Death, Rebirth of a Kibbutz Recalled : Joy and Sorrow: Israelis Mark 40th Anniversary

The original Kfar Etzion died the day before Israel was born.

Even as the late David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israeli statehood on a Friday 40 years ago, the Arab Legion fires that consumed what was left of this pioneering kibbutz were still burning, and the handful of its defenders who survived were taken away as prisoners of the country’s first war.

Shilo Gal, the son of one of the 151 defenders who died here in 1948, recalled the story Wednesday when asked what special meaning this Israeli Independence Day has in this place. Gal, who helped establish the new Kfar Etzion within three months of the day Israeli troops recaptured the area in the 1967 Six-Day War, talked about the special mixture of sadness and joy that he and the other residents feel on Israel’s 40th birthday.

It may be true, Gal said, that the period of unprecedented unrest that has claimed at least 156 Palestinian and two Israeli lives during the last 19 weeks has put a damper on what were to be the country’s joyous anniversary celebrations.

However, he added, “There are different shades of light and darkness, of joy and sorrow.” And he, like many residents of Kfar Etzion on Wednesday, said they preferred to be grateful for all that has been accomplished since 1948 rather than worry about things yet undone.

Israel is celebrating its birthday today, according to the Hebrew calendar. By the Western calendar, it will be 40 on May 14.

In either case, not all Israelis are as philosophical about this anniversary as are the residents of what is by now the Etzion Bloc of 15 Jewish settlements, about 10 miles south of Jerusalem.

“Israel enters its fifth decade in deep confusion concerning our structure and our values,” former Foreign Minister Abba Eban told an audience in Newport Beach, Calif., earlier this month.

And nothing is more symbolic of that confusion than the continuing Palestinian unrest in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--an uprising so widespread that authorities late Tuesday sealed those areas off from the rest of Israel in hopes of avoiding a spillover of the violence during Independence Day celebrations.

Protest Picnic

The leftist “There’s a Limit” organization has scheduled a protest picnic today “to stress our conviction that there can be no complete independence for Israel without guaranteeing freedom and independence for the Palestinians.” Several members of the group are in prison for refusing to perform any of their mandatory army service in the territories.

If some significant proportion of Israelis are troubled by what they see as they look ahead, however, the residents of the Etzion Bloc gain strength by looking back. So attached are they to their history, for example, that even normally clean-shaven men sported several days’ growth of beard here Wednesday as a sign of mourning for the followers of Rabbi Akiva, who revolted against the Romans 2,000 years ago.

Gal, who serves as the head of Kfar Etzion’s regional governing council, said he sees himself and his neighbors as part of a chain extending back all the way to the patriarch Abraham. “It is our duty, the people who are in the ‘link’ of this generation, to be sure our link is strong enough to continue the chain for the coming generations,” he said.

Father Was a Founder

His return to the kibbutz his father helped found, 19 years after it had been overrun by the Arab Legion in 1948, “is analogous to the desire of the Jewish people to return to this land after 2,000 years,” Gal added.

Kfar Etzion is to Israel what the Alamo is to Americans--and much, much more.

It was started in 1943 by an advance group of 13 religious pioneers, most of whom had barely escaped the Nazis in Europe, and all of whom were awed by the idea of settling a swath of Jewish-owned land in otherwise hostile Arab territory.

“In Kfar Etzion we shall be opening up a new and exceedingly difficult area for Jewish settlement,” they wrote. “We can only seek consolation in our efforts to rebuild our country, to develop a secure homeland which can serve as a haven for those who survive.”

On Main Road

Five years later, the United Nations had partitioned what was once Palestine, and fighting between Jews and Arabs was escalating toward what would soon be full-scale war. Kfar Etzion was a vital strategic position, standing on the main road leading north to Jerusalem.

The day before the area was finally overrun after a months-long siege, one wounded defender wrote in his diary: “A deep depression settled like a pall over all of us. . . . A heavy bombardment was destroying the settlement, the construction of which had cost us so much effort. Would we ever be able to build it up again?”

Although Kfar Etzion fell and most of its defenders were slain, Ben-Gurion credited them with saving the Jews of Jerusalem. “If today there is a Hebrew Jerusalem, the main people we have to thank for it are those who defended the Etzion Bloc,” he said.

A memorial building now stands over the cellar of an old German monastery in which the last defenders died--and a legend was born.

