Much of what occurred during the latter months of 1948 has long since vanished in the rearview mirror. The arguments that dominate today’s headlines, all of them the disputatious stepchildren of those early disagreements, make for a dire litany of daily aggravations: the construction of new Jewish homes on land that much of the world regards as illicitly seized, the bulldozing of Palestinian houses, the firing toward Israeli civilian houses of rocket barrages from Palestinian strongholds, the construction of enormous cement walls that cut off Palestinians’ access to places that threaten Israelis’ security. All these things and a thousand more serve to inflame passions on both sides, and to keep them inflamed for what seems likely to be an eternity.

  The fundamental argument that rages within today’s Israel concerns the ownership of the land. It is an argument that pits Palestinian against Jew in much the same way as the very same question pits Catholic against Protestant in Northern Ireland. Except that there is a signal difference. As Mary and Gerald in Vancouver have so amply demonstrated: Take the Irish out of Ireland, and their dispute, no matter how ancient, somehow evaporates. But take the Levantine out of the Levant, and wretchedly, the argument somehow manages to survive. It clings on like an ineradicable black mold, a dispute that positively refuses to die, no matter how much time elapses, no matter how far from home the parties may have come.

  Construction began in 2000 of a four-hundred-mile long “separation barrier,” consisting of cement walls or barbed-wire entanglements, surrounding the entirety of the West Bank. The Israeli government says it protects the country from Palestinian violence.

  One plausible explanation for the durability of the Middle Eastern land passion is rooted in the sheer antiquity of the dispute. Winston Churchill had famously remarked on the endlessness of the Irish dis-accord by noting drily that “once the waters of the Great Flood have ebbed away, so the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone would emerge intact once again, since the integrity of their argument is eternal.” But in truth, Ireland has little knowledge of the real eternal. What has transpired in Ireland’s long and troubled history is as nothing compared with what has been going on in the equally troubled and supposedly very much holier Holy Land. Irish claims to the land of Ireland were challenged most severely by the Cromwellian invasions of the seventeenth century, four hundred years ago. But Israeli and Arab have been at each other’s throats about the ownership of the 22 million donum of Levantine land for fully four thousand years, with both the Palestinian pastoralist and Israeli merchant convinced to the inner deeps of their souls that the land belongs to each, exclusively, and that the Other, whoever that may be, has no right to be there, and by being so is committing trespass, and on an insulting and legendary scale, and so is worth fighting, and to the death.

  As to whose land it truly was, has been, and now properly is, none shall ever agree.

  Geology, geography, and topography have long determined some goodly portion of the region’s fate. Palestine’s dunes and fertile plains were on the ancient caravan route between Egypt and Mesopotamia, and like so many of the world’s passageways today—the Strait of Hormuz, the Fulda Gap, the Khyber Pass, Suez, the Hudson-Mohawk Gap, the Strait of Malacca—they have long been a place of fierce contest, of permanent watchfulness, and of determined protection. The Israelites, one of the many local Egyptian tribes, passed through and over this passageway in a complex tarantella of expulsion and exile, of settlement (the first time in around 1400 BCE), as well as of massacre and misery, and which they endured for centuries. Through all these dramas and travails, and no matter how far and wide they settled and were dispersed as a result, their traditions and rituals were all sedulously and near miraculously preserved. The ambitions of nineteenth-century Zionism eventually brought them back, to emerge blinking in the sunlight from their various adopted European settlements, and returned them back to their homeland, to this ancient nomads’ passageway, and with which they can reasonably claim to be most commonly identified.

  The Bible told and mythologized the story—and it had much to say about the land (most especially detailed in the Book of Joshua) that would be tilled and improved by the wanderers. Leviticus reminded them, though, that the surface belonged to Yahweh, and that it “shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine, and ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” Moreover, land management was a topic for biblical admonishment: every fifty years—after forty-nine years of “regular time,” as Leviticus chapter 25 verse 9 famously describes it, there would be a Jubilee, a time when the land would be allowed to lie fallow, the Hebrew slaves would be set free, and all the land and the houses in the open country that had been previously sold would revert to their former owners or their heirs.

