“I have watched the Jews come back and perform miracles on the land. We have nothing in common in religion or language or outlook. I am not even sure the Jews will not eventually take all the land. Yet … the Jews are the only salvation for the Arab people. The Jews are the only ones in a thousand years who have brought light to this part of the world.”
“I know this is difficult for you to say, Kammal …”
“Let me continue, please. If we can live side by side in peace although our worlds are far apart then we must eventually prosper from what you have done. I see no other way for the Arab people, Barak, and I don’t know if it is right or wrong.”
“We have never given you reason to doubt our sincerity in wanting peace… ”
“Yes … but there are powers greater than you and I who could bring us into conflict against our will.”
How true … how very true, Barak thought.
“Barak, I am going to sell the Zion Settlement Society that land by the Huleh Lake you have always wanted.”
Barak’s heart began to beat fast.
“It is not merely benevolence. I have conditions. You must allow the Arabs of Abu Yesha to learn your farming and sanitation methods. This can only be done slowly over a period of time. I want a portion of the village’s more deserving boys to be able to attend your school to learn to read and write.”
“That will all be done,” Barak said,
“There is one more condition.”
“And what is that?”
“You must come too.”
Barak rose and rubbed his great beard. “Me? Why me?”
“As long as you are there I know the conditions will be kept and that we will be able to live in peace. I have trusted you from the first day you entered Abu Yesha as a boy over thirty years ago.”
“I will think it over,” Barak said.
“And what will you tell Kammal?” Sarah asked. Barak shrugged. “What is there to say? We can’t go, of course. What a shame. For years I have been trying to set
him to sell that land. Now if I don’t go up there we will never get it.”
“It is a pity,” Sarah agreed and poured some tea.
Barak paced the floor unhappily. “After all, Sarah,” he mumbled, “we must face facts. I am needed at the Yishuv Central and the Settlement Society. It isn’t as if I was running a candy store on Allenby Road.”
“Of course not, dear,” Sarah said sympathetically. “You are vital in your work. The entire Yishuv needs you.”
“Yes,” he said, pacing again, “and we aren’t children any longer. I am past fifty and the land is going to be very very hard to redeem.”
“You are right, Barak. We are too old to pioneer. You have done your share in building this country.”
“Right! I’ll turn Kammal down.”
He sank into a chair and sighed deeply. He had not succeeded in convincing himself. Sarah stood over him and smiled. “You are mocking me, woman,” he said softly. “What’s the use?”
She sat on his lap and was almost lost in his greatness. His huge hands were amazingly gentle as they stroked her hair.
“I was thinking of you and Ari. It will be brutal work and the hardships will be great.”
“Shhhh… drink your tea.”
Barak resigned his position with the Zion Settlement Society, sold his apartment in Tel Aviv, and led twenty-five pioneer families out to the Huleh swamplands to build a moshav. They called it Yad El, the Hand of God.
They pitched tents below the fields of Abu Yesha and mapped out their task. No pioneers yet had faced a job so difficult. The Huleh swamp was deep, and full of forbidding tangles of thickly matted unyielding brush and papyrus which towered to heights of fifteen feet. The muck was alive with poisonous snakes, scorpions, and rats and a hundred other creatures. Wild boars and wolves lurked near the isolated base camp. Everything had to be brought in on muleback, including drinking and washing water.
Sarah was in charge of the base camp, the hospital tent, and the kitchen. Barak headed the work gangs which took to the swamps daily with shovels and picks.
In that first scorching summer they worked day after day, week after week, and month after month in hundred-degree heat, in waist-and neck-high water, slogging away the muck to start drainage channels. With machetes they hacked at the jungle growth until they couldn’t raise their arms. The women
Worked right in the swamps along with the men. Young Ari
Ben Canaan, ten years of age, one of the three children in the settlement, ran off the pails of sludge and ran in drinking water and food to the workers. The workdays were seven each week. The work hours were sunrise to sunset. Still each night they found the energy to sing a few songs of the fields and dance a hora before their six or seven hours of sleep.
At night there was the usual guard against robbers and animals.
It was a race to get the channels in before the winter rains. If the water didn’t drain off, the summer’s work would be wasted. Hundreds of Australian eucalyptus trees were put in to suck up water. Every kibbutz and moshav in the area sent over as many workers as they could spare each day to help the pioneers.
At night, by candlelight, Sarah and Barak took turns schooling Ari and the other two children.
The winter downpours came and all but swept the base camp into the swamp. After each downpour they rushed to the channels to keep the slush from blocking the runoff.
Even a man so strong and resolute as Barak Ben Canaan was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t attempted too much this time. Each time he looked at Ari and Sarah his heart bled. They were always covered with bug bites or suffering from dysentery or hunger or thirst.
And worse was the ravaging malaria. In that first summer and winter Sarah had five attacks and Ari four. The chills and fevers and deliriums all but killed them. Ari, like Sarah, took his pain in silence.
The swamp broke many of the families. Half the original group quit to return to the city to find an easier way.
And soon-Yad El had a graveyard. Two members died of malaria.
Yad Eclass="underline" the Hand of God. It may have been the hand of God that led them there but it was going to be the hands of men that licked the swamp.
For three solid years they beat back the swamp!
At last there was enough land to make twenty-five farms of two hundred dunams each. There was no time to gloat, for there were crops to be planted and homes to be built.
Young Ari Ben Canaan had shaken off the effects of malaria and the other illnesses and had become as sturdy as a rock. At the age of fourteen he could do a man’s day’s work.
When they moved into their cottage and the fields had been plowed and planted Barak was given a reward for his years of toil. Sarah told him she was pregnant again.
At the end of the fourth year two momentous things happened to Barak Ben Canaan. Sarah presented him with a baby daughter who had flaming red hair like his own. The
second occasion was the harvest of the first crop at Yad El.
At last the weary pioneers stopped their labor and took time to celebrate. What a celebration it was! Kibbutzniks and moshavniks from all over the area who had lent a hand at Yad El came to join in the celebration. Arabs from Abu Yesha came. There was gaiety for a week, each night ending at dawn as weary hora dancers collapsed with joy. Everyone came to look at Barak’s and Sarah’s new daughter. She was named Jordana after the river which flowed past the edge of Yad El.
As the celebration continued, Barak took his son An and saddled two horses and they rode up to Tel Hai to that place where he had crossed into the Promised Land from Lebanon forty years before. Tel Hai, the death place of Joseph Trumpledor, was a shrine of the Yishuv, Barak looked down from the hill to Yad El as he had sworn he would long ago.
“I took your mother up here before we were married,” he said to Ari. He put bis arm around his son’s shoulder. “Someday there will be two dozen settlements in this valley and it will be green all the year around.”