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

Harod. But there is fire in his belly. More than any other Zionist leader in Palestine, he understands the Diaspora and feels for the Diaspora. More than any other local socialist-Zionist leader, he is Jewish. Even when he rails against Judaism, he does so as a Jew. Even when he rises up against religion, he rises up religiously. There is so much God in the godless Tabenkin as he assaults God and dismisses God and tries to create a God-free, godless world.
    That’s why, in the early 1920s, Tabenkin is the link between the events in the Valley of Harod and the events in Eastern Europe. That’s why Tabenkin talks to the valley’s youth on behalf of the Diaspora, and talks to the Diaspora on behalf of the valley’s youth. That’s why, day in and day out, Tabenkin wonders whether the work being done in the valley will be sufficient, whether the valley’s youth will have enough in them to pull European Jewry from the deadly ocean in which it is drowning.
    On its first anniversary, Ein Harod celebrates its success. By now the year-old kibbutz has mastered 8,390 dunams of cultivated land. Grain takes up 7,000 dunams, olive tree groves and vineyards 450 dunams, the vegetable garden 200. There are over 600 dunams of forest, with 14,000 eucalyptus trees, 2,000 pine trees, and 1,000 cypresses, which cover the inclines of Mount Gilboa with the first green shoots of hope.
    There are nearly three hundred comrades in Ein Harod in the summer of 1922. Apart from Tabenkin and a few others, the age range isfrom nineteen to twenty-five. Two hundred white, cone-shaped tents house a young, thriving, and energetic community that is transforming the valley and the lives of its inhabitants. Four other new kibbutzim are now flourishing in the valley. Momentum is fast and strong; there is not a force in sight to stop it.
    Many now come to see the wonder. As the Ein Harod experiment becomes world famous, it attracts attention in Jewish communities and progressive circles worldwide. Some compare its revolutionary ways to those being tried in the young USSR. Some see it as providing the only example of successful, democratic socialism. When one of Zionism’s leading lights arrives for a day-long visit, he thinks in different terms. Deeply touched, the national moral leader says the following:
    From the nation’s valley of death rose a new generation. This generation finds life’s meaning in toiling our ancestor’s land and reviving our ancient tongue. The draining of the Harod swamps, which only covered the land after our people were forced to go into exile, is a true wonder. But this wonder also symbolizes the draining of the swamp our nation was bogged down in during two millennia of exile. You, the pioneers of Harod, are the heroes of the new generation. What you are doing is healing the land and healing the nation. You are taking us back to the source.
    Yet the listening comrades are not heroes. What’s remarkable about them is their lack of heroism. Practical and down-to-earth, they know they must do whatever must be done, but there is no self-aggrandizement about them, no sentimentality, no smugness. Caught in a drama larger than themselves, they simply carry on. Another furrow, another acre, another swamp, until the valley is truly theirs. Until the land is once again the Land of Israel.
    But there is one feature of the landscape that does not yet retreat. The serfs of Ein Jaloud are gone, but the serfs of Shatta remain, living by the railway station right in the center of the valley. And the villagers of Nuris menacingly overlook Ein Harod from the mountaintop. The villagers of Zarin are actually doing quite well as the valley booms. The friendly neighbors of Tel Fir and those of Komay are multiplying now,as the anopheles mosquitoes are no longer here to take the lives of their young. The Bedouins, too, find the valley more attractive now. As summer peaks, they pitch their black tents in the northern part of the valley. Their herds of