The Middle East is imploding, the Arab Spring is a memory, Syria is a surreal nightmare, yet a new attempt, brokered by the Obama Administration, is under way to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Can this new drive succeed where previous attempts have failed? It’s possible that the answer can be found in the history of Lydda, a small Palestinian city, now known as Lod, which lies east of Tel Aviv and west of Ramallah and Jerusalem––the very epicenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Anyone striving for Middle East peace must acknowledge the tragedy of Lydda and comprehend its implications.
In 1905, two years after Zionism first arrived in the Lydda Valley, a Jewish Russian entrepreneur built an olive-oil-soap factory, later named Atid (Hebrew for “future”), near the city. Shortly afterward, on the slope above the factory, a well-known Zionist teacher established an orphanage, called Kiryat Sefer, for the survivors of the pogrom in Kishinev, in Bessarabia. In 1908, members of the Zionist movement planted the Herzl Wald olive groves, commemorating its founder, Theodor Herzl, and, in the following two years, Zionists set up an artisan colony and an experimental agricultural farm. All those enterprises failed, except one—Ben Shemen, a “youth village” established by a doctor named Siegfried Lehmann.
Lehmann was born in Berlin in 1892. He studied medicine and then served in the German Army as a doctor. Although he was the son of a wealthy family of assimilated German Jews, he rediscovered his Jewish identity during the First World War and found meaning in an attempt to revive Judaism. In 1916, he established a center for homeless Jewish children in an East Berlin slum and, in 1919, opened a shelter for Jewish war orphans in the Lithuanian city of Kovna. Inspired by Martin Buber and Albert Einstein, Lehmann believed that there was no future for Jews in Germany, and that Western Jewry must reconnect with the traditions and rituals of Eastern Jewry.
By 1925, Lehmann realized that a rising wave of anti-Semitism would prevent him from maintaining his children’s home in Kovna. He decided that there was no place to go but Palestine. On a rainy day in January, 1927, he arrived with his wife and a group of Kovna orphans in the courtyard that had been built for the Kishinev orphans in the Lydda Valley some twenty years earlier.
By 1946, Lehmann’s educational institution had more than five hundred students. On the gentle slope from the courtyard of Kiryat Sefer down to the ruins of the soap factory, long, red-roofed dormitories had been built. The founders put up a school, dug a swimming pool, and planted flower gardens. The students raised poultry, cattle, sheep, and horses; they cultivated an orange grove, a vegetable garden, wheat fields, apiaries, and a vineyard. In the Lydda Valley, Lehmann developed one of early Zionism’s most welcoming sites.
Lehmann was not a narrow-minded Zionist. Although he dedicated his life to homeless Jewish children, he viewed his humanitarian mission in a broader historical context. He believed that, in the twentieth century, displacement and detachment were not solely Jewish maladies. He wanted Zionism to suggest a cure both for the modern Jewish people and for modern man; he wanted it to fulfill an urgent national task in a manner that would benefit all humanity. In his view, Zionism should be a settlement movement that was not tainted by colonialism or chauvinism, a progressive movement that was not distorted by urban alienation. He believed that Zionism should not establish a closed-off, condescending colony in Palestine that ignored its surroundings and its Arab neighbors; it should not be an Occidental frontier fortress commanding the Orient. On the contrary, it must somehow plant the Jews in their ancient homeland in an organic fashion, becoming a bridge between East and West. Though he never said so explicitly, Lehmann saw his Lydda Valley youth village as an example of what Zionism ought to be: a place that would give a home to the homeless, provide roots to the uprooted, and restore meaning to life. Ben Shemen would offer harmony to the children there and to an era that had lost all harmony.
Six months after Lehmann established the youth village, an earthquake demolished much of the old town of Lydda and killed scores of residents. Lehmann rushed to the city to attend to the survivors. His work had a profound impact, and over the years he made friends among Lydda’s Palestinian gentry and among the dignitaries of the neighboring Arab villages of Haditha, Dahariya, Gimzu, Daniyal, Deir Tarif, and Bayt Nabala. He saw to it that the villagers walking to and from Lydda in the summer heat could have cool water and refreshing shade at a fountain that he built for them at the gate of the Zionist youth village. Lehmann instructed the local clinic to give medical assistance to Palestinians who needed it. He insisted that the students of Ben Shemen, aged ten to eighteen, be taught to respect their neighbors. Almost every weekend, the students went on trips to the villages and frequently visited the schools and the market in Lydda. Arab musicians and dancers were invited to participate in the youth village’s festivals.
