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From Palestine to Israel
My Earliest Memories of Zionism
THERE WAS NEVER a time that Israel was not a part of my consciousness. But in 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared the reestablishment of a nation-state for the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael (the Ancient land of Israel), it became my passion. I was turning 10, and my parents sent me to a Hebrew-speaking Zionist summer camp, called Camp Massad, in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, where we followed, with deep concern and interest, the news of the War of Independence in which all the surrounding Arab nations attacked the new state. That was more than 70 years ago, and my passion—and concern—has never abated, though the nature and degree of my involvement have changed dramatically over these many decades.
I grew up in a religious Zionist home, attended religious Zionist schools and summer camps, sang Zionist songs, and recited Zionist prayers. Every home in our modern Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood of Boro Park had a JNF (Jewish National Fund) “pushka” (charity box) with a map of Jewish Palestine on its blue-and-white metal surface. In the early years, before Israel became a nation, the charity was for purchasing and developing land for Jewish communities in what was to become Israel.1 (I even have a collection of JNF boxes going back well before the establishment of the state. They show the increasing purchases of land over time.) Much of the land was bought from distant land speculators in Syria and other locations and from local Arab landowners seeking to profit from the high prices offered by the JNF.2
David Ben-Gurion, then the head of the Jewish Agency (the pre-state “government”), was sensitive with regard to maintaining good relations with local Arabs.3
In elementary school—Yeshiva Etz Chaim (Tree of Life)—we sang “Hatikvah,” which was the Zionist anthem of hope, before it became Israel’s national anthem. I can still remember the original words, “L’shuv L’Eretz Avoseinu” (to return to the land of our fathers), which we sang until Israel declared statehood. These words of longing and hope were then changed to words of aspiration and determination: “Li’ Yot am chofshi b’artzeinu” (to be a free nation in our land).
The lyric was different but the music was the same.
Even our social athletic clubs (they were called SACs), in which we played street games like stickball, punch ball, stoop ball and ringalevio, had Zionist names. Mine was the Palmach, which was the forward strike force of the Haganah, which became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after the establishment of Israel. Our club “song” was the battle hymn of the Palmach, which we sang in Hebrew: “rishonim Tamid anachnu Tamid, anu anu Hapalmach” (“We are always the first; we are the Palmach”). (Years later, at a charity event in Los Angeles, I learned that Vidal Sassoon had been a Palmach fighter, and so we regaled the crowed with an off-tune duet of the battle hymn.) The very idea of a Jewish army capable of protecting Jews was thrilling to young Jews in a neighborhood that included many Holocaust survivors who had lacked any protection.
Several months before Israel’s establishment, we had watched the vote of the United Nations to partition British Mandatory Palestine into two states for two people: one for the Jews, one for the Arabs. The Jews immediately, if reluctantly, accepted the partition. The Arabs rejected it. (I own an original edition of the newspaper Haaretz that contains a report on the partition as the crucial step to statehood, as well as an original of the newspaper Hamashkif announcing the establishment of the state.) There was dancing in the streets. A school assembly celebrated the prelude to statehood by dancing the hora and offering prayers. Among the people I knew, there was no dissent or even doubt.4 We were all overjoyed.
But joy soon turned to concern, fear and distress when the surrounding armies attacked Israel immediately upon its establishment. Distress turned to tragedy when the son of one of my mother’s friends was killed. Moshe Perlstein had been studying at Hebrew University under the G.I. Bill of Rights when the fighting broke out, and he volunteered to join the Haganah. His death brought the war to our neighborhood. Our group of 10-year-old Zionists all imagined ourselves volunteering to fight for Israel’s survival when we came of age. Our school raised money to buy a jeep that was shipped to Israel. Before being sent abroad, it was proudly displayed in the driveway of our school.
I attended Camp Massad during the summer of 1948, while the War of Independence was raging (we played sports there using Hebrew words; a “strike” was a “shkia”—literally, a mistake). The Zionists had resurrected the Hebrew language of the Bible and prayer into a vibrant, modern language suitable to the new nation. We were eager to learn Israeli Hebrew, and we did at Camp Massad. Our bunks and divisions were named after areas of Israel (Degania, Emek, Galil). All the counselors were fervent Zionists, even our division head, a 20-year-old student named Noam Chomsky, who was active in Hashomer Hatzair, the “guardians of the young,” a left-wing Zionist group. Though Chomsky supported, in theory, a binational secular state, he was not opposed in practice to the state declared by Ben-Gurion. Every day during mealtimes, we heard reports in Hebrew of the progress of the war, and several Israeli counselors left camp to return home to defend their newly born country.
