ARTICLES Hidden Scripts The Social Evolution of Alterman’s “Don’t You Give Them Guns”

Efrat Ben-Ze’ev

ABSTRACT: Nathan Alterman’s poem “Don’t You Give Them Guns” echoed European post–World War I anti-war literature. Curiously, the poem turned into a key text in a ritual instituted by members of the elite Jewish underground fighting force, the , which was established during World War II. This article is an attempt to understand how a paci- fist poem came to be used by Jewish-Israeli soldiers at the heart of the 1948 War of Independence. In terms of theory, the analysis dwells on the relations between text and social context, arguing that alternative social ideas conceal themselves in poetry and other literary forms. These texts can be likened to undercurrents that preserve hidden social concerns. To follow the changing role of such texts, the article considers the fate of “Don’t You Give Them Guns” from its birth in 1934 to its later manifesta- tions in the early twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS: anthropology and poetry, anti-war poems, hakhshara, Nathan Alterman, 1948 War, Palmach

Don’t You Give Them Guns

Come sit yourself beside me nurse, lest my last breath go unknown. Death comes in such a silence here, and I am cold, alone.

The oil lamp shines its yellow haze, wind the darkened garden beats,

Israel Studies Review, Volume 29, Issue 1, Summer 2014: 1–17 © Association for Studies doi: 10.3167/isr.2014.290102 • ISSN 2159-0370 (Print) • ISSN 2159-0389 (Online) 2 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev

before you here consumption sat, a gentle nurse—and sweet.

She held me, though I were a child, and bid me cry and have no shame. For orphaned sons, for widowed wife, an old and whimpering babe.

Sister, you must know, please tell me why do sick men seem so small? I was once a man and soldier, in cannons’ face I stood so tall.

It was a while, I concede, they left me little of that past: a medal and consumption, nurse, do you know of poison gas?

The sky was more than sky that day, soft wind rolled the valley floor. May was the sweetest of all Mays Our mother nature bore.

Like boys let out for holiday armies marched in dizzy fun. The air was rich with happy spring, tobacco smoke and sun.

Steel helmets passed from head to hand, our hair and voice let loose. Oh high chin and oh proud step, you can’t escape the noose.

Young apple trees burst into song, my mother hugged me on the way. And through the grain the whistling wind Came laden with its May.

When horror struck we knew its smell so only mother asked, why do you hide from me my son, why do you wear a mask?

We fitted well the rubber straps And took the cloud head first. I stabbed a small one in the skull, three big ones through the chest. Hidden Scripts | 3

Soldiers all had lost their song, the world had lost its sense. Among the bombs we killed in fear and so much innocence.

I still remember, as all should, they were as good as us, just ought not to have been sent to war, ought not to have been given guns.

It’s over now, the war is gone. You are here—the lamp still glows. Ten and seven years have passed. They killed me there—but slow.

Even death is silent here, polite and patient to the last. Only my bitter lungs still spit murder, hatred, and the gas.

Only I remember how— so different in that burst— I stabbed a small one in the skull, three big ones through the chest.

Nurse, one moment, I’ve two loved ones, Fine good-hearted sons. When my day comes, oh for heaven, Don’t you give them guns.

— Nathan Alterman, 1934 (translation by Yahav Zohar)