In 1947, just before the establishment of Israel, Lehmann asked the director Helmar Lerski to shoot a film about a young boy, a Holocaust survivor, who arrives from Europe and finds a life, and a purpose, in Ben Shemen. Lerski agreed, and called the film “Adama” (“Land”). Lehmann conceived of the film as a fund-raising tool, portraying an almost impossibly idyllic commune: boys and girls who had barely escaped Europe living in a progressive, democratic educational establishment; a kind of convalescent home for the uprooted youth of an uprooted people in the land of the Bible. Here were young Hebrew shepherds herding sheep on the craggy, ancient hills between Haditha and Dahariya. Here were young weavers spinning yarn on spindles as if they were French or German villagers who had been living on the land for generations. Here was a community of orphans living in a Euro-Palestinian village culture that was at peace with the land it had just descended upon. On Friday evenings, the children wore white shirts and gathered around tables to light candles. Some played Bach, some sang hymns, some recounted Jewish legends or tales from Tolstoy.
But, just after Lerski finished shooting his film, an inner tension between Zionism’s Lydda Valley enterprise and the Palestinian city of Lydda became apparent. In February, 1947, the British decided to leave the Holy Land and let the United Nations determine its fate. In June, an eleven-member U.N. special committee arrived in Palestine and, while touring the country, visited Ben Shemen and the Lydda Valley. The members concluded that there was no chance that the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine could coexist as one nation; they recommended dividing the land into two states. In November, the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the partition plan and, in Resolution 181, called for the establishment of two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine were not willing to accept Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine and rejected the resolution.
In December, 1947, a seven-car convoy of Jewish soldiers from the Haganah, the precursor of the Israel Defense Forces, en route to Ben Shemen, was attacked by Arab fighters. Thirteen soldiers were slain. A few months later, most of the residents of the youth village were evacuated from the Lydda Valley in buses, escorted by British armored vehicles. By April, 1948, Lehmann’s youth village had become a military post.
In May, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded Palestine, determined to crush the young Jewish state. In early July, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, set in motion Operation Larlar, designed to conquer Lydda, Ramle, Latrun, and Ramallah. On July 10th and 11th, the 8th Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces took the northern parts of the valley, including the villages of Deir Tarif and Haditha, and the international airport, near Tel Aviv. The élite Yiftach Brigade took the southern parts: the villages of Inaba, Gimzu, Daniyal, and Dahariya. Within twenty-four hours, all the villages that Dr. Lehmann loved and taught his students to respect had been conquered. And, as the I.D.F. closed in on the Lydda Valley from the south, the east, and the north, it prepared to take the city of Lydda itself.
On July 11th, two platoons from the 3rd Battalion advanced from the conquered village of Daniyal toward the olive groves separating Ben Shemen from Lydda. The Arab militia defending the city held them off with machine-gun fire. In the meantime, the 89th Battalion, led by Moshe Dayan, had arrived in Ben Shemen. In the late afternoon, the battalion, consisting of a giant armored vehicle mounted with a cannon, menacing half-tracks, and machine-gun-equipped jeeps, left Ben Shemen and stormed Lydda. In a forty-seven-minute-long blitz, dozens of Arabs were shot dead, including women, children, and old people. The 89th Battalion lost nine men. In the early evening, the two 3rd Battalion platoons were able to enter the city. Within hours, the soldiers held key positions in the city center and had confined thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Great Mosque.
The next day, according to “1948,” by Benny Morris, two Jordanian armored vehicles entered the conquered city, setting off a new wave of violence. The Jordanian Army was miles to the east, and the two vehicles were of no military significance, but some of the Arab citizens of Lydda thought that they were harbingers of liberation. Soldiers of the 3rd Battalion feared that they were in imminent danger of Jordanian assault. Some Palestinians fired on Israeli soldiers near a small mosque. Among the young combatants taking cover in a ditch nearby were Ben Shemen graduates, now in uniform. The brigade commander was a Ben Shemen graduate, too. He gave the order to open fire. Some of the soldiers threw hand grenades into Arab houses. One fired an anti-tank shell into the small mosque. In thirty minutes, two hundred and fifty Palestinians were killed. Zionism had carried out a massacre in the city of Lydda.
