Leon Uris (44 page)

The main difference was the measure of individual freedom and the fact that a man’s family was in his own house and he ran his own farm in the way he saw fit. The first
moshav
was in the Jezreel Valley and was named after its Biblical site, Nahalal, the Heritage. The Nahalal pioneers faced the toughest swamp and did a miraculous job of redemption.

The drawback of the
moshav
movement in the over-all scheme was the working for personal profit and the inability of the
moshav
to absorb the numbers of new arrivals the
kibbutz
could; but both movements flourished and grew.

As the Yishuv grew, so did the complexities of the community. Barak Ben Canaan, a respected elder citizen, was never at rest. Zionism had a bulky machinery and there were a dozen different political philosophies inside the Yishuv. The dealings with the Arabs became more delicate after the riots and the dealings with the British became more confusing after their sudden departure from the Balfour Declaration and the articles of mandate. Barak’s wise council was sought in every quarter. Although there were no more outbreaks against the Jews, the atmosphere was one of uneasy calm. Every day there was a new story of an ambush, a sniping, or a theft. The tirades from the Moslem pulpit never ended. There was always tension in the air, for the sinister Mufti, Haj Amin el Husseini, lurked in the shadows.

One day in 1924 Barak returned to Tel Aviv after a particularly difficult week at the Yishuv Central in Jerusalem. He was always happy to come home to his three-room flat on Hayarkon Street overlooking the Mediterranean. This time he was delighted and surprised to see his old friend, Kammal, the muktar of Abu Yesha, awaiting him.

“For many years I have been meditating to try to solve the perplexing riddle of how to help my people. It grieves me to say this but there are no greater exploiters than the Arab effendis. They do not want things better for the fellaheen ... it may endanger their own pleasures.”

Barak listened intently. This was a tremendous confession on the part of an Arab and one so enlightened as Kammal.

“I have watched the Jews come back and perform miracles on the land. We have nothing in common in religion or language or outlook. I am not even sure the Jews will not eventually take all the land. Yet ... the Jews are the only salvation for the Arab people. The Jews are the only ones in a thousand years who have brought light to this part of the world.”

“I know this is difficult for you to say, Kammal ...”

“Let me continue, please. If we can live side by side in peace although our worlds are far apart then we must eventually prosper from what you have done. I see no other way for the Arab people, Barak, and I don’t know if it is right or wrong.”

“We have never given you reason to doubt our sincerity in wanting peace ...”

“Yes ... but there are powers greater than you and I who could bring us into conflict against our will.”

How true ... how very true, Barak thought.

“Barak, I am going to sell the Zion Settlement Society that land by the Huleh Lake you have always wanted.”

Barak’s heart began to beat fast.

“It is not merely benevolence. I have conditions. You must allow the Arabs of Abu Yesha to learn your farming and sanitation methods. This can only be done slowly over a period of time. I want a portion of the village’s more deserving boys to be able to attend your school to learn to read and write.”

“That will all be done,” Barak said.

“There is one more condition.”

“And what is that?”

“You must come too.”

Barak rose and rubbed his great beard. “Me? Why me?”

“As long as you are there I know the conditions will be kept and that we will be able to live in peace. I have trusted you from the first day you entered Abu Yesha as a boy over thirty years ago.”

“I will think it over,” Barak said.

“And what will you tell Kammal?” Sarah asked.

Barak shrugged. “What is there to say? We can’t go, of course. What a shame. For years I have been trying to get him to sell that land. Now if I don’t go up there we will never get it.”

“It is a pity,” Sarah agreed and poured some tea.

Barak paced the floor unhappily. “After all, Sarah,” he mumbled, “we must face facts. I am needed at the Yishuv Central and the Settlement Society. It isn’t as if I was running a candy store on Allenby Road.”

“Of course not, dear,” Sarah said sympathetically. “You are vital in your work. The entire Yishuv needs you.”

“Yes,” he said, pacing again, “and we aren’t children any longer. I am past fifty and the land is going to be very very hard to redeem.”