In the course of a study on 1948 memories, I stumbled upon a commemo- rative rite that incorporated Nathan Alterman’s anti-war poem “Don’t You Give Them Guns” (Al Titnu La’hem Rovim). The rite was initiated within one Palmach hakhshara (Kaddish 1995) immediately after the men’s first baptism by fire in January 1948. The hakhshara was a closely knit group of young men and women that originated in Zionist youth movements and agricultural schools of the early 1940s. It was designed to combine military instruction with the founding of new settlements, and its com- mon division of labor was that the men were the fighters while the women served as support (with some exceptions). The hakhshara that adopted Alterman’s “Don’t You Give Them Guns” during the war continued to observe its commemorative rite thereafter, cre- ating and maintaining an annual fixed program. The question that triggered 4 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev the following inquiry was why this pacifist poem surfaced in the heart of fighting and established itself as a key text for the hakhshara members. Slightly expanding on this question, this article considers the poem’s his- tory, both before its adoption by the hakhshara and during its later use within other contexts. The aim here is threefold. First and foremost, it is to document the details of this commemorative rite, including the circumstances that led to its establishment and the positioning of the poem within its program. Second is to consider this piece of ethnography as a case study that sheds light on the relations between a key text and its social context. More specifically, the question is how poetic recitation serves as a conduit to express an alterna- tive message to the more articulated, mainstream one. Finally, as the poem’s title later took on a life of its own, divorced from its original meaning, we see how new contexts preserve part of the text yet transform its meaning. Before proceeding, some notes on the methodology are necessary. The Palmach veterans were interviewed between 2002 and 2005 (see also Ben- Ze’ev 2011: 127–166). They were then in their early to mid-seventies, no longer at the height of their careers or fulfilling central roles in Israeli public life. Their image of being ‘forever young’ (Spector-Mersel 2008) was difficult to maintain, and they were stepping down from their quasi- mythical role as the founding generation (Ben-Ze’ev and Lomsky-Feder 2009; Harris 2009). Moreover, they were contemplative and disappointed, lamenting the gap between what they had hoped for as youngsters and the present, occasioned by the failure of many aspirations. Having retired, they had more time to exchange opinions with one another, possibly finding solace in this sharing. At this stage in life,it seemed that the bonds of their youth were reinstated and reinforced. They met for their yearly reunions, at lectures, and on tours, often recording and videotaping the events. Many of them published memoirs and circu- lated them among other hakhshara members, devoting significant space to their 1948 experience. The 20 interviews that I conducted with the hakhshara members were with its core actors—those who had remained in touch and kept the com- memorative rite going. All interviews were conducted at the interview- ees’ homes, mostly on a one-to-one basis. They tended to last between one hour and two hours, and as they were concluding the veterans often brought out memorabilia. They would fetch a book, a photo album, mem- oirs jotted on single sheets of paper or arranged in a booklet, a videotape of a joint activity, and the like. Hence, the ethnography of this study was composed of all these components put together. The poem was another curious ‘artifact’ and will be treated here as the vantage point from which the whole can be profitably viewed. Hidden Scripts | 5

This article will work its way chronologically from end to beginning. I will first consider the use of the poem’s title in recent years and then move back in time to describe its role for the active Palmach hakhshara. Finally, I will touch on the poem’s origins, typifying the evolution over time of World War I poetry. Before focusing on the poem itself, however, the article briefly considers some of the work on the interrelation between texts and social context in the field of anthropology.

Anthropology and Poetry

Texts such as novels, memoirs, and poems are often integral parts of eth- nographies. Alton Becker’s (1979) analysis of Javanese shadow theater touched on the union between cultural text and context. His argument was that the theater is understood by the audience due to the latter’s acquain- tance with prior social texts. Cultural constraints predefine the audience’s spectrum of interpretation. There is a single mythological world that gov- erns the theater’s protagonists and symbols. It is through the combination of the theater’s contents and the cultural context, he argued, that the epis- temology of Javanese society can be revealed: the wholeness of society is manifested through the same principles in different arenas. Since this article’s scope is narrower, and it is assumed that the readers are fairly well acquainted with the 1948 context, the bulk of the discussion will be dedicated to the text itself. I have chosen “Don’t You Give Them Guns” as a focal point for three main reasons: its salience during the 1948 War, its canonical endurance throughout the lives of the hakhshara mem- bers, and its uniqueness—a pacifist text playing a major role in the heart of war. Becker’s argument about the union of text and context suggests that we can learn something about Jewish-Israeli society by paying attention to the text as a complementary source. Yet ‘our’ text, at least at first glance, does not seem to fit well with the context. Stephen Greenblatt (1995) argued that a culture is refined through texts that delineate constraints, either by praising the normative or by mock- ing the deviant. Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000: 16) practiced what they defined as ‘new historicism’ by delving “as deeply as possible into the creative matrices of particular historical cultures” in order “to understand how certain products of these cultures could seem to possess a certain independence.” In a similar manner, “Don’t You Give Them Guns” can be interpreted as an important representation of Hebrew-speaking society, having been written by one of its greatest poets, yet at the same time as a signal of the margin of that society’s culture. In its presence one encoun- ters a disharmonious chord. 6 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev

Lila Abu-Lughod’s (1986) observations on Bedouin poetry can further assist us here. In her study of the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin of the western Egyp- tian desert, poetry reveals “vulnerability, expressing sentiments of dev- astating sadness, self-pity, and a sense of betrayal, or, in cases of love, a discourse of attachment and deep feeling” (ibid.: 187). These oral poetic recitations are a subversive genre, violating the public code of honor. However, according to Abu-Lughod, it is still clear that this poetic dis- course is socially constructed no less than ordinary speech: the former enables one to say what is unacceptable in the latter. Along a similar vein, “Don’t You Give Them Guns” may have offered a discourse parallel to the prevalent one. In Israel, the public discourse justified and almost venerated the han- dling of the 1948 War, to the extent of describing it as characterized by a ‘purity of arms’. Yet at the same time, the alternative and more private poetic discourse uncovered the emotional and moral conflicts of the sol- diers. The heroes of the public discourse chose to undermine it, if subtly, to indicate an alternative image of war. Hence, within certain settings, some- what on the margins of public discourse, alternative renderings were pro- posed by these soldiers turned veterans. Many decades after the war, the poem went through some degree of revival. This time, rather than adhering to its original meaning, its head was cut off from its body when the title was used without the poem itself. Set into new contexts, the title was thus given new connotations. Let us now briefly review these later usages.

A Late Reincarnation

Bumper stickers have enjoyed broad popularity in Israel in the last decades, with many expressing a political position (Salomon 2001). In May 2004, the Hebrew hip-hop band HaDag Nakhash released “The Song of the Sticker,” comprised of a collection of bumper sticker phrases. The lyrics, compiled by author David Grossman, incorporated “Don’t You Give Them Guns,” by then a bumper sticker phrase that was also popular in political speeches, newspaper articles, and demonstration placards. Although the idiom was originally associated with a humanist worldview—the post–World War I anti-war sentiment—by the time of the Oslo Accords it had been adopted by right-wing speakers. The phrase implied that the Israeli government should not have granted weapons to the newly emerging Palestinian political entity. For example, an organi- zation called Professors for a Strong Israel opened their July 1998 press release as follows: “Re: Don’t Give Them Guns! Professors for a Strong Hidden Scripts | 7

Israel Urge the Government to Supply No Additional Guns to the PLO/ Hamas Terrorist Army.”1 During the 1990s, the phrase “Don’t You Give Them Guns” was taken to be a recent invention of the right wing; many were unaware of its 60-year-old history. Before becoming a right-wing slogan, it was used in a variety of other connotations. In 1985, not long after Saddam Hussein’s army sprayed the Iranians with mustard gas, it was the title of a short newspaper article opposing the American provision of weapons to Iraq (Caroz 1985). Five years later, author Shulamit Har-Even (1990) published an article with the same title, this time meaning that the Israeli govern- ment should not give guns to the Jewish West Bank and Gaza settlers. Soon after, columnist Yaron London (1991) used the expression to support the Israeli policy of exempting women from obligatory army service. That the slogan had emerged and become common by the late twen- tieth century is not surprising, as the phrase was already ‘in the air’. But how “Don’t You Give Them Guns” as a full poem rooted itself in its earlier use, in the midst of the 1948 War, is more perplexing.