When the news reached the headquarters of Operation Larlar, in the Palestinian village of Yazur, the military commander, General Yigal Allon, asked Ben-Gurion what to do with the Arabs. Ben-Gurion waved his hand: Deport them. Hours later, Yitzhak Rabin, the operations officer, issued a written order to the Yiftach Brigade: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”
The next day, negotiations were held in the rectory of St. George’s Church between Shmarya Gutman, the newly appointed military governor of Lydda, and the Arab dignitaries of the occupied city. When negotiations ended, in the late morning of July 13, 1948, it was agreed that the Arabs in Lydda and the refugees residing there would be expelled from the city immediately. By evening, approximately thirty-five thousand Palestinian Arabs had left Lydda in a long column, marching past the Ben Shemen youth village and disappearing into the east. Zionism had obliterated the city of Lydda.
Lydda is the black box of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist. In retrospect, it’s all too clear. When Siegfried Lehmann arrived in the Lydda Valley, in 1927, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to a Jewish state, and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Dr. Lehmann did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For decades, Jews succeeded in hiding from themselves the contradiction between their national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive groves and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, Lydda was no more.
Twenty years ago, as a young reporter, I tried to decipher the secrets of Lydda. I found the brigade commander and spent long hours with him in his office. I found the military governor and spent days with him on the kibbutz where he lived. I spent time with soldiers from the 3rd Battalion and interviewed former students from the youth village. Not long ago, I dug out the audiocassettes I had recorded and listened to them as they told the story of the death of Lydda.
Mula Cohen, the brigade commander, was born in 1923 in Kovna, where his father worked with Dr. Lehmann. He was reared in a socialist household in Tel Aviv, but in middle school he was sent to the Ben Shemen youth village, where he became a favorite of his father’s old friend. On Shabbat mornings, he was invited to the Lehmanns’ cottage to listen to recordings of Haydn, Mozart, and Bach on the gramophone. On holidays, he accompanied Lehmann as he made courtesy calls in the neighboring villages. Occasionally, he went with him to visit friends and schools in Lydda. He liked Lydda, its market, its olive presses, its old town. At Ben Shemen, he worked in the cowshed, the vineyard, the orange grove; he played handball and developed a taste for the arts. Most of all, he loved music: classical music, popular music, folk music. One of his favorite memories of Ben Shemen is of hundreds of students sitting in silence in the great courtyard listening to an orchestra and a choir perform Bach’s “Peasant” Cantata.
But Cohen lived in another world as well. At night, he and his friends would go to the forest beyond the youth village, and there they learned to assemble and dismantle an English rifle, to use machine guns, to throw grenades. And, when the music lover graduated from Ben Shemen, he joined the first platoon of the Palmach Strike Force, a leading unit in the Jewish military. In the winter of 1942, he climbed Masada, the great site of Roman assault and Jewish martyrdom. In the summer of 1942, he trained in the Negev to stop Rommel’s Nazis with Molotov cocktails. Over time, he became a company commander, then a battalion commander. When war broke out at the end of 1947, Cohen commanded one of the élite units of Zionism.
Did the brigade commander ever confront the Lehmann disciple he had been with the warrior he became? The sad sixty-nine-year-old talking to me had no real answers. He told me about the fighting in the north in the first months of 1948: the conquest of Tiberias and the conquest of Safed and the cleansing of the Safed-Tiberias region. And he told me about Lydda. Yitzhak Tabenkin, one of socialist Zionism’s ideological leaders, “supported the expulsion of the Arabs. He was perfectly clear,” Cohen said. “His general instruction to Palmach headquarters was that the war presented a one-time opportunity to solve ‘the Arab problem.’ ” Cohen spoke slowly as he recounted how he had conquered the villages and vanquished the city of Lydda. He gave the order to evacuate the city. He sent the people of Lydda marching away from their homes in a long, dusty column heading east.
After Lydda was occupied by the Israeli Army, Shmarya Gutman was named military governor. Although he was secular and rational, his approach to Zionism was almost mystical. Gutman, who forged the Masada ethos, and who later became one of Israel’s leading archeologists, saw the revolutionary movement as a defiant display of vitality from a people on the verge of extinction. He saw it as an inspired undertaking by a beaten nation that does not wait for the Messiah but takes upon itself the Messiah’s mission. He believed that for fifty years Zionism had been an outstanding success. Every time one wave of immigration subsided, another wave emerged. But, in the forties, the Arab issue, which had always existed, suddenly put a question mark on the future. Throughout the country, Arab villages became more modern and Arab cities more prosperous. A new Arab intelligentsia developed a strong national awareness and began to assume a distinctive Arab-Palestinian identity––a dangerous threat, he believed, to Zionism. The old Zionist way of doing things was no longer relevant. There was no longer an option to buy land gradually, bring in well-trained immigrants, and build a Jewish nation. There was a need for a different sort of action. “War was inhuman,” Gutman told me, “but it allowed one to do what one could not do in peace; it could solve problems that were unsolvable in peace.”
