Read My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel Online
Authors: Ari Shavit
November is extremely wet, with thirteen days of rain. In a three-day period, 112 millimeters of rain descends on the orange grove. Night after night the orange grower paces the halls of his spacious villa, fearing hail. If a winter hailstorm followed the spring heat wave, the first season would be lost. But as the storm recedes and the skies clear, the orange grower finds that his fruit is unharmed. And when he stands by the trees, now heavy with oranges, he feels hopeful. Perhaps the blessing of the November rains would compensate for the curse of the April
hamsin
. Perhaps, against all odds, the first season of his young orange grove would be one of prosperity.
The orange grower is not the sort of man who believes that blessings are given freely. What is called for in this land is sweat, dedication, and precision. In the first weeks of December 1935, the orange grower
clears the paths to and within the grove. He rids the trees of dry branches so that they wouldn’t bruise the fruit during the harvest. And he opens the heavy lock of the packing house, where he had stored ladders and shears, satchels and baskets. He makes sure the ladders are sturdy, and sharpens the long blades of the shears. He lines the rough baskets with soft jute that would protect the fruit.
In late December the early picking begins. To protect the sensitive green fruit, work is done only by hand. Then in January 1936, as a golden winter sun paints the skies blue over Rehovot, the major harvest of the Shamouti begins. The Arab pickers work in pairs. One climbs a three-legged ladder up to the branches and begins to pick from above, while the other disappears into the thicket to pick from below. To pick the fruit, each takes the delicate Shamouti gently with the palm of his left hand and fastens the rounded blades of his shears on the petiole, separating the fruit from the branch. Then he places the fruit carefully in his satchel.
The orange grower stands by the working pairs, making sure the ladders do not hit the oranges and the shears do not scar their peels and the oranges land softly in the fast-filling satchels. Once the Californiamade satchels are full, he summons a Bedouin girl so that the workers can empty their bags gently into her straw basket. And when the straw basket is full, he makes sure that the workers help lift it onto the Bedouin girl’s head. Once the full basket is on her head, he makes sure she joins the other Bedouin girls coming from other sections of the grove. The orange grower enjoys the sight of the procession of Bedouin girls walking along the citrus trees in their long black dresses with straw baskets on their heads full of bright Jaffa oranges.
As 1936 begins, the orange grower is somewhat concerned. There are rumors of unrest. The national Arab leadership and the nationalistic Arab press are inciting against the Jews. Some friends in Rehovot fear that something nasty is coming. But the local weekly journal reports that by January 12, 1936, Palestine exported 2,794,165 citrus crates. By January 19 it exported 2,923,571 crates. By January 26, 3,259,609. The orange groves yield nicely, the market conditions are favorable, and Zionism
is heading in the right direction. The writer Moshe Smilansky, the leader of Rehovot’s orange growers, publishes strong, decisive words in the local weekly:
Never in history did a people enter a country as we entered our country. There are two reasons for this: We are returning to our homeland that has waited for us as wasteland, and we are not entering a new country that is not ours; we are a people of ancient culture, and in the long years of our exile we have added to that culture the great values of a new civilization. All these riches we bring with us as a gift to our ancient land, and to the people who have settled it while we were away, and to the other peoples of the surrounding Orient.…
Never did a colonial project bring so much blessing as the blessing brought upon the country and its inhabitants by our project. Every piece of land upon which our feet have stepped turned good. We did good to us and we did good to all that are with us. This is our pride. It is the pride of an endeavor of justice. Never was a colonial endeavor a historical necessity to any country as our project is a historical necessity for this country. We shall not recover without this country and this country shall not recover without us. This historical imperative is to guarantee that no human hand will demolish our great deed. Our deed is a deed of justice, absolute justice. It is all decency and love.
A lazy midwinter rain falls on the red-tiled roof of the packing house. In the soft rain, the Bedouin girls walk into its dim, elongated hall with straw baskets on their heads. The Bedouin chief takes the baskets off the girls’ heads and helps them empty them gently so that the oranges roll on the straw-matted cement floor and are then gathered into meterhigh piles. In the gray February light, the orange grower can see pile after pile of oranges rise from the floor of his new, modern packing house.