The Year 1948 and the Party of the First

In 1948, the meaning of “Don’t You Give Them Guns” was still drawn from its origin, Alterman’s pacifist poem of the previous decade. At the onset of war, it became an essential poem for the hakhshara discussed here. The hakhshara was comprised of roughly 50 young men and women, mostly born in British to families who had emi- grated from Eastern Europe. Many had completed prestigious agricul- tural high schools, and some had been associated with the socialist youth movements. Born in 1929 and 1930, they had volunteered for the Palmach in mid- to late 1947. Many of the hakhshara veterans mentioned a highly esteemed rite that they had established early in the war. They called it the Party of the First (Mesibat Ha-Rishon), and it was initially ‘celebrated’ in January 1948, fol- lowing the unit’s first armed encounter on 30 December 1947, which they termed ‘the first battle’ ha-krav( ha-rishon). The clash that triggered this inau- gural rite or first ‘party’ was not quite a battle. The soldiers—the hakhshara men alongside soldiers from other units—were sent for a retaliation action (pe’ulat tagmul) against an Arab village as a reprisal for the killing of Jews some days earlier. Specifically, their mission was a night attack on the vil- lage. They were given axes to break into houses and instructed to separate the women from the men and to kill the men. This is how the unit’s officer described the retaliation activity over 50 years later: 2 8 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev

We received arms and a briefing and went off to take cruel revenge [la’asot shefatim]. We walked on the slopes of the mountain and came down to the village in a few thrusts [kama rashim]. At some stage they [the Arabs] noticed us and shot [at us]. We didn’t respond. We penetrated quickly into the village and began the action. It wasn’t simple. It wasn’t a nice kind of an action. We did what we were supposed to do and retreated. Koby was killed … I carried his body on my back for most of the way and returned covered with blood. It wasn’t a nice battle. There are no nice battles, but this one had something unpleasant. The youngsters who had come back glori- fied their deeds. Very soon it became tasteless and unpleasant … Among these youth there were those to which this kind of wild behavior had noth- ing to do with them, but in the circumstances of this battle, this is what they were expected to do. (Argaman 2002: 74)

Despite the understated tone of the officer’s description, one can sense his discomfort. He was not the only one to feel this way. Some of the hakh- shara privates expressed their reservations in writing as early as 1952, when they began to include their war experiences as part of the annual Party of the First. They turned their collective remembrances into a text and would read it during the party. The retaliation action at the Arab vil- lage was described in the text as follows:

We descend. Cries of fear from the village. Single shots. We run. The teams spread. The cover takes its place. Shooting from all directions. The celebra- tion has begun [hahilula hekhela]. An exciting fire catches you. Go farther down, exterminate them. First houses. The Sten [gun] spits at escaping images. Doors are broken with axes. (Hand grenades silence the cries of babies and the yells of women.)3 The sound of explosions and shooting implant you with fever, alertness, and a passion to kill. You sons of bitches, the day of revenge has come. We slowly begin to withdraw. Then we run up the mountain. Good—no one is missing. We spread ourselves on the rocks. Platoon, come carry the injured. What—there are injured? We draw near. A young man is lying on his back, his hands and legs spread aside, a white bandage on his face and a small dark stain on his fore- head. It doesn’t matter, he will live. Someone says: “His mother will cry over him.” Everybody silences him with anger: “Don’t be cynical, he will not die.” We load the wounded on our shoulders. The other [wounded man] has a torn breast. He will surely be saved. The battalion’s officer had promised that no one would be killed. The hand of the injured man penetrates through your shirt. It’s cold. My God—how could that be? And that path—which of us does not remember the withdrawal? We have withdrawn many times Hidden Scripts | 9

[thereafter], but that one was the most depressing, the most chaotic, without elementary first aid facilities, without a stretcher, the heads of the injured bumping against the sides of the stones. Morning drew near. We leave the injured on the road for the ambulance. For us they are still only injured. When dawn breaks from the eastern green hills, we plod along. We killed a hundred of them, and two of our men were killed.4 A little depressing, but who can think of it when one is so tired. I’m glad I’m alive. During the day we laugh, we tell stories. It’s an outlet [hitparkut] after the battle. When we get back, everything seems worthless. We were in battle. We killed people. We carried those injured. Damn, which of you ever carried a dead man on his back? Later, a lousy feeling overcomes you, a kind of shock. The cry of babies silenced by grenades, a woman ripped by a Sten, a man with no defense hid- ing under a bed and a burst gets him. Is this war? Is this heroism? Are these the enemies? This is the summary of our first battle. And later is the Party of the First, and everyone is happy that no one is missing. Yes, we will always sit together.

