of the Arab villages in the valley were in many cases able to register ownership for the first time. Some sold excess land; others were prevented from doing so, and tensions within the Arab community as well as between Arab and Jew grew and spread through the 1920s.

Although Beit Hashita initially acquired 3,500 dunams of land from the Jewish National Fund, it needed more, and expanded its holdings by buying from individuals in the neighbouring villages of Yubla and Al Murassas – or individual strips of land were bought, on behalf of the kibbutz, by Jewish land companies and the Jewish National Fund, which raised money from Jews throughout the world in order to buy land for the future Jewish state. Yosef Dagan, a founder member of Beit Hashita, was a representative of the Jewish National Fund. He negotiated over land with Al Murassas and Yubla. According to the account given in his memorial book, which my aunt Chaya gave me, he was an effective negotiator. There were quarrels with the villagers of Al Murassas, Yubla and Taibe and he calmed things down. He knew ‘Arab etiquette’, and spoke good Arabic. He understood what he called ‘the mentality’ of Arabs and family politics; he spent time with villagers, and knew who was poor, who was well off. If there was a financial crisis, this provided an opportunity to buy land, which he exploited. Among Arab neighbours he was seen as the kibbutz mukhtar, or chief – but no such role existed in the communist organisation of the kibbutz, with its egalitarian ethos and its endless committee meetings, discussions and unresolved ideological arguments.

It was Yosef Dagan whom Abu Omar had mentioned, when he recalled the understandings that were later to be reached in 1948 between the kibbutz and Na’ura. But the land the kibbutz obtained through Dagan’s efforts was not contiguous. According to Saul, plots of land that the kibbutz cultivated alternated with plots of land owned by villagers, and conflict over field boundaries and use was both overt and covert – villagers’ cattle were released deliberately or accidentally onto cultivated kibbutz fields; theft was rife, and kibbutzniks ploughed and harvested under armed guard, or at night, so as to avoid detection. Often land was bought from individuals in secret, and the right to use it was continually contested. Kibbutzniks and villagers knew one another, dealt with one another, and were often on friendly and civil terms, but they also fought with one another. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a continuous conflict between the new Jewish settlements and the Arab villages throughout the valley. There were bloody confrontations; many people were injured and some kibbutz members were killed. Reading this, I hoped I might discover something about what had happened to my grandfather, but although Saul was no doubt recalling my grandfather’s injury in one of these conflicts, he didn’t name him.

Beit Hashita’s experience was shared by the other Jewish settlements in the valley at that time. For Saul, remembering the conflicts, the provocation was mostly that of Arab neighbours ‘trespassing’ on kibbutz fields, or deliberately letting their animals destroy kibbutz crops. He remembered confrontations in which hundreds of Arabs fought against handfuls of Jews – bloody fights, with Arabs using stones and knives, which caused some serious head-wounds, my grandfather’s among them.

But everything changed suddenly, overnight, on the 15th of May, 1948, according to Saul. That day, the morning after the midnight declaration of Israeli independence, he was working on the fields near one of the villages, driving the combine harvester, with some thirty armed guards nearby. Then he saw the mukhtar of the village leave his house and head his way (he does not specify whether it was the mukhtar of Al Murassas or Yubla). Clambering up on the combine, the mukhtar offered to sell the kibbutz his crops, and Saul ‘knew’ the conflict was over. ‘Just the day before, just one single day, the same Arabs were so sure of their victory, so sure that they would soon be looting our property, that one of them said to me: “See the Arab-Iraqi army up there?” They were really close by. On the hills, I could see 300-400 men. “Their commander has maps of Tel Aviv.” That’s what he told me on May fourteenth.’
6
On May 15th, with independence declared, and with open war, the perpetual conflict between Beit Hashita and its Arab neighbours was over. That, at least, was how Saul remembered it.

It was no doubt convenient to pin those memories to such a definitive date: the account fits with the narrative of the embattled Jewish state, under attack after its legitimate declaration of independence. Inconveniently, the historical record tells a somewhat different story – the Gideon campaign had begun five days earlier in anticipation of the declaration of independence, and the larger military conflict had begun months before, and in some places the previous year, and it continued, with periodic ceasefires, until early 1949. But as far as the conflict with the kibbutz and its immediate neighbours was concerned, Saul’s memory was accurate: soon, almost all the Arab neighbours of the kibbutz were gone.