While Dr. Lehmann was still teaching Mula Cohen to love Lydda, Gutman already comprehended the Lydda challenge. Because he anticipated the Jewish-Palestinian war well before it broke out, he was fully aware of the strategic and moral dilemmas that he faced. He knew that his generation’s mission would be to rid the country of Arabs, and he also knew how terrible that would be. So he looked for cunning ways of doing it. He did not want to kill them or expel them; he wanted to induce them to leave.
Gutman was assigned to Lydda by chance. On July 11, 1948, he was looking for Yigal Allon on an intelligence matter, and he finally found him, with Yitzhak Rabin, in the conquered, deserted village of Daniyal. As they watched the forces storming Lydda, Allon told Gutman that, once the city was taken, he would become its military governor. Gutman asked Allon, “What should I do with the Arabs? Do you have anything to say to me?” “I have nothing to say to you,” Allon replied. “You’ll see how things go, and, as things go, you’ll act. Do what you have to.”
Gutman arrived in Lydda at dusk. Residents had been told that anyone found outside after dark would be shot. Gutman saw thousands walking in silence toward the Great Mosque. By nightfall, the high-ceilinged house of prayer was packed. There was no food, no water, no air, no room to sit or to lie down. Within hours, many of the sick and the very young would have suffocated.
At midnight, the military governor released the elderly. Then he released the flour-mill and flour-shop owners so that they could provide flour, and the bakers so that they could bake pita bread. The next day, he released the children. The Great Mosque was still crowded, and when, early in the morning, the 3rd Battalion took control of the entire city, more men poured into the mosque, their hands up in the air, their eyes full of dread.
Later that day, shooting erupted, while the military governor was in the rectory of St. George’s, negotiating with Lydda’s Arab leaders. One of the officers present turned to the military governor with a sarcastic smile. “What do you say, Governor? What are your orders?” Gutman realized that if he did not act quickly and firmly things would get out of hand. He gave orders to shoot at any house from which shots were fired, into the windows, and at anyone violating the curfew. Gutman described the horrific noise that followed as the worst half hour of his life. The shooting that would not stop. The wrath of God. And, when the shooting finally did stop, the sweet silence. But then news came of what had happened in the small mosque. The military governor ordered his men to bury the dead.
Gutman returned to the Arab dignitaries assembled in the rectory of St. George’s, got hold of himself, and told them that there would be a great war in Lydda because of the international airport. The terrified men asked what would happen if they wanted to leave. “I must give it some thought,” the military governor responded. Retiring to the next room, he thought how much easier things would be if the Arabs were not there. Yet he decided that, no matter what, he would not order the Arabs to leave. When he returned, he told them that he had to think further.
During the third meeting, the Arab dignitaries were in a state of panic. They said that they would leave Lydda, on the condition that all the people detained in the Great Mosque were released. For the third time, Gutman left to contemplate. Now when he returned he was escorted by two young officers, whom he had asked to witness the fateful conversation:
Gutman felt that he had achieved his goal. He had not planned it in advance, but occupation, massacre, and psychological pressure had had the desired effect. After forty-eight hours of hell, he did not quite order the people of Lydda to go. Under the indirect threat of slaughter, Lydda’s leaders asked to go.
Gutman walked across the street to the Great Mosque and told the prisoners that they were free to leave. He said, “According to the decision made by the dignitaries of Lydda, within an hour and a half all the inhabitants of Lydda must leave Lydda.” They were forbidden to carry weapons or to take cars and vehicles. Any other possessions could be taken as long as they left Lydda immediately.
Thousands of men came out of the Great Mosque, their heads bowed. No one complained, no one cursed. With complete submission, the masses marched out and dispersed. The military governor climbed the minaret of the Great Mosque. From the top, he watched chaos engulf the town. People grabbed anything they could: bread, vegetables, dates, and figs; sacks of flour, sugar, wheat, and barley; silverware, copperware, jewelry; blankets, mattresses. They carried suitcases bursting at the seams, improvised packs made from sheets and pillowcases. Everything was loaded onto horse-drawn wagons, donkeys, mules.
