Read Online My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit - Free Book Online

Bentwich’s Victorianism and Herzl’s haut-bourgeois elitism. They want communism to colonize Palestine. If possible, they want to turn the entire country into one Zionist working-class commune.
    The way to that goal begins with Ein Harod. Let Ein Harod grow as fast as it can. Let it take more and more fields, capture more and more of the valley. Allow it to diversify into the profitable areas of crafts, light industry, and heavy industry. Let it conquer every patch of land in sight, conquer every field of human activity. Subjugate the valley to an alternative socioeconomic regime, self-reliant and self-possessed and able to fulfill the needs and realize the dreams of Jewish socialism in the Land of Israel.
    When spring arrives, the Ein Harod pioneers begin to drain the valleys. One evening, a quiet and earnest engineer arrives in the young kibbutz. Wearing a gray suit, he stands before the bewildered pioneers and explains what is about to be done. He shows them a map of the valley: the thick blue lines are major canals, the thin ones are minor canals. The minor canals lead to the major canals, whose purpose is to drain the bad waters out of the valley. The network of thin and thick lines is laid out across the valley like a fisherman’s net. It will drain the thousand-year-old marshes and muck and malarial scourge and clear the valley for progress.
    Some days later, strange men appear. Wearing khaki shorts and bizarre-looking high rubber Wellingtons, the surveyors look like prehistoric amphibious creatures. And yet these human frogs manage to walk about the cursed swamps. They hammer pegs and tie ropes along which the major canals and the minor canals will be dug. After they are done, Wellingtons, ropes, and shovels of all sorts arrive in camp. By sunrise the Labor Brigade pioneers take off into the valley’s marshes. The heat is unbearable but the mosquitoes are worse. Buzzing about the ears, eyes, and private parts, they suck fresh blood from the strong young bodies. The stench of the swamp is overpowering. The tall reeds are infested with snakes. Yet the canals must be dug.
    The boys work in teams of five. Each team digs one layer of mud and then moves on so that the next team will dig deeper. Standing in a two-yard-wide ditch, each bare-chested pioneer has to stick his shovelbetween the dripping walls of the canal and lift the filth above him. Once the hard soil, hidden under the marsh for a millennium, is finally exposed, there is a fury of festive shouting. Now the girls walk in, bearing baskets filled with white gravel that, since morning, they have been producing with their small, efficient chisels. Only now, when the girls’ gravel lines the boys’ canal, may lunch be served. Canned beef and loaves of bread sate their hunger.
    Only a few months ago the draining project seemed unreal—as ambitious as the Suez Canal project, as dangerous as the Panama Canal. But now, day by day, the swamps retreat. Clay pipes laid in the newly dug, well-lined canals absorb the deadly subterranean waters. The July sun does the rest. Acre after acre, the marshes give way to fertile fields. Zionist planning, Zionist know-how, and Zionist labor push back the swamps that have cursed the valley for centuries. Malaria is on a dramatic decline. Even the remaining Arab neighbors benefit from the miraculous project. The desolate Valley of Harod is gradually turning green.
    In years to come, historians will try to determine which is the more dominant feature of the endeavor, socialism or nationalism. Some will argue that choosing socialism at this critical stage is Zionism’s cunning way of conquering the land. Socialism gives this belated colonizing project a sense of justice and an aura of legitimacy. As the colonizers of the Valley of Harod don’t resemble at all the French masters of Algeria or the British plantation owners of Rhodesia, they are in the clear. By working the land with their bare hands and by living in poverty and