  The English word jubilee comes from the Hebrew word jubil (), which means “trumpet,” and which is blown at commencement of the event—a joyous celebration of the land and all that it offered to the people who lived upon it, cared for it, and drew their sustenance from it.

  And of all the various claims made upon the five million acres of today’s Palestine, this—the biblical notion of Jubilee—is to the scholar-Jew the single most alluring element in its justification. It suggests that for thousands of years past the settlers have not merely grown their olives and herded their goats and drawn water from their wells but have cared for and managed and shared land that in any case belongs to God, not to any of humankind. The Arabs see it all as Catastrophe, the Jews as Jubilee, and the argument of such fiercely opposed philosophies continues today, as it has continued for centuries.

  And meanwhile the landscape of Palestine itself, drenched though it may be in misery and mayhem, remains entirely neutral, sand and pebble, boulder and cliff, river valley and salt lake, beach and oasis and city street, all of it a child of geology and geography, all placidly accepting its role as, in this one corner of the world, an entity to be fought over endlessly, enduring it all because it alone endures.

  3

  Death on the Rich Black Earth

  I have made a shroud for my friend,

  Sad cloth.

  She loves, loves blood

  This Russian earth.

  —ANNA AKHMATOVA,

  Poem Without a Hero (1940–1965)

  Arguments over land take many forms in many places and have been going on for many centuries. One of the more poignant in recent times involves the violent intersection of a dispute involving vast tracts of territory—millions of broad acres of exceptionally fertile land in central Europe—with the craft of journalism. And in particular with one young British journalist who in the spring of 1933 discovered something terribly wrong, a crime of unfathomable proportions that was then unfolding in the central plains of the Ukraine.

  His name was Gareth Jones, and he was born in 1905 in South Wales, the son of a local schoolmaster. He died on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, far away from home in western Manchuria. He had been murdered, shot three times in the head.

  It has long been believed that this young, slight, bespectacled, phenomenally talented Welshman was killed by Chinese or Japanese agents working for the NKVD, the Soviet Union’s much feared domestic secret police. If this belief is correct, then it is further believed that he was murdered in retaliation for a series of newspaper eyewitness reports that he had written two years before, in which he bluntly accused the Soviet Union of confiscating vast tracts of arable land in the center of Ukraine, and in the process starving millions of people, creating a genocide of near unparalleled ferocity and longevity. Gareth Jones has been named a hero in today’s Ukraine, and there are statues in his honor and any number of plaques and memorials, as well as a Hollywood movie.

  What made his dramatic and terrible report, which was first published in a London newspaper, the Evening Standard, on Friday, March 31, 1933, of such monumental and lasting importance was its immediate denunciation—but not a repudiation by the Soviet authorities, who one might think had ample reason to refute suggestions that their policies were spawning a widespread famine in their southern provinces. Instead, the rebuttal was issued by Walter Duranty, a journalist for The New York Times, a native Briton born in Liverpool and who for the eleven years previously had been based in Moscow. He was a well-connected figure of considerable influence, eminence, and power, and he had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his extensive assessment—in a groundbreaking, multipart series—of the social and political effects of the Bolshevik revolution.

  The tragedy that was reported by Gareth Jones—not a whisper of which made it into any of Duranty’s initial reporting—turned out to be wholly true, and when fully confirmed, it shocked the world. Ten million peasants had been starved to death, maybe more. The unfolding events of 1932 and 1933 in the Ukraine are regarded by most today—though, notably, not by all—as constituting a classic case of a genocide, and of a genocide far greater in number than any other in properly recorded modern history.

  The event is now known in Ukraine and beyond as the Holodomor—murder by starvation. It is now known to have been the result of a fit of Stalinist policy madness born of a tyrannical and ideologically driven desire in Moscow to have the land taken away from the ordinary peasantry of Ukraine, for it to be turned into great collectivized and industrialized farms, which would be established in a way that would be entirely consonant with the Marxist ideal of public ownership. The policy instead created a human disaster of unimaginable proportions, and Gareth Jones—though he would soon thereafter pay the ultimate price for its exposure—was the first to reveal it to the world.