18th Settler

Sitting there Wednesday, Sandy Amichai, a former resident of Los Angeles who was the 18th settler in the revived Kfar Etzion after the 1967 war, feels a tie that she finds hard to explain.

Amichai came here out of a pioneering spirit, she said. And: “I’m thrilled with the other settlements. Today, when you see the lights from the other Jewish settlements at night, it’s a good feeling. It feels secure.”

Her husband, another son of one of the original settlers, is buried here, a casualty of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Many of her cousins still in America have married non-Jews and are “assimilated.” Today, she said, she, her children and her mother-in-law are “their ties to Judaism. It’s very sad for us.”

And she is “furious” at the Palestinian Arabs who throw rocks at her and her neighbors when they drive the roads of the West Bank. “Why can’t they live in peace with us when we are ready to live in peace with them?” she asked rhetorically.

‘Blessed Thing’

The answer to the conflict? “I think you get to the core of the problem and remove that,” said Amichai, referring to the organizers of the unrest. “What happened to Abu Jihad (the Palestine Liberation Organization leader assassinated last weekend) was a blessed thing. It should happen to more of them.”

And Amichai is not the only one who is frustrated and angry here.

“These events have pushed me to a much more extremist position,” said Simone Meer, 45, a Moroccan-born Israeli who immigrated in 1973. “When I came to this country, I was very moderate, and I was convinced there was room for Jews and Arabs to live together here,” she said. But she is no longer so sure.

No Place Else to Go

“We have to be strong to show the Arabs we are masters here,” she said. “I know it doesn’t sound very nice, but if we can’t coexist, someone has to be the master. And we have no place else to go.”

Normally, Meer said, she is “a very optimistic person.” But on Israel’s 40th birthday, with her son about to go into the army, “I just don’t know.”

And to engineer David Shamir, 64, “what’s happening today is an extension of the original war of independence” in 1948. “I don’t think that war has stopped yet, and it’s all centered on the issue of our right to exist. All of us ache for the day it will all stop, but we have to realize that war still goes on. The basic problem is still there.”

Shamir is deeply distrustful of the Arabs, he conceded, and he has no patience for those who talk about trading land for peace in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “I’m convinced it won’t solve the problem,” he said. Even if he heard moderate Arab voices, he added, “I wouldn’t believe them.”

Some Exchange

Acknowledging that he has only been here three years to Shamir’s 40, psychologist David Zeller said he is still ready to consider “giving something” in return for genuine recognition of Israel’s right to exist--in exchange, as he puts it, “for our land in their consciousness and in their textbooks.”

Whatever else it has meant, Zeller added, the unrest in the territories has forced him to “wake up” to the situation in the country. “I have to get involved,” he said.

Ironically, it was native-born Alex Lubotzky who said he could understand the view that Israel did not really belong in the Middle East. “The world is really divided into big pieces that are somewhat homogeneous,” he said. And a Jewish state in the predominantly Arab Middle East “is sort of an unnatural state in the area. In this sense we are really unfortunate,” he said.

‘Going to Suffer’

That does not mean that Israelis should pack their bags and leave, Lubotzky made clear--just that “we’re going to suffer for many, many years.”

A few steps away from Meer’s home, meanwhile, Ari and Mila Volvovsky are still settling in after finally being allowed three weeks ago to emigrate from the Soviet Union.

Volvovsky, who spent nearly two years in a Soviet prison camp as punishment for political activism, said the story of the Etzion Bloc was one of the things that inspired him to seek emigration to Israel. In contrast to the Soviet Union, where flying flags was a meaningless ritual, he was proud to put up an Israeli flag at his new home, he noted.

If the support of the residents of the Etzion Bloc was important to Volvovsky, he is clearly important as a symbol of hope to his new neighbors, as well. Immigration of more Jews is both the raison d’etre for the Jewish state and its hope for long-term survival, they believe.

Transition Ceremony

As gusts of heavy fog swirled at a square outside the synagogue in nearby Efrat on Wednesday evening, hundreds of Etzion Bloc residents participated in the unique ceremony that marks the transition from Israel’s somber Memorial Day to its festive Independence Day.

One minute the flag was at half-staff and a choir was singing the sad song of David on the occasion of his friend Jonathan’s death; the next, the flag was raised and the residents intoned the “Hatikva,” Israel’s anthem of hope.

It is a sudden and jarring transition, said Gal, but one that carries a deep message--especially on Israel’s 40th birthday.

“These two factors--sorrow and joy--go together,” he said. “You can’t have one without the other. This is apparently the reality.”