This passage is part of a much longer text that has been recited, year after year, at the Party of the First. The text shifts between present and past tenses. Through its oral recitation, the war is re-enacted annually in the company of the hakhshara members—and them alone. One of its apparent lacunae is the dearth of details regarding the ‘battle’ itself. Rather, it is the aftermath that matters: first the confused feeling during the retreat, and then the reflections upon return. Facing death for the first time, of both comrades and those whom one has killed, has its demoralizing effect. The Party of the First signified the beginning of the war, and its com- memoration soon became a tradition, held once a month during the war when possible and then once a year after the war. The elements of the party were determined by the men and women of the unit in January 1948, and they have changed little through the years: selected members recite three texts, two of the unit’s women sing solos, and the entire group partici- pates in sing-alongs. Occasionally, the party has also included acrobatics, pyramid-like formations performed by the men. In 1952, as noted above, a chronicle of the unit’s war events was created and has subsequently been integral to the party. A map is hung on the wall, and small light bulbs or the ray of a flashlight indicates the sites of the hakhshara’s battles as they are being described. One of the three selected texts is an excerpt from the 1944 Russian novel Volokolamsk Highway by Alexandr Bek, translated into Hebrew as The Men of Panfilov (1953). Bek describes the events among a Soviet force that protected Moscow from the Nazi invasion in World War II. In one of the opening passages, the protagonist officer explains to the author the contradictory 10 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev emotions that only a soldier can experience. This passage (ibid.: 8) may have found resonance among the Palmach soldiers:5

“And do you understand what an internal struggle is, what conscience is?” “I understand,” I replied with less certainty. “No, you do not understand. You do not know how two emotions stir within you, fighting each other ablaze with anger, wishing to uproot one another: fear and conscience. They are like the most savage animals in their struggle. You may know the soul of a hard-working man, the soul of a hus- band, but you do not know the soul of a soldier.”

While it is these feelings that reverberate in the hakhshara’s ‘first battle’ description, this passage was not chosen for the party. Rather, it was another passage from this book—the officer’s provocative statement on the mean- ing of the motherland. Here is a segment of it, summing up his principles (ibid.: 42):

“The motherland is you! Kill him who wants to kill you! For whom is it neces- sary? For you, for your wife, for your father and mother, for your children!” … The cruel truth of war is not hidden in the word ‘die’ but rather in the word ‘kill’. I did not use the term ‘instinct’, but I had hoped for it, for the immense instinct for living. I had hoped to awaken and stimulate it so as to win in battle.

Here is a command to kill, giving reasons for a kind of warfare that the soldiers were not eager to fight. The hakhshara veterans repeatedly state that they did not perceive themselves as keen warriors, either back then or today. Hence, we can understand why they were seeking justifications for what they were—soldiers coming back from a massacre that barely con- formed to what they defined as a battle. They could find some justifications for their conduct in The Men of Panfilov. Moreover, Russia was for many decades a role model for the Zionists. It was almost inevitable that they would identify with the Russians who had fought the Nazis. The second recitation that the veterans chose for the Party of the First was the biblical eulogy of David for Jonathan and Saul, including these famous verses: “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen … How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!” (II Samuel 1:19, 25–27, KJV). In this text, as in the former one, the parallel seems evident. It is a eulogy for men who die in the prime of life. It speaks of comradeship, grief, and loss, all of which suddenly became part of the Palmach soldiers’ war experience. Hidden Scripts | 11