  His first revelation appeared—not under his own byline, but under that of another Pulitzer Prize winner, H. R. Knickerbocker, who had listened to Jones at a press conference he held in Berlin on his return from his surreptitious expedition to the Ukraine—as the lead in the New York Post of Wednesday, March 29, 1933. The headline was stark: FAMINE GRIPS RUSSIA, MILLIONS DYING . . . SAYS BRITON. The story was picked up by a host of other newspapers the next day, and on the day after that, Friday, Jones was able to publish his own piece in the Standard:

  All that is best in Russia has disappeared. The main result of the Five-Year Plan has been the tragic ruin of Russian agriculture. This ruin I saw in its grim reality. I tramped through a number of villages in the snow of March.

  I saw children with swollen bellies. I slept in peasants’ huts, sometimes nine of us in one room. I talked to every peasant I met, and the general conclusion I draw is that the present state of Russian agriculture is already catastrophic, but that in a year’s time its condition will have worsened tenfold. If it is grave now, and if millions are dying in the villages, as they are, for I did not visit a single village where many had not died, what will it be like in a month’s time? The potatoes left are being counted one by one, but in so many homes the potatoes have long run out. The beet, once used as cattle fodder, may run out in many huts before the new food comes in June, July and August, and many have not even beet.

  “Have you potatoes?” I asked. Every peasant I asked nodded negatively with sadness.

  “What about your cows?” was my next question. To the Russian peasant the cow means wealth, food and happiness. It is almost the center-point upon which his life gravitates.

  “The cattle have nearly all died. How can we feed the cattle when we have only fodder to eat ourselves?”

  Walter Duranty’s reply appeared on page 13 of The New York Times, on the same day, and under the less than reassuring headline RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING. He refers to the Ukraine situation in his 800-word piece, cabled from Moscow in response to Jones’s Berlin news conference of a few days before, clearly having been pressed into service by his foreign editor, who must have been stung by the jeremiads in the competing Manhattan papers. Somewhat wearily, Duranty describes Jones as a man “of a keen and active mind” who had “taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency”; But then he goes on to denounce the Welsh journalist in tones of patrician superciliousness. He felt, he said, that Jones’s judgment was “somewhat hasty” and was based on “a forty-mile walk through the villages in the neighborhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad. I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country, but nothing should shake his conviction of impending doom.”

  A photograph of Duranty taken around this time shows him and two contented-looking guests dining comfortably in his Moscow flat, attended by a servant with an uncanny resemblance to the young Trotsky pouring a glass of red wine. The table is set with candles, silverware, and fine napery. The dinner plate in front of the photographer’s seat appears loaded with food. In the image the diners may well have been hungry, but most certainly were not starving, nor probably ever had been.

  Duranty was prolific, and the articles he wrote during the next few days* kept to the theme of good harvest and prosperity and general success of the growing and now fifteen-year-old Communist juggernaut. SOVIET INDUSTRY SHOWS BIG GAINS, on April 6. SOVIET HAILS GAINS IN SPRING SOWING, April 7. SOWING IN RUSSIA CONTINUES TO GAIN: NEW POLITICAL SECTION OF TRACTOR STATIONS SPURS WORK WITH FOOD, April 10. And then, on April 21: SOVIET SOWN AREA TRIPLE LAST YEAR’S . . . OPTIMISM IS MANIFEST. KARL RADEK SAYS: “IF CROPS ARE GOOD, WE CAN TELL WHOLE WORLD WHERE TO GET OFF.”

  Colorful agitprop posters extolled the supposed virtues of the collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture in the 1930s, urging the people to believe the policy would bring prosperity and happiness for all.

