By Daniel Gavron, CGNews,
The coming festival of Shavuot celebrates both the harvest of the first fruits and the receiving of the Torah on Sinai. The generally accepted site of Mount Sinai is Jebel Musa (Mount Moses) in the Sinai Peninsula, but there are other candidates. One theory places the mountain in Saudi Arabia, another in Yemen, and there is even a possible site in the Negev. But there can be no doubt that the biblical narrative places the encounter between God and Moses in a desert location. It cannot be by chance that the idea of God came to mankind in the wilderness, where the vast emptiness inspires an awareness of human puniness. Even our hiking group – normally so talkative that we have named ourselves the “Walkers-Talkers” – always pauses to observe a few minutes of silence and reflection during our desert trips.
We have been walking together for more than a dozen years in the Galilee, the Jerusalem hills and the Negev. We have also hiked in other countries, but it is love of the Land of Israel that is our main motivation. The Negev hikes are the toughest: the terrain is rugged and the pitiless sun beats down from a clear blue sky; throats become parched and lips chapped. Nevertheless, we have special feelings for this land: its archaeology and history, its geography and geology, its scenery and its special light.
Hiking around Sde Boker, a lunar landscape of rocks, crags and canyons, almost bare of vegetation, I find thoughts of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founder and first prime minister seeping into my mind, because Sde Boker was his final home and subsequently his resting place. “BG,” or “the Old Man,” as he was known during his premiership, was enthusiastic about the Negev and the Bible. He was always calling on us, his fellow citizens, to settle in the southern desert, and, when he retired from politics, he went to live at Kibbutz Sde Boker, at the epicentre of that desert.
A leader with sharp political instincts, he defied many of his colleagues, when, together with Chaim Weizmann, he accepted the Palestine partition proposal of Britain’s 1937 Peel Commission. A decade later he agreed to the United Nations partition plan. Both proposed divisions of the territory would have left much of the land of the Bible outside Jewish control. On the other hand, he fought obstinately for the Negev, believing that the world would allow the Jewish people to develop its national enterprise in the relatively empty desert region.
More than half a century ago, shortly after his retirement, I visited BG in the book-lined study of his kibbutz hut. I was one of a party of young Jews from around the world and the old man seemed pleased to see us. Short and stocky, with a pink face framed by wings of white hair, he looked like one of Snow White’s seven dwarves: Grumpy, when haranguing us to come and make our homes in Israel; Happy, when quizzing us on biblical personalities or rhapsodising about the wonderful young Israeli pioneers who were building the kibbutz.
Now, standing by his simple tombstone, situated above the bleak spectacular beige and mauve fissures of the Zin Valley, I recall that, after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, 41 years ago this month, BG was the first mainstream national figure to call for withdrawing from the newly conquered territories—even before Arie Lova Eliav and Yitzhak Ben-Aharon. It surprised many people at the time, as he had previously been quoted as saying that Israel’s failure to conquer the West Bank in the 1948 War of Independence was “a cause of eternal regret.” Yet in 1967, with that territory in Israel’s hands, he proposed relinquishing it. With the advantage of hindsight, we can understand how right he was.
What would have happened if we had heeded his exhortations? Imagine the resources we poured into Sinai and Gush Katif – both subsequently abandoned – invested in Sderot, Netivot and Ofakim. Think of the Golan Heights enterprises redirected to Kiryat Shmona, Hatzor and Tiberias. If only the gigantic human and material investment in Ariel, Ma’aleh Adumim, Ofra and Elon Moreh had been channelled toward Nazareth, Taibeh and Umm el-Fahm, creating equal living conditions for Israel’s Arab citizens, how different our situation would be today.
Even if only some of the above programmes had been implemented, we could be marking our 60th anniversary in a state with a far greater degree of justice and equality for all its citizens. What a birthday celebration that would have been! Leaving BG’s graveside to start hiking through the canyons and gorges of the southern wilderness, I raise my arm in a sad, silent salute to the Old Man.
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Daniel Gavron is the author of Walking Through Israel (1980.) His latest book, published this year, is Holy Land Mosaic. “This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.