The sorters go first. With sharp, discerning eyes, their hands flying over the fruit, the Yemenite sorters cull the export quality oranges from the rest. Next come the wrappers, most of them newly immigrated European Jewish men and women, who wrap each fruit with delicate tissue paper, as if it were a precious pearl.
Now it is time for the packers. In working-class berets and khaki uniforms, the packers are the elite of the packing house crew. With astounding speed and precision they fill every crate with row after row of the glowing freshness that is the pride of Palestine.
The carpenters come last and do their work on the front porch. They carefully hammer the crate lids with dull, rusted nails, chosen so that the oranges won’t be bruised and will survive their long journey abroad.
Now the orange crates sit piled up one on top of the other near the packing house. Not so long ago, they would have been taken to port by camels, but today small trucks arrive to carry the crates along the gravel road to Rehovot’s main thoroughfare. In the port of Jaffa, they will be loaded onto Liverpool-bound ships. From Liverpool the oranges will travel to the wholesale market of Covent Garden, in London, and from Covent Garden they will make their way to Chelsea, Belgravia, Hampstead, Primrose Hill, St. John’s Wood, even Buckingham Palace.
The orange grower is not sentimental. He is a man of deeds. But as the rain falls on the packing house, he walks up and down the long hall observing the sorters, wrappers, packers, and carpenters. He sees that their lips are pursed in concentration. He notices the quiet, the order, the sense of the sacredness of the work, as if the working men and women realize that they are taking part in an event far greater than themselves. The orange grower thinks of Smilansky’s words, which express his sentiments exactly. The sons and daughters of Jewish shopkeepers have become fine orange growers. They have learned to love the citrus tree and nurture it as in no other land. In one generation the Jews have totally transformed themselves, so much so that now the U.S. Department of Agriculture fears that the fast growth of the citrus industry in Palestine will destabilize the international citrus market.
Outside, the trucks’ engines are roaring. On the porch, the carpenters’ hammers are nailing the orange crates shut. But indoors it’s all silence. Orange after orange wrapped in delicate Diphenyl paper, orange after orange carefully placed into the right space in the crate with precision, dedication, and proficiency. There is harmony here: man and
woman, Yemenite and Ashkenazi, Jew and Arab. The two peoples of the land are working side by side, producing its golden fruit.
Years later, Smilansky’s nephew Yizhar, who would become one of Israel’s leading authors, will try to capture the magic of Rehovot of the 1930s. “No one was in a hurry,” he will write.
Everyone lived in comfortable moderation, riding donkeys and horses. And all was open, really open, and wide and imbued with a good farmer’s thoroughness. Although there was never a shortage of trouble and there were days of fear and tension too, to come to Rehovot was to come to a place that had form, that had some slowness and level-headedness and that had men of honor.
There was calm there, and safety, and things did not change much. As if there was a secret pact between the ways of people and the fullness of orange groves and the slow flight of the crows that landed boastfully atop the eucalyptus trees. And in the evening, the silence was utterly full and it was given over to the ticking of the water pumps and the strumming of strings of far-away instruments, and there were jackals, and in the silence one could hear even the waves of the distant sea.
Writers wrote essays into the night by the light of lanterns, roosters crowed in circles, and donkeys brayed from the depth of their bellies, saying that no matter what, there was no reason to worry, the world was in good order.
To come to Rehovot was to come to a place with a face. It had gravity, it had a shadow, it had earnestness and straightforwardness. There was someone to talk to about matters of utmost importance and matters of no importance. The orange groves were fertile and almost blue of rich green. The hedgerows of acacias were fragrant, with golden stars over the paths of gold. Camels carried heavy citrus crates, the irrigation pools were dream-like, and reckless boys swam recklessly in them. And there was a never-ending heart that beat there all the time, round and round, and water came up day and night from the depth of the sandy soil earth that was shaded by oranges.