The third recitation, “Don’t You Give Them Guns,” was the most per- plexing choice, at least according to some of the veterans. They could not explain why it was chosen for the Party of the First. Alterman’s poem dif- fers from Bek’s Men of Panfilovand David’s biblical eulogy: it offers neither justification nor consolation. Parallel to taking up arms for the first time, the soldiers find in it a subtle way to express their reluctance and confu- sion. When the soldiers grasped, very early on, the non-heroic side of war, they chose a poem that revealed this discomfort. However, the message is not spelled out, and the reason for its inclusion is not obvious. Rather, to an outsider like me, they say that the poem entered the rite by mere chance. What can be said of the poem itself? First, its topic lifts the blame from those who shoot. The finger is pointed at “you” (who give them guns)—a plural ‘you’ in Hebrew. In the poem, the narrator compares the soldiers to “boys let out for holiday” and later to a child whose mother is rebuking him: “[W]hy do you hide from me my son?” Then, when terror strikes, likened to an external force, it sets off a dark inner persona of which the soldier was formerly unaware. When he emerges out of the stupor that arises from the chaos of battle, he mourns the men he killed, who were, he testifies, “as good as us.” It is this specific line that some of the Palmach men remembered by heart and quoted to me over half a century later. In light of tuberculosis and approaching death, the soldier is again held as if a child, a “whimpering babe.” To some extent, the soldier is portrayed as passive. But at the same time he is also active, if somewhat naive and oblivious, happily enjoying the weather and singing in anticipation of the battle. During the war, the soldier carries out his task of killing with devo- tion: four people are burned into his memory as his victims. The poem’s most salient trait is its duality, especially with regard to war and violence. It expresses empathy toward the happy soldier marching to battle and compassion toward the tormented soul that he later becomes. Altogether, the poem’s soldiers are humane, capable of repentance, caught up within larger forces. This complexity may explain both the poem’s popularity in the heat of the fighting and its persistence through time. Its long-time inclusion as a canonical literary piece in the hakhshara’s party has its logic. The veterans could share an attitude that found expression nowhere else. There is another issue at hand. One of the prime traits of the ‘Palmach generation’ was its reluctance to disclose emotions (Sivan 1991; Spector- Mersel 2008). When I asked an interviewee whether the unit’s soldiers would talk among themselves about personal matters, he noted: “Much less than we would today, I’m sure. I think to myself, should we meet to talk about these matters today, we would surely speak of each and everyone’s burden [ma shekol ehad sohev ito]. It would surely be more personal than it 12 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev could have been back then.” When I asked why this was so, he replied: “I don’t know why. That’s how we were brought up. That’s how we were educated. I know that I’m generalizing, but that was the spirit of the era … For us at the time, there were situations that with today’s sensitivity are ungraspable. We were tougher [kshuhim]. We were stronger [hasonim]. And perhaps, in parallel, at the same time we understood less. It’s not as if we were made of a refractory material. But that’s how we were brought up. I’m not sure whether what I’m saying would fit everyone, but I’m sure it fits many of those who lived back then.” This Palmach veteran is arguing that the generational norm was of maximum restraint; emotional expressions were not accepted in the public domain. In an oft-quoted line of poetry, Lea Goldberg (1970: 199), a contem- porary of Nathan Alterman, wrote in the 1950s: “To this generation, crying is a disgrace.” If the soldiers experienced moral wrangling as manifested in regret, sorrow, or a sense of being out of place, it was conveyed indi- rectly through the texts chosen for the Party of the First. The message comes through most evidently in “Don’t You Give Them Guns,” but the other texts also have significance for these veterans. Together they form a statement and an image of what war meant—and means—to those who participated in it.

