chapter 2 “Tell It Not in Gath”: the Palestinian Nakba in Hebrew Poetry 1948–1958

I

The title of this essay is taken from Nathan Alterman’s poem “Al zot” [“About This”] published in the Davar newspaper (November 19th, 1948). Alterman was in fact the national poet of the Yeshuv (the Jews that lived in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel). The poem was published in his “The Seventh Column,” which was published every Friday in Davar, the newspaper of the Mapai party, the hegemonic power in the Yeshuv. In all likelihood, the subject of Alterman’s poem was the massacre that took place in the town of Lydda on July 12, 1948 (according to Menachem Finkel- stein, however, the poem was written about the massacre in Dawayima that took place at the end of October in 1948).1 It thus records the moral crimes that Israel committed against the Pales- tinian inhabitants who had resided in Palestine before the outbreak of the 1948 War. Descriptions such as these—in this case, of the massacre in Lydda, which was perpetrated by the soldiers of the Yiftah Brigade, and of the expulsion of the inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle eastwards, towards the lines held by the Arab Legion2 (Benny Morris regards the poem as a reaction to the horrors of “Operation Hiram”3)—are rare in Alterman’s poetry. For instance, Alterman does not deal poetically with the Haganah’s campaigns of intimidation, which led to a mass flight of Arabs, or the expulsion from Caesarea, which took place on February 20, 1949. In fact, the poet usually ignored the fact that during the second stage, while there was no blanket policy of expulsion, the Haganah’s Plan D clearly resulted in mass flight. Commanders were authorized to clear the populace out of the villages and certain urban districts, and to raze the villages if they felt a military need. Many commanders identified with the aim of ending

1 See Manachem Finkelstein, Hatur Hashvie veTohar Haneshek (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad, 2011). 2 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 423–428, 489. 3 Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 230.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004377608_004 16 chapter 2 up with a Jewish state with as small an Arab minority as possible. Some gener- als, such as Allon, clearly acted as if driven by such a goal.4 Thus “Al zot” appears to diverge from the line Alterman took in his weekly column, “The Seventh Column,” (Davar, November 19th, 1948) in which his practice was to conceal the military’s immoral actions from his readers. Alter- man wrote the poem five weeks after the massacre in Lydda (that he knew of its occurrence is certain, as Yaakov Orland (1914–2002) states in his poem “Zutot”5). However, a close reading of “Al zot” would show that the poem, which might initially seem to be a condemnation of the massacre, is in fact used by Alterman to bolster the prevalent hegemonic position, which portrayed the 1948 War as a just war. Ostensibly, “Al zot” is quite atypical; indeed, Alterman warns here of war crimes being perpetrated by IDF soldiers:

He drove through the conquered town on a jeep, A fierce, armed youth … a lion boy! And there on that street An old man and a woman Pressed their backs, before him, to the wall

And the boy smiled a milky-toothed smile: “Let’s try the machine gun” … and did! The old man buried his face in his hands Before his blood covered the wall.

[…]

So boys and girls, and we alongside them Some in deed, Some with an approving pat on the back, Mumble our way with “necessity” and “revenge,” To the role of war criminals.6

4 Morris, Righteous Victims, 256. 5 Haggai Rogani, Mul hakfar sh’harav: hashira ha’ivrit veha’sichsuch ha’yehudi-arvi 1929–1967 (Haifa: Pardes, 2006), 126–127; Mordechai Naor, Ha’tur ha’shmini: massa histori be’ikvot ha’tu- rim ha’aktualiyim shel Nathan Alterman (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2006), 190–192. 6 Nathan Alterman, “Al Zot,” in Ha’tur ha’shvi’I, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1977), 150.