After the end of the 1948 war, members of refugee families who had been separated during the conflict sent messages to each other across the border, in broadcasts on Jordanian and Israeli radio. Saul was told, though he didn’t hear it himself, that a refugee from Al Murassas or Yubla, now living in Irbid, had dedicated a song to him on Jordanian radio. Twenty years later, after the 1967 war, when the borders were once more open, some of the refugees from Al Murassas and Yubla came back to visit. It was impressive, Saul remarked, how they had got on in Irbid – opening shops, ‘their special talent’, and sending members of the next generation, whom he’d known as babies, to study throughout eastern Europe as doctors and engineers. ‘And all this, from a tiny village which hardly had a primary school,’ he exclaimed. ‘This development stems, perhaps, from their forced escape from here.’

Most of the Arab population had fled or been expelled, but some people remained in a handful of villages, and this created a moral issue that troubled Saul – that of Arabs working as hired labour on land that had once belonged to them. ‘We took these fields from them – we took them in war and many kibbutz members were killed in those battles, mind you,’ he said to his interviewer, but hired labour was anathema to him, to the kibbutz ideology: ‘If we become employers, the kibbutz becomes an employer, our children become employers, and they will be like employers all over the world in spite of all our education ... And this will be the end of the kibbutz.’

This was the story of Al Murassas and Yubla, the villages my mother had named on the phone that day in late August when I sat on my doorstep in Wales, talking to her in Australia. The story is there to discover in
Kibbutz Makom
, in
All That Remains
, and elsewhere, and the larger context can be read in books on the 1948 war by Pappe, Morris, Avi Shlaim and many others. If the kibbutz was not directly responsible for what happened, it certainly benefited, for after 1948, Beit Hashita and its neighbours began to cultivate land that had belonged to the destroyed villages. But some of Beit Hashita’s fields that had belonged to Al Murassas and Yubla were not the spoils of war: this was land that had been bought from the villages. And none of this explained the 3,500 dunams of land with which the kibbutz had started – none of it explained Shatta, which, in
Kibbutz Makom
, Saul describes casually as ‘an old abandoned Arab village’.

A picture of Shatta hangs on the wall of the entranceway to the kibbutz archives – a long, framed, black-and-white photograph, with a Hebrew caption that reads
HaKfar Shatta: 1933
. In the foreground on the left, against Mount Gilboa, stand the squared, flat-roofed buildings of an Arab village; to the right the buildings are falling into a ruin of tumbled stone.

I could not find the name Shatta on the lists of Palestinian Arab villages depopulated between 1947 and 1949. It’s not among Benny Morris’s 369 villages in
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
, not among Ilan Pappe’s 531 depopulated villages in
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
, and not on Salman Abu Sitta’s maps in the
Atlas of Palestine
or in his
The Return Journey
. It isn’t on the list of 418 depopulated villages in Walid Khalidi’s
All That Remain
s, either. Shatta doesn’t appear in the record of conflict because it wasn’t depopulated in the lead-up to the 1948 war, or during the war itself, or after. It was depopulated years before that, in 1931.

All that’s left of Shatta is its hidden railway station building, lying out of sight inside Shatta prison, which is a converted Tegart fort from the British Mandate period. Now only the prison name retains a memory of the village. ‘I looked before me and saw a huge building towering like an ugly demon of the desert,’ recalls Saeed, the protagonist of Emile Habiby’s novel
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist.
‘Its walls were yellow, and around it there was a high, white outer wall. There were guards posted on each of the four sides of the roof, and they could be seen standing with their guns at the ready. We were awestruck by the spectacle of this yellow castle, so exposed and naked of any vegetation, protruding like a cancerous lump on the breast of a land itself sick with cancer. The big man was unable to control himself and exclaimed, “There! The terrible Shatta prison! How fantastic!”’
7

This prison is one of the most evocative and terribly familiar landmarks from my childhood; this is the prison you pass just before turning left off the Ruler Road to Kibbutz Beit Hashita. By the time my mother was old enough to remember, in the mid 1940s, all that was left of the village itself was
beit ha-sheikh
, the sheikh’s house – a building that had initially been used by kibbutzniks as a cowshed. It was unsafe, with precarious stone walls. As a child she and her classmates found broken pottery there, and they thought that it was from biblical times. ‘But,’ she said to me, correcting herself, ‘I expect they were just bits of pottery from the people who had lived there before.’ Her brother Asaf, fifteen years younger than her, also remembered
beit ha-sheikh
. By the early 1940s there were no other remains, and now
beit ha-sheikh
is also gone.