“You are right, Barak. We are too old to pioneer. You have done your share in building this country.”

“Right! I’ll turn Kammal down.”

He sank into a chair and sighed deeply. He had not succeeded in convincing himself. Sarah stood over him and smiled. “You are mocking me, woman,” he said softly. “What’s the use?”

She sat on his lap and was almost lost in his greatness. His huge hands were amazingly gentle as they stroked her hair.

“I was thinking of you and Ari. It will be brutal work and the hardships will be great.”

“Shhhh ... drink your tea.”

Barak resigned his position with the Zion Settlement Society, sold his apartment in Tel Aviv, and led twenty-five pioneer families out to the Huleh swamplands to build a
moshav
. They called it Yad El, the Hand of God.

They pitched tents below the fields of Abu Yesha and mapped out their task. No pioneers yet had faced a job so difficult. The Huleh swamp was deep, and full of forbidding tangles of thickly matted unyielding brush and papyrus which towered to heights of fifteen feet. The muck was alive with poisonous snakes, scorpions, and rats and a hundred other creatures. Wild boars and wolves lurked near the isolated base camp. Everything had to be brought in on muleback, including drinking and washing water.

Sarah was in charge of the base camp, the hospital tent, and the kitchen. Barak headed the work gangs which took to the swamps daily with shovels and picks.

In that first scorching summer they worked day after day, week after week, and month after month in hundred-degree heat, in waist-and neck-high water, slogging away the muck to start drainage channels. With machetes they hacked at the jungle growth until they couldn’t raise their arms. The women worked right in the swamps along with the men. Young Ari Ben Canaan, ten years of age, one of three children in the settlement, ran off the pails of sludge and ran in drinking water and food to the workers. The workdays were seven each week. The work hours were sunrise to sunset. Still each night they found the energy to sing a few songs of the fields and dance a
hora
before their six or seven hours of sleep.

At night there was the usual guard against robbers and animals.

It was a race to get the channels in before the winter rains. If the water didn’t drain off, the summer’s work would be wasted. Hundreds of Australian eucalyptus trees were put in to suck up water. Every
kibbutz
and
moshav
in the area sent over as many workers as they could spare each day to help the pioneers.

At night, by candlelight, Sarah and Barak took turns schooling Ari and the other two children.

The winter downpours came and all but swept the base camp into the swamp. After each downpour they rushed to the channels to keep the slush from blocking the runoff.

Even a man as strong and resolute as Barak Ben Canaan was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t attempted too much this time. Each time he looked at Ari and Sarah his heart bled. They were always covered with bug bites or suffering from dysentery or hunger or thirst.

And worse was the ravaging malaria. In that first summer and winter Sarah had five attacks and Ari four. The chills and fevers and deliriums all but killed them. Ari, like Sarah, took his pain in silence.

The swamp broke many of the families. Half the original group quit to return to the city to find an easier way.

And soon—Yad El had a graveyard. Two members died of malaria.

Yad El: the Hand of God. It may have been the hand of God that led them there but it was going to be the hands of men that licked the swamp.

For three solid years they beat back the swamp!

At last there was enough land to make twenty-five farms of two hundred
dunams
each. There was no time to gloat, for there were crops to be planted and homes to be built.

Young Ari Ben Canaan had shaken off the effects of malaria and the other illnesses and had become as sturdy as a rock. At the age of fourteen he could do a man’s day’s work.

When they moved into their cottage and the fields had been plowed and planted Barak was given a reward for his years of toil. Sarah told him she was pregnant again.

At the end of the fourth year two momentous things happened to Barak Ben Canaan. Sarah presented him with a baby daughter who had flaming red hair like his own. The second occasion was the harvest of the first crop at Yad El.

At last the weary pioneers stopped their labor and took time to celebrate. What a celebration it was!
Kibbutzniks
and
moshavniks
from all over the area who had lent a hand at Yad El came to join in the celebration. Arabs from Abu Yesha came. There was gaiety for a week, each night ending at dawn as weary
hora
dancers collapsed with joy. Everyone came to look at Barak’s and Sarah’s new daughter. She was named Jordana after the river which Bowed past the edge of Yad El.

