SETTLEMENTS (Shmuel Katz memoirs) The first element (of havlage) was the “aliyah shniya” (the second wave of Zionist immigration): the generation of pioneers who came to Palestine from Eastern Europe in the decade before the First World War. Today in Israel “aliyah shniya” is usually a term of humorous tolerance of the pretensions of a self-regarding generation, a self-designated “elite” who believe not only that they above all laid the foundations of the State of Israel but that they represent the quintessence of idealism and morality, not to mention political wisdom. They were an intellectually vigorous element, who placed their incisive stamp on early Zionist culture. They and their disciples were in 1936 the leaders of the community. They were revolutionaries. They had come from small-town, middle–class, usually religious, Jewish homes in Tsarist Russia. They had avidly consumed all the forbidden literature of the age. They were in revolt against Tsarism, they were in revolt against the insecurity and the humiliating status of the Jews. They were in revolt against the empty incantations of organized religion. They were in revolt against the unproductive life of the middle-class. They were in revolt against commerce and shopkeeping, sometimes even against the professions. They were in revolt because they were Socialists. They were in revolt also because they had been fired by Zionism – and Zionism was still anathema to the majority of their generation and to many of their own parents. Their very coming to Palestine (often with their parent’s volubly hostility echoing in their ears) was the crystallized expression of their revolt. They came to restore the wilderness. They came in order to go back to the Land. They came in order to set up a Socialist society. “RESTORING THE WILDERNESS” HAS BECOME SO COMMON AS A CATCH-PHRASE TO DESCRIBE THE JEWISH ACHIEVEMENT IN PALESTINE THAT ITS SIGNIFICANCE, IN TOIL AND SWEAT, IN DISEASE AND DEATH, IS GIVEN LITTLE THOUGHT. Forced into ideological debate with other sections of the population, they became all the more conscious of the completeness of their “weltanschauung” and of the revolution they were bringing into being. When some of their number fell by the wayside and went to the despised towns or even back to Europe – those that remained became the more conscious of the magnitude of the role they were playing in Jewish history. Those early years, compounded of an intense emotional upheaval, of great physical exertion and many material hardships left an unusually deep imprint on their way of thought, a certain accentric fanaticism over the new values they had created in Jewish life, a certain superciliousness towards newcomers and certainly towards all who did not follow their way of life; and a quite unpacific and, in the end, unscrupulous hostility to all who dared to oppose their ideas or even to assign them a subordinate place in the scale of importance. Their ideas, their outlook, the achievements for which they had given and suffered so much, were no less than sacred. Their achievements: IN THE WILDERNESS IN WHICH THEY STARTED THEIR WORK EVERY NEW HUT SET UP, EVERY NEW TREE PLANTED, EVERY NEW BLADE OF GRASS, EVERY SQUARE YARD OF LAND RECLAIMED FROM THE SWAMP, WAS A TANGIBLE VICTORY ON ALL THE FRONTS OF THE COMPOSITE SOCIAL UPHEAVAL OF THEIR DREAMS. The sensation of the farmer as he sees the sprouting of his crops, as he helps his cow give birth to her calf, was multiplied manifold in the hearts of these revolutionaries. Their attachment to material achievement became obsessive. They saw what had been achieved, what had been built, what had been planted, as a mother sees the child she has nursed back to health through a long illness. THEIRS WAS THE PHILOSOPHY OF A PIONEER GENERATION, EMERGING FROM A PEOPLE LANDLESS, DISPERSED, HUMILIATED, PERSECUTED, LASHED BY HISTORY TO A PRECARIOUS EXISTENCE IN THE NEBULOUS AREA BETWEEN PRODUCER AND CONSUMER. EVERY ACHIEVEMENT OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC REGENERATION WAS INDEED WONDERFUL. Their dominant emotion in every set of circumstances, their dominant reaction to every crisis, was to preserve “what existed” – the tangible achievements from which they believed all else flowed, which alone they saw as the foundation on which Jewish political existence could be built. With their intent gaze turned inward, they were not equipped to measure, or even to see clearly, the nature of the forces that were ranged against the fulfillment of the political regeneration of the Jewish people. Confronted by a clear sighted purposeful antagonism determined to set bounds to Jewish regeneration – they did not even identify the antagonist, let alone recognize his motives. Moreover they were still under the spell of the early British friendship for Zionism, of the historic and at the time seemingly miraculous emergence of the great In this they were not alone: the pro-British emotion was an almost universal Zionist attribute. They however also persuaded themselves that British interest in Zionism was of moral interest, that it was their social revolution which charmed the British people, and that the virtues they personified, if only sufficiently publicized, would restore British friendship – a friendship which, to their puzzlement, had taken on such strange forms of restriction, of aloof hostility, of discrimination, even humiliation, in the Jewish Homeland. * * * ROSH PINA: Whenever I could I traveled up to Galilee to visit the pelugot there. I fell in love with Galilee, its rugged heights, its rolling plains. In Galilee no less than in Jerusalem you were filled with a sense of history and of its continuity. (the Rabbis have studied there for centuries) No resistance to sentimentality could smother the almost mystic understanding of how Galilee