  As winner of the Pulitzer Prize the previous year Duranty enjoyed considerable authority, enabling his criticism of Jones to be widely believed at the time and his evident admiration of Josef Stalin to be accepted as reasoned and reasonable. But only at the time. As the truth about what had actually happened in the Ukraine became ever more clear, and as the truth about the insane savagery of Stalin and his henchmen became ever more apparent, Duranty’s reputation began to suffer. Malcolm Muggeridge, who had reported vividly—though anonymously—for the Manchester Guardian, declared Duranty to be the “greatest liar” he had ever known, and Joseph Alsop, the celebrated midcentury American syndicated columnist, said that “lying” was Duranty’s “stock in trade.”

  The gathering uproar eventually persuaded The New York Times in 1990 to break rank with their long dead correspondent’s official reputation: the newspaper denounced him publicly and decried his reporting from Moscow sixty years before as “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” The storm led to a move to strip Duranty, posthumously, of his Pulitzer. But the Pulitzer board, both in 1990 and then again after a further Times appeal in 2003, declined to revoke the award. There was no evidence, the Pulitzer board said, in a masterly piece of pusillanimous evasion—and despite mountains of evidence from former journalistic colleagues, from intelligence agencies, and even from the FBI—that Duranty had known perfectly well that what he was writing was only vaguely concealed Kremlin propaganda, that his deception had been deliberate. Had it been done on purpose, the board said, then the prize would have been withdrawn. Altogether it was an unedifying chapter in the history of American journalism, although it can fairly be said that the Times rose to the occasion when the moment demanded, setting in train measures that have ensured—one hopes—that such slovenly reporting would seldom occur again.

  What Gareth Jones discovered—and really did discover—during his condescendingly described “forty-mile walk through the villages” was the appalling practical consequence of an act of Kremlin policy that had been hammered out in the spring of 1929, and which was targeted unequivocally at both the peasantry who worked the fields in the country’s southern agricultural belt and the land that they owned. The stated intention of this policy was to destroy one specific component of the USSR’s peasant class, and to wrest their land away from them wholesale, confiscating it and turning it over, in immense quantities, to the ownership of the state.

  Stalin saw to it that this policy—the so-called Five Year Plan, the first of several such economic stimulus programs bent on promoting massive changes to the new country’s industrial and agricultural sectors, went into formal practical effect on October 1, 1928. This was some six months before the plan’s details had been completed, and so it was as a result both hastily and shoddily contrived, and not surprisingly turned out to be a massive debacle. The Times of London reported on July 9, 1929,* that one foolhardy party official, Sergey Syrtsov, had publicly lambasted the program. In doing so, and by identifying for Stalin the one class of the Soviet people whom he thought to blame for the shambles, he helped to unleash the very tragedy with which the Five Year Plan later became so notoriously associated.

  The damnable word that Syrtsov uttered was kulak, which in literal translation, and in its Turkish etymology, means “fist.” A kulak in the Soviet Communist lexicon was a tight-fisted person—a relatively prosperous man of the countryside who owned a small amount of land and made a modest profit from it. Such parasites, as they were viewed in the eyes of the revolutionaries, and of whom there were millions in the immensely wide grain-growing regions of the southern and eastern Soviet Union, had been identified as the most verminous creatures in the population of the USSR. They were a class of people worthy of utter public contempt, just as were the greasiest of landlords or the greediest of capitalists.

  The kulaks stood between the might and wisdom of revolutionary doctrine on the one hand and, on the other, those impoverished peasants who worked the land and did not own it and who were in the eyes of Marx, Lenin, Engels—and Stalin—the very salt of the earth, those on whose capable shoulders the whole gigantic engine work of Soviet revolution could be supported. If the Five Year Plan had gotten off to a shaky start, in the view of Sergei Syrtsov then it was principally owing to the fact that the poor and the middle peasantry—the two classes were firmly divided in the Soviet Communist mind—were beginning to show signs of falling under the malign and counterrevolutionary spell of the kulaks. “The middle peasant has turned against us, and has sided with the kulak” was the sentiment most commonly expressed. To rev the plan up and into full-throated action, the kulaks as a class needed to be eliminated, their lands taken away once and for all, the stench of these most evil bacilli—that word bandied about by most of the attendees—needed to be eradicated, for all time.