Taḥanot be-derekh ḥatsarmaṿet
By: Ehud ʻEin-Gil.
Publisher: ha-Ḳibuts ha-meʾuḥad
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Tel Aviv
Language: heb
Number of pages: 294
Other titles: Milestones on the road to Hadhramaut
Description: This is the first novel by Ehud Ein-Gil, 56, an Israeli journalist and
editor in the Israeli daily Haaretz, and a socialist and anti-Zionist activist
in his spare time.  

The story reconstructs the events of five days in the spring of 1973,
that took the author on a clandestine mission from New York to the
remote Arab country of South Yemen, where he spent more than two days in
the company of its enigmatic revolutionary president, Salem Robaya Ali,
alias Salmin. Ein-Gil, at the time a recent convert to anarchism, had
contacted the South Yemeni diplomatic delegation in New York with a
suggestion that the socialist Arab state supply a ship to carry
Palestinian refugees back to their homeland, now the state of Israel –
much in the same way that the Zionist movement had organised in the
1940s ships to carry  Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine, the most
famous of which was the ship Exodus. (In 1941 the author’s grandmother
was on board one such ship that was stopped by the British navy and its
passengers deported to the island of Mauritius, where they were held in
detention for the duration of WW2). South Yemen rejected the suggestion,
but its president was sufficiently intrigued to invite the young Israeli
to Aden. 

Arriving at what Israeli law defined as an “enemy state” Ein-Gil was
taken by President Ali to a remote and secluded place, where he was
asked to tell his own story. “He wanted to get to know me, to understand
what motivated me, and through me to learn about Israeli society. He
knew that I could give him only a fairly limited view, but, he said,
that was the point-of-view he wanted - from the inside, but also a
little from the outside." 

Over the next two days the author narrated his life story, starting with
his grandparents in Germany, Austria and Poland. His father had taken
part in Israel’s war of independence, 1947-48, and in the Suez war of
1956. A few months after that war, when the narrator was seven years
old, the family moved to a new Jewish settlement above the Arab town of
Nazareth, which was constructed as part of an official project called
“Judaizing the Galilee”. The Arab population in the Galilee, which still
constitutes the majority in the area, was living under military
administration and remained so until 1966. 

The period is reconstructed through the boy's eyes, but perceived with
the mature understanding of the 23-year old who was describing it to
President Ali, as well as the insight of the author writing about it
three decades later. The narrator grew up as an average Israeli youth,
believing the Zionist version of history - i.e., that the persecuted
Jews came back to their ancient homeland after 2000 years in exile, only
to be rejected and attacked by the local Arab population and the Arab
world at large, which refused to let them have a small piece of land for
themselves. Aged 15 he joined a military boarding school, but soon
discovered  that army life was not to his liking.  

He responded with nationalist enthusiasm to Israel's victory in the 1967
war, and he joined a small right-wing group that called for the
annexation of the occupied territories to Israel. Less than two years
later, while doing his military service as a tank driver in the Israeli
army, he took part in what was known as the war of attrition, which went
on for two years along the Suez Canal between Israel's and Egypt's
forces. A large part of the novel is devoted to a description of this
least-known of Israel’s wars, as experienced by a regular soldier: the
battles, the casualties, the bravery of the soldiers on both sides. 

It was during this period that the narrator began to question Israel’s
basic principles and myths. When in 1971 Israel rejected Egypt’s peace
offer, realising that he had been fed lies all his life, he began
reviewing his beliefs and ideology. After his discharge from the army he
became politicaly active, broke with Zionism, took an active part in
protests - including a violent clash with the police on a May Day
demonstration by the Israeli Black Panther movement - and embraced a
socialist version of anarchism. 

The idea of a Palestinian refugee ship was born in the small Israeli
Socialist Organization, better known as Matzpen (Hebrew = compass), the
name of its periodical; the narrator was close to this group, which  he
joined some years later. While spending a few months in New York he
decided to try and push the idea forward. Eventually this brought him to
South Yemen. 

During his stay with President Ali, the narrator also learned something
about his host and the unique revolutionary process he led. Having sworn
to keep his visit secret, he kept his word even under interrogation by
the Israeli security service, which threatened him with a treason trial
and 15 years in prison. He maintained his silence even after President
Ali was executed in 1978 by his colleagues in the South Yemeni
government - they had wanted him to adopt Moscow's version of communism,
while he stood for “a Bedouin socialism with a human face”, in the words
of the British journalist David Hirst. 

* The novel’s title refers to Hadhramaut - an area in South Yemen that
became a symbol of Arab revolutionary socialism. Following their
victorious war of liberation from the British empire, the people of
Hadramaut strongly supported the policies of the left wing of the
national movement, and in the power struggle of 1968 the “Commune of
Hadhramaut” held out for some time against the government forces. The
left wing, under the leadership of Salem Robaya Ali, took power in 1969 (see an article in Hebrew by Ein-Gil in http://www.ainfos.org/south-yemen/south-yemen.pdf).
The Hebrew form of the name, Hatzarmavet, which appears in the Bible (as
the name of one of Noah’s descendents - Genesis 10:26), means literally
Death’s Court.
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