Leon's No News Bulletin 106 Sun 31st May 09

Dear Friends, shalom,

Last Sunday I made my way to the “new” campus of the Open University in the Sharon Valley town of Ranaana, 1km from Ranaana Junction on the “old” Tel Aviv – Haifa road.

I attended a seminar about Prof Moshe Berent’s ⁽¹⁾ hypothesis that if Israel became a nation like all other nations the Arab citizens would feel a closer affinity with the state and not feel underprivileged, bitter and sometimes antagonistic towards the state.

According to him Israel is the nation only of the Jews while other nations are the nation of all their citizens, like the American nation is the nation of the Americans not just of the Christian Americans or Moslem Americans. The same goes for the French nation, the English nation etc.

As bus 501 carrying me to the seminar, made its laborious way through the traffic in Ahuza street, Ranaana’s main street, I had time to glance at the neat buildings and parks of Ranaana, arrayed on either side and two thoughts came to me:

1. Few tourists see this town because they just fly past on one of the two main roads on either side of it, never entering the town itself, on their way to famous tourist sites like Caesarea, Mt. Carmel, Haifa etc.

2. This gem of a modern Israeli town embodies the problem of Jewish Nationalism which Moshe Berent and many others before him, is trying to solve.

The bus finally dropped me off at Ranaana Junction. I looked up into the clear, blue sky of the late afternoon and resigned myself to a half hour walk to the campus along the super duper highway with a river of cars speeding by.

I came across a filling station and asked a guy if he could give me a ride to the nearby stop light and I’d walk from there. Seeing the pick up and all the tools which he moved to the back to make place for me, I thought he could have been a farmer out of Biblical times.

Just like today so in Biblical times also, when Israel was a sovereign nation ruling over this part of the country the area was known as the Sharon Valley ⁽²⁾

Walking from the stop light I had time to take a deep breath of the brisk evening breeze blowing from the nearby Mediteranean, to look around and think about the history of Ranaana.

Ranaana stands on land which not so long ago was a swamp which the Jewish National Fund had bought from the Arabs of a village called Hirbet Azun located on a hill north of the swamp where Ranaana’s Country Club was built after the Arabs had left in 1948.

Baruch Ostrovsky, the first mayor of Ranaana, had founded the Achuza Alef organization in New York to collect money for purchasing the swamp.

The Arabs of Hirbet Azun didn’t sell their swamp out of an idealistic vision of land improvement through cooperative endeavor with the Jews, on the contrary, after selling their swamp they waited for the Jews to fail as many immigrants before them had failed, either dying from malaria or just failing to produce any crops from the swamp.

The Jews, on the other hand were determined to succeed. Ostrovsky exemplifies this determination. He had a vision, which filled the spirit of the early Jewish pioneers, of land redemption to make the land as it was in Biblical times.

Like many others in his day he had given up a comfortable life in New York as principal of the Hebrew Teacher’s seminary and director of the J.L. Peretz Jewish Day school, to fulfill his ideal of immigrating to Israel.

His idealism was so great that being mayor of Ranaana he was entitled to a higher salary than the workers of his town.

However he refused the salary of mayor, insisting to be paid instead the same as a laborer digging ditches to drain the swamp. The balance of his salary was used to set up a fund to help young pioneering families living in Ranaana.

The Arabs of Hirbet Azun weren’t poor people; they had owned the great tract of swamp land which they had sold to the Jews and where the modern Ranaana I was on my way to stands.

Typical of many villages, Azun was located in two places: Hirbet Azun in the valley, the Sharon Valley, for raising cattle and sheep and Azun, a mountain village, at the foot of the Mts. Of Samaria, for various crops like wheat, olives figs etc.

They weren’t happy to see the Jews succeed in draining and cultivating the swamp. ⁽³⁾ Things didn’t turn out the way they expected them to.

It became clear to the Arabs of Hirbet Azun, in the war of independence in 1948 that the Sharon Valley would fall to Israel and the Mts. Of Samaria to the Jordanians.

Their reason for leaving wasn’t because the Jewish State of Israel didn’t want them as citizens, on the contrary; the Jewish State of Israel would very much like the Arabs to feel comfortable as citizens and not to feel that they are outsiders or second class citizens, so they’d be motivated to identify with the Jewish objectives of building up the state.

They left because they didn’t have the same vision as the Jews of developing the land. They wanted to live in an Arab state where they could oppose the Jewish State more effectively.

The Jordanian Legion attempted to achieve this objective in June 1954 in an attack on a Jewish farm near Ranaana in which they managed to kill, Moshe Reines, a Jewish farmer.

The attack was launched from the village of Azun in Jordan, the same village where the inhabitants of Hirbet Azun went to live.

2 days later a group of paratroopers, in one of the first reprisal operations of the Israeli Army, Operation Baruch, led by Ariel Sharon attacked the village killing several Jordanian soldiers.

Baruch Ostrovsky had tried to draw the Arabs into the embrace of progress and development taking place in Ranaana. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, the aims of the Jews and the Arabs were very far apart from each other, in fact were the opposite of each other.

Sadly everybody realizes that the contrast in aims of the Jews and Arabs of Ranaana and Hirbet Azun, exemplifies the situation throughout Israel.

Moshe Berent and others are right in saying that we need harmony between the Jewish and Arab goal of developing the country.

It would be in the interests of the Jewish Nation to make great efforts to bring this about.

But giving up the dream of Jewish nationhood, as suggested by Berent is not the way.

Wishing you a great no news day

Yours truly

Leon Gork

Come for a Jerusalem Walk with Leon Gork

Jerusalemwalks.com

legork@netvision.net.il

Tel: 052 3801867

1.        Dr. Moshe Berent teaches Political Science and communications in the faculty of Sociology at the Open University. His hypothesis is contained in his book “A nation like all the other nations; towards the establishment of an Israeli Republic”.

For the sake of comparison I suggest reading Rabbi Dr. Simon Federbush Mishpat Hamelucha beyisrael. Published in Hebrew by the Rabbi Kook institute. Also Jacob Blidstein Principles of Nationalism in the teaching of Maimonides. Bar Ilan University Press.

2.        Isaiah 65:10 “Sharon will become a pasture for flocks,
       and the Valley of Achor a resting place for herds,
       for my people who seek me.”

Song of Songs 2:1 “I am a rose ^[] of Sharon,
       a lily of the valleys.”

3.        According to one of the veterans of Ranaana (YNet “America of the Sharon” 2/7/07) “The Arabs of Hirbet Azun were our neighbors on the hill, stealing from us, attacking us and murdering. The Arabs of Hirbet Azun weren’t robbed, on the contrary they wanted to rob, when they failed they fled and the land where the village once stood is suitable compensation for their murderous activities.”