But as I look back in time and watch the orange grower now leaving the packing house and riding his horse in the sweet, lazy afternoon hours
of mid-March 1936, I see even more than that. The orange grower does not know it yet, but from the two-story stone building south of the railway that houses the new Sieff Research Institute, Israel’s future scientific prowess will emerge. From the experimental farm of the Chumasch family on the grounds of the Agricultural Institute, Israel’s future modern agriculture will spring forth. The talent and the knowledge of the German-Jewish scientists and agronomists who reside in the new Bauhaus homes of the Miller neighborhood will utterly transform the colony and the country. The Rehovot of 1936 is quiet and calm and harmonious, but it already has within it the seeds of a mind-boggling future.
On his way to his home in Rehovot, the orange grower’s horse passes by the icehouse, the small pharmaceutical plant, the new cafés on the newly paved Herzl High Street. It passes by the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the bakeries, the hairdresser’s salons, and the new bus station. It passes by the new shop of the newly arrived Austrian photographer and new shops for electrical devices. It passes by the fit youngsters who gather on the sports field for their physical exercise, and it passes the respected elderly of the local landed gentry who are gathered in the landowners’ club. The horse then climbs the hill by the new maternity hospital and reaches the grand synagogue that overlooks Rehovot. In the west the orange grower can see the workers’ quarters; in the east, the grand colonial houses of the wealthy orange grove owners; in the south, the Yemenites; in the north, the modern palacelike villa being built by the well-known architect Erich Mendelsohn for the Zionist leader Dr. Chaim Weizmann. For two millennia the Jews had no place. Now, in Rehovot, they have a place.
Things feel right about the Rehovot of 1936. There is a balance between the revolution of Zionism and the evolution with which it is carried out. There is a balance between the need to grow fast and the determination to grow slowly. Both the social democrats of the working class and the liberals of the landowning class agree that step-by-step development is the way to grow. Both want Zionism to be rooted in the land and to grow from it gradually and naturally. There is no talk of taking the land by force. In their different ways they all want Zionism to be a natural identity-building process. They want to merge the healing of a people with the cultivation of a land. In March 1936, there is nothing totalitarian about Rehovot. There is no Bolshevism, no fascism,
no militarism. The Zionism of Rehovot is humane, pragmatic, moderate, and balanced. It is turning the seed that was planted here at the end of the nineteenth century into a living reality.
The end-of-season party is held in the orange grove in early April 1936. The orange grower is not the partying type, but his Tel Aviv friends have refused to take no for an answer. They said the current fashion was wild spring parties in the orange groves of Sharon, Judea, and Rehovot, and they have insisted that the packing house of the orange grove is just the place to hold one. They have taken it upon themselves to locate a bulky generator to generate electricity. They have hired a popular jazz band and spread the word in the Viennese-style cafés of the emerging metropolis. They have invited slim Berlin girls and mink-clad Polish society ladies. The guests have driven down from Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard in a jolly convoy of luxurious American cars, arriving at the orange grove gate with horns tooting and lights blazing.
The orange grower does not really join the party. He does not drink, does not dance. Although the raucous guests honor him with a toast, he prefers to watch. Standing in the corner of his own packing house turned nightclub, he is bewildered by the young entrepreneurs of Tel Aviv and the young orange grove owners of Rehovot who are pouring drink after drink for the Yemenite beauties of Rehovot and the sophisticated urban European immigrants who now reside in Tel Aviv. He is astonished by the flashy import and export agents who lead onto the improvised dance floor the tipsy maidens in their skimpy dresses. The music played by the band becomes more and more lively. First the waltz, then the tango, then the fox-trot. What a hit, the fox-trot. After a noisy contest for the belle of the ball, and then a naughty contest for the boldest couple of the ball, some couples slip away from the light into the dark of the orange grove.
When the sun rises, the urban crowd is gone, and the orange grower is on his own again. The guardian, Abed, and his sons carry tables and chairs out of the packing house, the Zarnuga workers rake the court and wash the well house. With some dismay they collect a silky brassiere left by the irrigation pool. The orange grower turns his back on all that and walks in his high boots into the thick morning dew.