The Poem’s Origins

The image of war is always negotiated. The Zionists had yet to discover the meaning of a full-fledged war when the poem was written inthe 1930s. Nathan Alterman first published “Don’t You Give Them Guns” in 1934 in a small weekly literary journal entitled Turim (Columns). What were the circumstances that influenced Alterman to write a poem with such a clear pacifist message in a country that was already caught up in violent conflict? According to literary critics Dan Miron and Dan Laor, the Hebrew poets of the early 1930s, many of whom were immigrants of European origin still bearing the imprint of World War I, were seeking a way to find a compromise between constructing war as a horrifying per- sonal experience, on the one hand, and portraying it with heroic images to serve a collective and national sentiment, on the other. While many poets represented the collective-heroic spirit that dominated the period, a small yet influential group of modernist poets, led by , voiced opinions from the left end of the spectrum. They emphasized a universal, anti-nationalist worldview, focusing on the terror and unacceptability of war (Miron 1992: 35–36; Laor 2013: 129–132). Shlonsky (1932) published a 60-page book in Hebrew entitled Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Small Collection of Anti-war Poems. The first half of the book Hidden Scripts | 13 consists of an essay in which Shlonsky considers the role of the poet vis-à- vis war, with special reference to World War I. In it, he blames the silence of the poets and intellectuals at the start of the war, writing: “In all sev- enty tongues curses were sworn to a great abomination, all words were attracted to patriotism’s inn, the gentle hands of 1914’s poets could not hear the cry of the letters that were created to form the secret holy marriage of ‘Bless my Soul,’ ‘Love your brother’ and ‘Thou shall not kill’” (ibid.: 15). In the book’s second part, Shlonsky collected and translated selected anti- war poems originally written in Spanish, Russian, French, and German. Alterman, who was born in in 1910 and arrived in Palestine at the age of 15, was associated in the early to mid-1930s with Shlonsky’s group and its pacifist inclinations (Miron 1981: 211–212; Laor 2013: 129– 132). Yet not long after, he dissociated himself from this clear anti-war mes- sage and refrained from including “Don’t You Give Them Guns” in any of his own poetry collections. In 1937, Alterman published “The Battalions’ Song,” also translated as “Song of the Field Units” (Zemer Haplugot), a poem that voiced the very opposite message: it is a song that praises tak- ing up arms.6 The poem was set to music and became very popular. However, Alterman was never to become a marionette voicing the offi- cial line. On the contrary, he was to express the paradoxes of his period. The critic Ziva Shamir (1999: 335) described him as a “Bohemian vaga- bond and national poet at the same time, a man with and without com- mitment, a rootless cosmopolitan refining his Parisian-like poems, and a man struggling for Israel’s independence, identifying with the pain of his people and sharing the burden.” In December 1947, on the eve of the 1948 War, Alterman wrote one of his most famous pieces, “The Silver Platter” (Magash Hakesef). Its heroes are a young man and woman who are described as ‘weary youth’ (ayefim ad bli kets, nezirim mimargoa). They declare to the nation that they are the ‘silver platter’ on which the land of the Jews was given.7 According to cultural his- torians Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (1999: 36), the poem became a key representation of the 1948 War because so early on “Alterman was already visualizing the disappearance of a whole cohort of young men and women.” During the war, Alterman’s “The Silver Platter” was used in remembrance of lost ones by bereaved families and friends, and it was later adopted as a canonical text at Israel’s Day of Commemoration (Yom Hazikaron). Hence, as we see, Alterman embodied opposites: a poet who venerated the dead as part of a nationalist agenda in “The Silver Platter,” and an anti-war poet whose “Don’t You Give Them Guns” conveyed a pacifist message. “Don’t You Give Them Guns” was set to music by Stefan Wolpe, a gifted musician who escaped his native Berlin in 1933 and arrived in Palestine in 1934. Wolpe was the head of the Composition Department at 14 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev the Conservatory until he left Palestine for the United States in 1938.8 It was probably during his four years in Palestine that he composed the music for “Don’t You Give Them Guns.” By the 1980s and 1990s, the song was no longer popular, but the title survived and could be used for other causes, as noted earlier. Divorced from the context of the poem, the title could mean almost anything. It was now mainly used by the Israeli right wing in support of its militant approach. In the late 1990s, David Broza, a well-known Israeli songwriter and performer, tried to revive the poem in its entirety by composing a new tune to the lyrics. However, in the atmosphere that then pervaded the country, the song achieved little success. The Israeli reality of the 1990s rejected a revival of “Don’t You Give Them Guns.”

