My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

On July 11, 1948, the training group boys march on Lydda. The shooting from the eastern outskirts of town confines them to the olive groves bordering Ben Shemen. Mosquitoes buzz around them, the heat is scorching, and their new iron helmets sizzle on their heads. A few are wounded, others are shell-shocked. The group’s first daylight battle is not

Bulldozer is very different from the brigade commander. Although he, too, is traumatized by the war of ’48, his mental injury is not the same. Rough and coarse, he tends to raise his voice too much. He’s tense and quick-tempered, restless. He admits that in the damned war he lost his peace of mind. In the many years since, he has not been able to f

On July 11, two 3rd Regiment platoons advance from the conquered village of Daniyal toward the olive orchards separating Ben Shemen from Lydda. Strong machine gun fire from the outskirts of Lydda halts them. In the meantime, Moshe Dayan’s Regiment 89 arrives in Ben Shemen. By the water fountain Dr. Lehmann built for his Arab neighbors, Dayan forms

But on July 4, 1948, Operation Larlar, designed to conquer Lydda, is presented to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. On July 10–11, the 8th Brigade of the IDF takes the northern parts of the Lydda Valley: the villages of Deir Tarif and Haditha, and the international airport. Simultaneously the elite Yiftach Brigade takes the southern

As temperatures run high, Zionist policy undergoes profound changes. On May 11, 1942, in New York’s Biltmore Hotel, Zionism’s leaders abandon the old idea of long-term organic growth and endorse the demand to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as soon as possible. In the weeks preceding and following the Biltmore convention, the Palmach S

On September 19, 1939, the general staff of the Haganah was founded. Well before a Jewish state was established, a well-organized Jewish army was raised. The Arab revolt was over, but the Jewish community in Palestine made the formative decision to organize a national military structure. Twenty months later, on May 15, 1941, the Palmach Strike Forc

In the winter of 1938 and spring of 1939, the British suppressed the Great Arab Revolt with an iron fist. But Jewish terrorism did not abate. In February 1939, more than forty innocent Arabs were murdered when bombs went off in the Haifa train station, the Haifa market, and the Jerusalem market. On May 29, four Arab women were murdered in Bir Addas

Forty-five years after it came into the Lydda Valley in the name of the Kishinev pogrom, Zionism 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.

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.