Gutman descended from the minaret and walked to the eastern edge of town, overlooking Ben Shemen. The procession of civilians had assembled into a long, Biblical-looking column of thousands. As he watched the faces of the people marching into exile, he wondered if there was a Jeremiah among them to lament their calamity and disgrace. Suddenly, he felt an urge to join them. For one long moment, he who was their Nebuchadnezzar wished to be their Jeremiah.
Mula Cohen, standing by his command car, also watched the people of Lydda depart, carrying on their backs heavy sacks made of blankets and sheets. Gradually, they cast aside the sacks; they couldn’t carry them any farther. Old men and women, suffering from terrible thirst in the heavy heat, collapsed. Like the ancient Jews, the people of Lydda went into exile.
Gazing at the column, the brigade commander felt compassion, not guilt. Was the evacuation the outcome of an early expulsion plan or an explicit expulsion order? No, Cohen replied. “In July, 1948, David Ben-Gurion was already the Prime Minister of a sovereign nation. The troops attacking Lydda were part of the new Israel Defense Forces. The Holocaust was in the background. Ben-Gurion could not instruct the I.D.F. to get rid of the Arabs. Neither could Allon. As a state, we do not expel. On the other hand, both Ben-Gurion and Allon knew that it was impossible to allow an Arab Lydda to remain by the international airport, not far from Tel Aviv. If we did so, there would be no victory and there would be no state. Some things were said between Ben-Gurion and Allon, but there were no written orders.”
There were also no explicit orders from Allon to Cohen. But the training that the brigade commander had received in the Palmach made orders redundant. He knew what he had to do without being told. And yet when I asked Cohen to go back to the place, the moment, the personal experience, he was startled. Allon and Rabin had left for another front, so the responsibility for the exodus from Lydda fell to him, to his lieutenant, and to the military governor. They were the ones who contended with the dangers of renewed fighting in the east and the chaos caused by wild looting by the Israelis in town. They had to see to the burial of their men and the Arabs. And the march: the terrible column of tens of thousands leaving the city.
“Officers are human beings, too,” Cohen said. “And as a human being you suddenly face a chasm. On the one hand is the noble legacy of the youth movement, the youth village, Dr. Lehmann. On the other hand is the brutal reality of Lydda.” For years, he had trained for that day. He had been told that war was coming and that the Arabs would have to go. “And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing. And you see the Jewish soldiers, and you see the marching Arabs, and you feel heavy, and deeply sad. You feel you’re facing something immense that you cannot deal with, that you cannot even grasp.”
Ottman Abu Hammed, of Lydda, remembered the column, too. His grandfather had worked with the Jews in the soap factory and had helped them plant the olive groves. His father, who had supplied the youth village with vegetables, befriended Dr. Lehmann and escorted him when he administered cholera vaccinations in Lydda. He had visited Ben Shemen quite often as a child and loved the modern cowshed and the swimming pool and the girls in khaki shorts, with their tanned legs. But on July 11, 1948, Jewish soldiers suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. Loudspeakers mounted on jeeps called for all men to go to the Great Mosque. Inside the mosque, it was hot and crowded. Eighteen-year-old Ottman was terrified. He cried. He wet himself. Yet, after thirty-six nightmarish hours, Ottman and his father were allowed out of the mosque with the thousands of others.
Shortly after the Abu Hammed family was reunited at home, there was a knock on the door. Two soldiers stood there, shouting, “Hurry, hurry, pack your belongings and leave.” The father took out of his pocket a letter written in Hebrew, saying that Dr. Lehmann vouched for this decent Arab and asked that no harm come to this friend of Ben Shemen. But the more dominant of the two soldiers pressed the barrel of his gun into the father’s chest, and said, “If you don’t go right now, I will shoot.”
Ottman’s mother screamed. His father was in shock. Under the barrels of the soldiers’ guns, the Abu Hammed family hastily collected a few things—flour, sugar, rice, jewelry, mattresses–– loaded them onto a horse-drawn wagon, and left.
