Waiting for the Fedayeen
SAMUELS, GERTRUDE
A TEST OF ENDURANCE Waiting for the Fedayeen BY GERTRUDE SAMUELS Kibbutz Neve Ur, Beit Shan Valley The room looks remarkably complete, like a spacious, airy nursery on a ship. It has a...
...Many settlements in the danger zones are using this professional service today...
...And the settlers, outwardly, reflect this tranquility...
...If the danger grew," I asked, "would you evacuate the children...
...I stayed down with the children for a night...
...But we have no choice except to have them, at least, in a position of safety...
...up there, keeping watch...
...it has a fine herd of milk cows, and a good water supply...
...Normal life for us," he reflected, "means that we have adjusted, adults and children, to this way of living...
...It would break morale here and throughout Israel...
...Yisrael and Nahama Reich find time for their hobbies of art and archeology...
...The scene, the bedlam, the children seem normal...
...They were just farmers, like ourselves," the maskir (kibbutz secretary) told me...
...Because," said Pieter de Vrees with a touch of scorn, "they have to see that we are here, that we remain here...
...its orchards grow wild and untended...
...The youngest have grown up in this situation almost from birth, and to them the shelters arc a rule of life...
...Pieter, 31, a handsome, bearded six-footer, is a former Dutch sailor and a Protestant...
...Before we decided on this practice, there was always a rush when the shells started to come, to get the children below...
...Because if the children were evacuated, the mothers would have to go, and the men could not stay on here without them...
...We don't forget our intellectual obligations to ourselves and to our community...
...Sometimes we are very romantic with names for our houses...
...The whitewashed walls at the entrance are bright with the children's crayoned drawings...
...They're just called Aleph, Bet, Gimmel, Dalat [A, B, C, D...
...The kibbutz has always had a hard time keeping members, and nearly all the present settlers arrived in the last dozen years...
...I don't like to be waked up because it's hard to go back to sleep...
...I cannot say, in spite of what's happened to me, that I hate Arabs," he went on...
...It's better to sleep here than in the house...
...Still, the enemy's long-range guns, shells and Katyusha rockets have been zeroing in from Jordan...
...Settlements like Neve Ur continue to suffer human and property casualties...
...It is 8:30, bedtime, and the mothers must go...
...Only one child cried out, at about 3 o'clock, and then he fell quiet and slept again...
...They are mainly young men and women????the oldest are 33who finished their service with the Nahal (a volunteer corps of soldiers who combine their military tour of duty with agricultural work) and came to build up the settlement...
...For the moment it must be," he replied quietly...
...Their kibbutz was founded 20 years ago by immigrants from Iraq, who had lived near the ancient site of Ur-Kasdim...
...A typical farm-settlement nursery in Israel????except that this children's room is a "shelter," bomb-proof and fire-proof and gas-proof, 18 steep concrete steps beneath the ground...
...But since June 1967 and the growing Fedayeen violence, the Arab village has become deserted...
...Any farmer, any tiller of the soil, is always tied to his place...
...Every morning and every afternoon, the Army must send out search units, to insure that the areas to be worked are clear of mines...
...It has a double-decker bunk arrangement around three sides, a tiled floor, a long brown table for play and meals, toy trains, dolls and stuffed animals...
...The units that have been firing on Neve Ur are Iraquis and Jordanian guerrillas...
...I just went with Yotam to the baby's shelter," she said calmly, "and we went on with his meal...
...Remembering that Abraham, seeking the Land of Canaan, lived in the area of Ur-Kasdim (in what was then Mesopotamia), they named their new home Neve Ur, or Abode of Ur...
...When the Arab terrorists moved forward in number, and the Arab farmers fled from the neighboring villages, the kibbutzim along the valley border strung double rows of barbed-wire fences...
...Our future is not in these shelters????we hope...
...All night long at Neve Ur the lights are turned on brightly, illuminating the entire settlement though the enemy is less than two miles away...