had through the ages cradled the impulse to freedom, to revolt against oppression. There was a freedom in its very air which dictated freedom of the spirit. Most often I visited Rosh Pina. This village, established in the 1880s, was bathed in an old-world mellowness, its aspect an inviting sleepiness. The cobbled main street, under an overhanging canopy of tall eucalyptus trees, gave you a sense of unchanging tranquility, remote from the bustling dynamic of Palestine. This drowsy setting embraced naturally the effervescence, the hot youthful strivings, the tensions and the harsh day-to-day realities of the sixty members of the Betar pelugah. A youth poet, Shlomo Skulsky, was to write in a poem called “Rosh Pina,” today in a popular song: The height will not be conquered If no grave is on the slope. Among the Betarim in the pelugah at Rosh Pina in the spring of 1938 was a youth of 21, Shlomo Tabatchinik, who had adopted the Hebrew name of Ben-Yosef. His “grave on the slope” marked a turning point in our relations with Great Britain. (see ARAB MASSACRES theme) * * * Rabbi Eliezer Melamed: “Our Own Flesh and Blood” The first wave of immigrants, the Aliya HaRishona, for example, was composed for the most part of pious Jews whose coming to Israel was the outgrowth of what they had absorbed in the Yeshiva study halls. The founders of Zikhron Yaakov made their way to Israel after having already purchased a portion of land, but the Turkish administration did not allow these new arrivals to disembark at any port in the area from Alexandria to Beirut. Finally, after great effort, they managed to land at Haifa, and from there they made their way in carriages pulled by oxen until eventually arriving at their destination. So difficult was the way that the travelers were forced to send the oxen on ahead of themselves in order to render the path travelable. Their allotted plot of land was full of snakes and scorpions, and far from any other Jewish settlement (two days journey from Yaffo, and a day and half from Haifa). From where would they receive their necessities? To where would they deliver their products? When the officials of Baron Rothschild arrived they demanded to know who was responsible for the injustice that had been done to these settlers by having them sent to such a horrid location. Yet, despite all this, when the officials offered to have them relocated in a more central site, the settlers' response was notably straightforward: We are not budging from this place, even if its means eating the stones themselves. Large waves of Jewish immigration to Israel did not necessarily begin as a result of the First Zionist Congresses in Basel (in the manner that secular Zionism has attempted to portray). Long before this, in 5637 (1878), Jews of the Old Settlement began to set out beyond the walls of Jerusalem. One such pioneer was Yoel Moshe Solomon. He belonged to the third generation of a family of pioneers. His grandfather, Rabbi Zalman Tzoref, was murdered in a skirmish with Arabs while trying to reestablish the Churvah Synagogue in Jerusalem's Old City. In his remembrance the family name was changed to Solomon. His son was the "first Jewish 'Fellah' (field laborer) since the days of the second Temple," or at least so he was called. It was in such a home that Rabbi Yoel Moshe grew up. He presented Moses Montefiore with a detailed plan for creating a Jewish agricultural settlement. He was also a serious Torah scholar, the editor of a newspaper, a journalist, and completely steeped in Torah. He left his newspaper work in order to establish Petach Tikvah. This young settlement too had its share of difficulties; there was a period in which it was completely destroyed due to the great hardships that came upon it. The settlers left and went to Yahudiyeh, and only later did there arrive a group of Jews from Bialystok (the hometown of Rabbi Mohilever, the leader of the Zionist organization "Chovevei Tzion") and reestablish the settlement. In Hadera there was a very green area, and the local Arabs warned the Jewish settlers that the place was infested with malaria. During the course of the first seven years, 230 of Hadera's the 512 settlers died of this disease. It is told that on Yom Kippur, there were just enough settlers present for the prayer services to take place in the room adjacent to the hospital room. During the course of the day one of the members fell ill and expired leaving the settlers short of their quorum. They were uncertain as to whether or not they should to continue, yet, in the end, they decided that God Himself would be counted in order to complete their quorum. When the fast was over it was announced that before eating it was necessary to bury the deceased. In order to overcome the near-unbearable sadness which accompanied the loss, one of those present, himself a Torah scholar, advised the people to rejoice in the burial. And they did just that - they danced by the grave of the deceased. At a later date, the very same individual, who had always said that joy is the cure for everything, also died of malaria. Today, when traveling along Israel's coastal road, which runs between Haifa and Tel Aviv, we must remember the great self-sacrifice of the early settlers which gave birth to such settlement, all by virtue of a love for the land which they passed down to the generations to come. Such self-sacrifice shakes all existence and sets the machine in motion. They initiated it all. (THE GREAT BETRAYAL) As a result of Britain’s pledge to the Jews and acceptance of the League Mandate, Jews in all parts of the world, - but, above all, politically homeless Jews, - uprooted themselves and took up the march to make a home, a new home, in the old land. One hundred thousand men and women, bravest of the brave, have within a decade settled in |