Summary and Discussion

By following the curious path that “Don’t You Give Them Guns” has taken, this article has explored the role of poetry as a subversive channel, a means to express alternative ideas. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1993: 143) com- mented on this role as early as the eighteenth century, as part of the roman- ticist theories that he was developing: “In poetry’s gallery of diverse ways of thinking, diverse aspirations, and diverse desires, we come to know periods and nations far more intimately than we can through the mislead- ing and pathetic method of studying their political and military history. From this latter kind of history, we rarely learn more about a people than how it was ruled and how it was wiped out. From its poetry, we learn about its way of thinking, its desires and wants, the ways it rejoiced, and the ways it was guided either by its principles or its inclinations.” Poetry discloses implicit ideas that circulate within societies and mat- ter to them. It can be, as in this case, a way to express a latent discourse. In a semi-private setting such as the Party of the First, the moral discom- fort with war was permitted to surface through poetry. For this hakhshara, “Don’t You Give Them Guns,” recited yearly in the intimate company of old comrades, carried an essential message. However, the poem’s pacifist message did not translate into any form of operational mode for the hakhshara members. They continued to take front-line positions in the 1948 fighting—killing and being killed—and were major players in the depopulation of Palestine’s Arabs. They did not express publicly their opposition or doubts. The role of poetry here was as an anesthetic, a way to deal with ethical discomfort. Moreover, the potential humanist worldview carried by the poem was totally lost over time. While in the 1930s “Don’t You Give Them Guns” was Hidden Scripts | 15 part of an open discussion of humanist ideas, shortly afterward it turned into a poem that was exceptional among Alterman’s more militant corpus. Perhaps Alterman could not have become the national poet if he had con- tinued to embrace “Don’t You Give Them Guns.” By 1948, its pacifist tone did not play a major role in the public national sphere, now highly mili- tarized. The poem went underground, preserved in a concealed form in settings such as the Party of the First. If, as Herder argues, poetry reveals a society’s desires and wants, the history of “Don’t You Give Them Guns” sheds light on a certain trajec- tory. Going back to Abu-Lughod’s terminology, the subversive genre, which is socially constructed as much as the public one, was to be estab- lished as secretive and to remain as such. The historical twists and turns of “Don’t You Give Them Guns,” in and of themselves, can still teach us something about the ideological undercurrents that used to bubble under the surface. To discover whether they still do would entail searching for other key texts that are possibly hidden in multiple meanings, just like “Don’t You Give Them Guns.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jay Winter triggered this inquiry back in 2004 by drawing my attention to the similarity between “Don’t You Give Them Guns” and European post–World War I anti-war poetry and literature. At the time, I consulted Eliyahu Hakohen, the late Haim Hefer, Rafi Ilan, Dan Laor, Gil’ad Shakh, Shmuel Tratner, and Hamutal Tsamir, who generously shared their knowl- edge. Ari Barbalat, Eyal Ben-Ari, Lawrence S. Lerner, Edna Lomsky-Feder, Tamir Sorek, and Elia Zureik kindly commented on this article. None, of course, should be held responsible for its content. Finally, I am especially indebted to Yahav Zohar for his fine translation of Alterman’s poem.

EFRAT BEN-ZE’EV (DPhil, Oxon.) teaches at the Ruppin Academic Center. She is a Fellow of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University and is currently Head of the Israeli Anthropological Associ- ation. She co-edited (with Jay Winter and Ruth Ginio) Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (2010) and authored Remembering Palestine in 1948: Beyond National Narratives (2011). 16 | Efrat Ben-Ze’ev

NOTES

1. Although it is no longer available, the article was originally posted on the group’s website (http://www.professors.org.il). 2. All names of people are pseudonyms, and all place names have been deleted. 3. These parentheses appear in the original text. Perhaps they indicate a hesita- tion to include the sentence. 4. Argaman (2002: 74) quotes official sources that estimate the Palestinian casu- alties at 60–100, including women and children. 5. All passages quoted here are my translations from the Hebrew. 6. A verse from the “Battalions’ Song” reads as follows: “Wait for us, homeland, in your mountains’ paths, / Wait for us in fields of standing grain, / Your youth once carried your plow of peace, / Today they carry your peace with guns.” 7. Translated by David Stern, the last stanza of the poem reads: “Then they fall back in darkness / As the dazed nation looks / And the rest can be found / In the history books.” See http://www.phy6.org/outreach/poems/alterman.htm (accessed 10 January 2014). 8. See https://graham.main.nc.us/~bhammel/MUSIC/SW/bio.html (accessed 10 January 2014).

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