The road was narrow, the congestion unbearable. Children shouted, women screamed, men wept. There was no water. Every so often, a family withdrew from the column and stopped by the side of the road to bury a baby who had not withstood the heat; to say farewell to a grandmother who had collapsed from fatigue. After a while, it got even worse. A mother abandoned her howling baby under a tree. A cousin of Ottman’s deserted her week-old boy. She could not bear to hear him wailing with hunger. Ottman’s father told the cousin to go back and get her son, but the father, too, appeared to be losing his mind. Following the loaded wagon, he cursed the Jews and cursed the Arabs and cursed God.
I drive to Lydda. It’s July, and the heat is as stifling as it was back in July, 1948. A thick yellow haze chokes the Lydda Valley. The small mosque was recently renovated and is locked up. The Great Mosque is open. I walk through the stone gateway that the inhabitants of Lydda entered, through the square courtyard they crowded into, beneath the arches of the high dome they stood under for thirty-six hours. A few yards away is the regal Church of St. George. Across an alley is the rectory where the military governor, Gutman, held talks with the dignitaries of Lydda.
The stone houses and the olive presses and the alleyways of the old city were demolished in the fifties. But, in that square kilometre of what was once Old Lydda, one still feels that something is very wrong. There is a curious ruin here, an unexplained ruin there. Amid the ugly slums, the shabby market, and the cheap stores, it is clear that there is still an unhealed wound. Unlike other cities where Israel’s modernity has overwhelmed old Palestine, here Palestine still makes itself felt.
Do I wash my hands of Zionism? Do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the destruction of Lydda? No. Like the brigade commander, I am faced with something too immense to deal with. Like the military governor, I see a reality I cannot contain. When one opens the black box, one understands that, whereas the massacre at the mosque could have been triggered by a misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events, the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda’s population were no accident. Those events were a crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of the story. And, when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism along with Lydda.
One thing is clear to me: Mula Cohen and Shmarya Gutman were right to be angry with the critics of later years who condemned what they did in Lydda but enjoyed the fruits of their deed. I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the 3rd Battalion soldiers. On the contrary. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned, because I know that if not for them the State of Israel would not have been born. If not for them, I would not have been born. They did the filthy work that enables my people, my nation, my daughter, my sons, and me to live.
But, looking straight ahead at Lydda, I wonder if peace is possible. Our side is clear: we had to come into the Lydda Valley and we had to take the Lydda Valley. There is no other home for us, and there was no other way. But the Arabs’ side, the Palestinian side, is equally clear: they cannot forget Lydda and they cannot forgive us for Lydda. You can argue that it is not the occupation of 1967 that is at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but the tragedy of 1948. It’s not only the settlements that are an obstacle to peace but the Palestinians’ yearning to return, one way or another, to Lydda and to dozens of other towns and villages that vanished during one cataclysmic year. But the Jewish State cannot let them return. Israel has a right to live, and if Israel is to live it cannot resolve the Lydda issue. What is needed to make peace now between the two peoples of this land may prove more than humans can summon. Contrary to every belief that Siegfried Lehmann held, Ben Shemen and Lydda cannot really see each other and recognize each other and make peace. This is why the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy lingers—generation after generation, war after war. While Syria is awash in blood and Egypt is in the grip of military autocrats, with so much uncertainty in the region, the chances to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the foreseeable future are hard to envision. It may be that the most one can hope for is an interim agreement or a unilateral initiative that will end the occupation and divide the land even if it does not bring about a grand historical reconciliation.
The fields of the long-gone Arabs of Lydda are now the withering sunflower fields of Ginton and Ben Shemen, two Israeli farms. Lehmann’s youth village is still there, but after the 1948 war, and after the doctor’s death, a decade later, its spirit was gradually lost. The nondescript buildings of a generic educational institution now stand on the gentle slope. Only the courtyard, and one group of long, red-roofed houses, built for the orphans of Europe, endures as testimony to what Ben Shemen once was and what it wished to be. A project is under way to preserve the courtyard as a national heritage site.
From the highest point of the Ben Shemen youth village, I look out at the Lydda Valley. I see the city of Lydda and the tall minaret of the Great Mosque. I see the vanished olive groves, the vanished Lehmann youth village. And I think about the tragedy that took place here. Forty-five years after Zionism came into the Lydda Valley, in the wake of anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe, it instigated a human catastrophe in the Lydda Valley. Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sent out of the Lydda Valley a column of homeless. In the heavy heat, through the haze, through the dry brown fields, I see the column marching east. So many years have passed, and yet the column is still marching east. For columns like the column of Lydda never stop marching. ♦