After the long, bitter war, where Israel prevailed, an armistice was declared under which Israel gained additional territory.5 But victory came with a heavy price. The new nation lost 1 percent of its population, including many civilians who were murdered in cold blood.6 Among the dead were young men and women who had survived the Holocaust, some volunteers from Europe and America—including Colonel Mickey Marcus, a World War II hero, who became Israel’s first modern general and was the subject of the film Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas—and many chalutzim.
My uncle Albert (whose nickname was “Itchie”), my father’s second youngest brother, stowed away on a ship to Israel in order to help defend the new nation. (He paid the fare several years later when he could afford to.) He eventually became an ultra-Orthodox head of a yeshiva in Bnei Brak and a religious opponent of political Zionism, though he continued to love the people of Israel. His youngest brother, Zecharia, a doctor of psychology, was to follow him several years later, changing his name from the Europeanized Dershowitz (originally Derschovitz) to the Hebraized Dor Shav (the generation that returned). At this writing, he is still living in Jerusalem and remains active in Israeli and Jewish causes.
Another one of my father’s brothers had been a captain in the U.S. Army, and he proudly collected guns from his military colleagues to send to Israel. I remember my uncle showing me a Luger confiscated from a German POW that would now be used to protect Jews rather than kill them.
Both my father’s and my mother’s families had strong connections to Israel. In the early 1930s, my mother’s father, Naftuli Ringel, traveled to Palestine to see if he could make a living and bring his family there. He bought a small piece of land on which he hoped to build a home near what is now Ben Gurion Airport. He returned to Brooklyn several months later, brokenhearted, with the realization that he could not make aliya with his wife and six children. He brought back several small sacks of earth from Rachel’s Tomb, which he wanted to be buried with. I have one of these sacks in my home as a remembrance of my grandfather’s visit to Eretz Yisrael before it was the State of Israel. (When I told this story to a leading political figure in Israel, he generously replied, “If your grandfather had made aliya, you would probably have my job today.”)
My father’s father was active in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust, some of whom settled in Israel. He obtained false affidavits from neighbors, promising “jobs”—including rabbis, cantors and other religious functionary positions—to unqualified people for nonexistent synagogues. The last such refugee to leave boarded the ship shortly before Hitler invaded Poland. One relative was trapped and couldn’t leave, so my grandfather sent my unmarried uncle with his American passport to find her, “marry” her and bring her to safety in America. He did, and then he fell in love with her on the boat and they married in a real wedding upon their arrival in New York. Many of these refugees became prominent Americans, including one who served as chairman of the Columbia University Engineering Department; another became a rabbi in a large Los Angeles synagogue. Hence my natural sympathy for opening our gates to refugees—even illegal ones in extreme situations. (One of my favorite comic shticks was by the Russian-Jewish comedian Yakov Smirnoff, who would stand by the Statue of Liberty thanking her for rescuing him and his family from Soviet tyranny. Then, as he leaves, he turns to Ms. Liberty and shouts, “Now please keep the rest of those damn immigrants out!”)
My parents and grandparents belonged to organizations that supported Israel—such as Mizrachi and Hadassah—and they contributed to Israeli charities despite their limited means. Everyone I knew did. My grandmother Ringel had a JNF pushka next to the party-line telephone; everyone who made a call was required to deposit a nickel into it for tzedakah (charity) for the poor Jews of Eretz Yisrael.
I grew up with an uncomplicated love of Israel, and support for its success, as a given. No one questioned it. No one had any doubts or qualms about the righteousness of our cause. To us, Israel was always in the right, and its Arab enemies were always in the wrong. The Arab war against the Jews of Palestine and then Israel was a continuation of the Nazi war against the Jews of Europe. In fact, several notorious Nazi war criminals had received asylum in Egypt and other Arab countries and were helping them develop weapons systems with which to destroy Israel.
We all believed that if there had been an Israel in the 1930s and early 1940s, millions of Jews—who were trapped in Europe by Britain’s immoral policy of strictly limiting Jewish immigration into its mandate and America’s bigoted policies that denied visas to Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust—could have been saved from the Holocaust.
David Ben-Gurion, who personified the new Israel, was the hero (although some, particularly the rabbis, didn’t approve of his secularism and socialism). The Arab leaders—from Haj Amin al-Husseini to Gamal Abdel Nasser—were the villains. They were easy to hate because of their association with Nazism, communism, anti-Semitism and other despised ideologies.
Copyright © 2019 by Alan M. Dershowitz