...Ashdot Ya'acov, north of Gertrude Samuels is a writer for the New York Times Magazine...
...But when I commented that the shelters were so comfortable and well-built that "you seem to have built for the future here," Pieter de Vrees burst out: "No, no, no...
...This is my life...
...We all feel this way...
...The strange and sad fact is that until the Six Day War the Beit Shan Valley was probably one of the most peaceful places in all Israel...
...Their play emphasized war, too: a doll was "killed...
...Working with the youngest, she has been showing them????by clapping hands hard, by making raucous noises????that "you can make your own noises and it's fun...
...sometimes the Arab farmers came over to pinch some carp from Neve Ur's fishponds...
...during the winter rains a thick mud engulfs a great part of the area...
...Geshcr, eight killed...
...Many people sec the farmer as a simple person...
...Shalom . . . lila-tov...
...Guts...
...A dozen youngsters to about age nine yell and laugh as they race around for Iast-minutc sport, or sit crying in their bunks...
...The overhead lights are turned out...
...I would not leave my village...
...Is that the solution...
...Its one thousand acres are devoted to cotton, citrus, fishponds, wheat, fodder...
...No, it's not because of guts that we stick here," insisted Yisrael in reply to a question...
...Two of their three children were born in Neve Ur...
...He came to the kibbutz with his wife, Marga, to volunteer for three months' work"We love the communal way of living"????And they stayed on to become full-fledged members...
...Sometimes the kibbutzniks would go over in the night to pinch some of the bananas in the Arab groves...
...What we long for, of course, is not this normal situation, but normal-normal????no shelters, no shellings, being able to work in our fields all day and night if necessary, not having to wait until the Army gives us the all-clear to begin our work...
...It applies to the whole community of Israel...
...Psychologically, it's easier to put the children in the shelters every night...
...Young mothers lean over the wooden safety rails to soothe or hold a child...
...In addition, since the cotton fields and fishponds go right down to the Jordan, Army tanks or halftracks accompany, at a distance, those assigned to the fields after the all-clear...
...They got a room in the guest house, and 4-year-old Mede (Mayday) went outside to look around...
...Not long ago, Pieter's wife, Marga, took the two older children for a holiday to another village at the seashore...
...Because when there's shooting I don't have to be waked up in my house and taken here...
...She came back and said matter-of-factly, "Well, we have to ask for another room...
...Now we try to teach the children...
...There's no shelter here...
...Concern about the long-term effect of present conditions on the children goes very deep with the settlers...
...After the mothers leave, a two-way public address system connects above ground to the Children's House, where a nurse is on guard...
...Like everybody in all the valley settlements, the people of Neve Ur know that they are in an endurance test with the guerrillas and the Fatah, and are prepared to see it through...
...All tight," says Rivka, the children's nurse, "now everybody quiet...
...The Israelis have a Hebrew term for the patient and stubborn spirit of the settlers here on the hot border: K'mo kulam????like everybody...
...A red nightlight goes on...
...But these shelters...
...We have to teach them not to fear noise, but to live????how shall I say it?????with reality," explained Nahama...
...Every fortnight a psychologist comes from Tel Aviv to advise and consult with the teachers...
...Never," they answered...
...And it allows us to go on with our evening meetings, because we know the Army and the ambushes are...
...You must understand that this is my house, and you don't leave your house that quickly...
...Eli Ovadiah, the 33-year-old sa-bra from Jerusalem whose Yemenite wife lies buried in the cemetery, said: "I have been here 12 years...
...Living with danger around us...
...We're no heroes...
...But Moshe Dayan would never let it come to that either," said Pieter, reflecting a widespread confidence in the Minister of Defense...
...Good night . . . good sleep!]," they call to the children...
...If an Israeli plane flew high above where a group of youngsters were playing, without word they dropped their toys????even the 2-year-olds????And ran to the shelters...