As the celebration continued, Barak took his son Ari and saddled two horses and they rode up to Tel Hai to that place where he had crossed into the Promised Land from Lebanon forty years before. Tel Hai, the death place of Joseph Trumpledor, was a shrine of the Yishuv. Barak looked down from the hill to Yad El as he had sworn he would long ago.

“I took your mother up here before we were married,” he said to Ari. He put his arm around his son’s shoulder. “Someday there will be two dozen settlements in this valley and it will be green all the year around.”

“Look how beautiful Yad El is from here, Father.”

The irrigation sprinklers were whirling and a school was under construction. They could see an enormous shed where the community had put a dozen pieces of heavy machinery. There were paths of rose bushes and Bowers and lawns and trees.

There was sadness, too, for the Yad El cemetery had already claimed five members.

As Kammal had hoped, the establishment of Yad El had a tremendous effect upon the Arabs of Abu Yesha. The creation of the
moshav
was in itself a startling revelation. Barak was true to his agreement and set up special schools for the Arabs to teach them sanitation, the use of heavy machinery, and new farming methods. Their school was open to any Arab youngster of Abu Yesha who would attend. The Yad El doctor and nurse were always at the call of the Arabs.

Kammal’s favorite son was a youngster named Taha who was a few years younger than Ari. From the time of his birth Kammal had ingrained into Taha his own great desire to better the conditions of the fellaheen. As the coming muktar of Abu Yesha, Taha spent more time at Yad El than in his own village. He was the personal ward of the Ben Canaan family. Taha and Ari became close friends.

While Yad El and Abu Yesha lived in peace and proved Arab and Jew could exist side by side despite their cultural differences a slow mantle of fear was falling over many of the other effendi families in Palestine. They were becoming frightened at the spirit and progress of the Third Aliyah.

In the beginning the effendis had sold the Jews worthless swamps and rock-filled and eroded hills, eager to get their hands on Jewish gold and certain the land would continue its dormancy. The Jews turned around and performed miracles of redemption. Not only had the farms grown, but cities were springing up all over Palestine.

The example of the Jews could be disastrous. What if the fellaheen began demanding education, sanitation, and medical facilities? What if the fellaheen, God forbid, were to take a fancy to the way the Jews governed themselves by equal votes of both men—and women! It could well wreck the perfect feudal system of the effendis!

To counter the progress of the Jews, the effendis harped on the ignorance, fears, and religious fanaticism of the fellaheen. They pounded the theme that the Jews were invaders from the West out to steal their fellaheen’s lands—even though the effendis had themselves sold this land. They maintained tension so that the fellaheen would not come into too close contact with the new ideas.

After many years without a major incident Haj Amin el Husseini moved again. This time he concocted a cold-blooded fraud aimed at driving the Arabs wild. The year was 1929.

The site of the Dome of the Rock or the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem was worshiped as holy ground by the Moslems as the point where their prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. On this very site stood the one remaining wall of the Great Jewish Temple which had been destroyed for a second time in
A.D.
76 by the Romans. This wall of the Temple was the holiest of all Jewish holy places. Pious Jews gathered before the wall to pray and to weep for the past glory of Israel. From their tears it became known as the “Wailing Wall.”

The Mufti circulated faked pictures showing Jews at the Wailing Wall preparing to “desecrate” the Arab holy place of the Dome of the Rock. The fanatic Moslem fellaheen started another outbreak supported by effendi and Husseini Jew baitings. Again the riots hit the defenseless old Jews of the holy cities. The slaughter was far greater than the Mufti-inspired riots of a decade before. The rioting spread against some of the weaker settlements and on to the roads, and casualties mounted into the thousands on both sides. The British again appeared helpless to stop the slaughter.

They sent a commission of inquiry. The commission squarely placed the blame on Arab shoulders. Then, by great paradox, they completely ignored the Balfour Declaration and the articles of mandate and suggested that Jewish land buying and immigration be restricted to “soothe Arab fears.”