Passion Perverted
from the diary of Josef Weitz
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Josef Weitz of the JNF [Jewish National Fund], the man who pushed hardest for Israel to get rid of the Arabs and take possession of their land, wrote the following amazing account in his diary toward the end of 1948: [The Passion] "And the road continues eastward between mountains and over mountains, and the Galilee is revealed to me in its splendor, its hidden places and folds, its crimson smile and its green softness and its desolation. I have never seen it like this. It was always bustling with man and beast. And the latter predominated. Herds and more herds used to descend from the heights to the valleys of the streambeds, their bells ringing with a sort of discontinuous sound, which vanished in the ravines and hid among the crevices, as if they would go on chiming for ever. And the shepherds striding after them like figures from ancient times, whistling merrily and driving the goats toward the trees and bushed--to gnaw at them hungrily; and now the picture has disappeared and is no more. A strange stillness lies over all the mountains and is drawn by hidden threads from within the empty village. An empty village; what a terrible thing! Fossilized lives! Lives turned to fossilized whispers in extinguished ovens; a shattered mirror; moldy blocks of dried figs and a scrawny dog, thin-tailed and floppy-eared and ark-eyed. [The Perversion] At the same time--at the very same moment--a different feeling throbs and rises from the primordial depths, a feeling of victory, of taking control, of revenge, and of casting off suffering. And suddenly the whispers vanish and you see empty houses, good for the settlement of our Jewish brethren who have wandered for generation upon generation, refugees of your people, steeped in suffering and sorrow as they, at last, find a roof over their heads. This was our war. But has it ended? For a full day we galloped over the roads of the Galilee and saw the deep-rooted agricultural heritage that the fleeing villagers had left behind them. With this, my heart became heavy beneath the weight of our circumstances: have we among us the human resources to carry on this heritage, to deepen it, and to broaden it? And will we be able to bring thousands of Jews here to banish the desolation, the human desolation, so that the Galilee will continue to blossom?" | |
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