...a teddy-bear was "dead...
...One cannot give a special meaning just to this kibbutz either...
...His late wife's father was killed also, by shelling in the 1948 War of Liberation...
...Israeli units had sent up flares to light up the area, and were answering the fire in the hills...
...In this Kibbutz, Eli Ovadiah's wife, Braha, 31, mother of three, was killed during a shelling ("Now we have a cemetery with one grave"), and two adults have been wounded, one by a mine that blew up his tractor last August...
...The next-door neighbor has the news and American pop music going, loud...
...Kibbutz Gesher, northwest of this one, has had nine members killed...
...Outwardly, with its tree-shaded lawns and blossoming gardens sitting below the mountains of the lower Galilee, Neve Ur is a beautiful and tranquil oasis...
...A father of three children shrugged...
...I Sam...
...If anything, that air-cooled dungeon for the very young and the very helpless was almost sinister in its completely cooperative silence...
...said Nahama, who has charge of the educational programs, "that when there is a noise they are not to be either passive or frightened, but active...
...Hamadiya, three killed...
...This way we don't have to take them from their beds...
...Being forced to take the children to the shelters every night is a sign of war...
...Noises of all kinds take their toll, and for a long time every noise affected the children...
...We each depend on one another...
...no...
...They are a youthful, tough population of many interests...
...Its families have fled...
...Arabs and Israelis would hail one another as they worked the crops, while their children played on the banks of the nearby Jordan...
...One can get shot at and killed in Fatahland...
...Each side pretended not to know...
...Here on the "hot" border with Jordan the Jewish settlers ruefully refer to "this one-thousandth day of the Six Day War...
...Well, we are simple people, but we also have a higher goal than just being farmers at the border...
...On one recent night the wife of the maskir, Nahama Reich, was breastfeeding her two-week old son, Yotam, in her cottage when the shelling began...
...In Neve Ur, meanwhile, the visitor watches a ritual each evening that is now accepted as routine: The children take their showers in the Children's House above ground, are helped into nightgowns or short-trousered pajamas, gather up their dolls and teddies, say their lila-tovs to their fathers, and go down to the bunkers with their mothers...
...Why Aleph...
...He drives a tractor in the fodder fields, and supervises new volunteers...
...His uncle was killed in Jerusalem when the marketplace was blown up not long ago...
...No problem...
...Israeli Army units and border police also began to position themselves permanently in the hills above the settlements, thus thinly separating the Israeli farmers from Fatahland...
...When something happens to someone in Jerusalem, we don't run from Jerusalem either...
...He has written a book on archeological discoveries in this area where, the Bible says, "The Philistines put his [King Saul's] armour in the house of Ashtoreth and they fastened his body to the wall of Beth-Shean...
...The small town of Beit Shan, five killed, including three schoolchildren...
...Neve Ur's relations with its neighboring Arab village were good...
...As six-year-old Tal, a blonde, blue-eyed beauty, put it later: "It's all right...
...All valiant men arose, and went all night, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth-Shean...
...So it is not surprising that the inhabitants of Neve Ur fondly recall the days when these precautions were not necessary...
...But by the middle 1950s the earliest settlers of the kibbutz had left...
...We're just ordinary people...
...In Pieter's modestly furnished cottage of two rooms one listens evenings to records of Mozart and Handel...
...31, 10...
...On the hottest days temperatures soar over 100 degrees...
...Even without war the Beit Shan Valley, which is below sea level, is climatically less than desirable...
...The June 1967 fighting pushed back the frontiers on the Golan Heights and silenced the enemy guns that had for years threatened the settlement in the valley below, but it has simply never ended on this eastern front with Jordan...
...Lila-tov.'" Slowly the children obey...
...Called Aleph, it is one of several shelters in Kibbutz Neve Ur where the children have slept almost every night for the past two years...
...If a window or a door was closed with a bang, they would run to hide or to a shelter...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 15
