I love a good story. Gimme all the antiheroes and plot arcs and twists and turns I can handle. TV, movies, books, podcasts – I love it all.
I mean, who doesn’t? We’re humans. Our brains are wired to make and encode memories by telling ourselves a story, by tracing cause-and-effect. If you can reconstruct a chain of events, you have a reasonable shot at predicting the future, because what happened is often a decent predictor of what will happen. It’s on the wall of every middle school history classroom: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
Stories are how a culture survives. It’s the mechanism that prods history into shape. At the root of every identity, every tribal affiliation, every family, is a story.
And the reverse is true, too. In a recent article in the journal Sapir, Allen C. Guelzo writes, quote:
Much as every despot has come to power promising better future worlds of various sorts, the totalitarians really look first to control and manipulate history….
He follows this up with a chilling quote from the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, quote:
“the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory… Destroy its books, its culture, its history, then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
Stories are the building blocks of a culture. In the right hands, they can ensure continuity and purpose. But they can also be erased. Rewritten. Twisted to support some nefarious agenda.
That’s why we need to keep telling our stories far and wide. Why we need to cling to them. To make them that much harder to erase, distort, or replace.
So when the time came to decide what I wanted to do when I grew up, I chose to become a storyteller. To share the full story of the Jewish people and the Jewish homeland to anyone who would listen. Of course, my actual job title is much more boring than “professional storyteller,” but in essence, that’s what it boils down to.
But here’s a little-known fact about being a professional storyteller. To do it well, you need to take stories apart. That’s why I started this podcast. And that’s why I’m particularly excited to delve into today’s topic.
The 1920 battle for Tel Hai – a tiny Jewish community in the Galilee – became a foundational myth for the State of Israel before there even formally was a State of Israel. And on its face, it is a perfect story. The gripping plot arc, the tragic hero, the famous last words. The whole tale is perfect fodder for a national myth.
So of course I want to take it apart.
Not because I’m a grinch or a contrarian – though I have, on occasion, been accused of being both of those things. Because a good story is a real story, and real stories are genuinely interesting, non-linear, maybe even morally fraught.
If you’ve been listening for a while, you might remember that we briefly touched on the story of Tel Hai a few years ago, in the spring of 2023. (Link in the show notes, of course.) But that version was just a teaser – an on-one-foot recap with hardly any of the juicy details.
Here’s the story in a nutshell: On March 1, 1920, a large group of armed Arab fighters caught up in the Franco-Syrian conflict arrived at the isolated settlement of Tel Hai in the Upper Galilee, claiming they were searching for French soldiers. A man named Joseph Trumpeldor allowed a few inside to look. A confused firefight erupted, and Trumpeldor was fatally shot. Reportedly, his last words were “Tov lamut be’ad artzenu,” “it is good to die for our homeland.” He was one of eight people killed defending the settlement. Within days, all eight were no longer just people. They were national heroes. Archetypes. Symbols.
Which to me feels like a serious shame. Because history isn’t made by archetypes, but by people – real, complicated, and flawed. So by the end of this episode, I hope Trumpeldor and his comrades will feel real to you too: flawed and complex, but still meeting history’s challenges with extraordinary conviction and grit.
We’ll tell this story in four chapters.
In chapter one, we’ll meet a prophet of disaster and a one-armed war hero, and see how their collaboration resulted in the first armed Jewish battalion since the Bar Kokhba revolt between 132 and 135 CE.
In chapter two, we’ll discuss the tension between Yishuv leadership and the farmers of the north, as the attacks on their settlements grew more frequent.
In chapter three, we’ll outline the events of March 1, 1920: the day of the battle at Tel Hai.
And in chapter four, we’ll talk about how the myth of Tel Hai exploded through the Yishuv. We’ll explore the way this moment changed the trajectory of modern Jewish history – and continues to resonate today. And we’ll ask whether it might be time to take a different lesson from the story of Tel Hai. A lesson that’s not about death or martyrdom, but about life.
So buckle up, let’s get into Tel Hai.
Chapter One: We’ve Got to Smash the Turk
It’s not a pleasant thing to be a prophet of disaster.
Two years before the eruption of World War I, the 32-year-old journalist Ze’ev Jabotinsky predicts, quote, “a war of destruction between two or more superpowers… with inconceivable losses and an enormous expenditure of resources.” Not the kind of thing you want to be right about.
As a war correspondent for a Russian newspaper, Jabotinsky has a front-row seat to the chaos that ensues when more than thirty countries declare war on each other. And as a passionate Zionist, he is keenly aware that the project to build a Jewish state depends entirely on how the war plays out.
But Jabotinsky isn’t the type to watch history unfold from a passive remove. He’s a Zionist first, journalist second. And the war, for all its awfulness, presents an opportunity for the Zionist movement. He intends to seize that opportunity.
Since 1516, the Ottoman Empire had held fast to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, that’s like 400 years. But by the time World War I rolls around, the empire is dying. By 1914, Jabotinsky had correctly diagnosed that all it would take was one good battle to finish the Ottoman Empire off, leaving its former territories wide open for the taking.
Jabotinsky was no fool. He knew that the Jews of the Yishuv – wouldn’t suddenly get a state of their own just because the Ottomans were gone. Once the Allied Powers smelled blood, they would carve up Ottoman territory between them like turkey at Thanksgiving, and the Jews needed to be at the table when that happened.
But when you’re a stateless minority with little political power, a seat at the table is not guaranteed. If you want in, you have to prove yourself useful. So when the Ottomans join the war in November of 1914, Jabotinsky smells his opportunity. What if he established a volunteer Jewish legion within the British Army, focused solely on routing the Ottomans from the region?
Jabotinsky becomes obsessed with the idea, which combines his passions: Jewish ACTION, Jewish POWER, and Jewish SELF-DETERMINATION – all in service to the ultimate goal of Jewish DIGNITY. Hadar. None of which could happen without action or might.
But as the war reshapes the balance of power across the globe, some Zionist leaders counsel neutrality. Like I said: it’s tough to be a stateless minority caught between great powers. If the Ottoman Empire – which controlled the entire region – managed to survive, its leaders would not forget that the Yishuv had sided with the enemy.
But Jabotinsky’s rival, David Ben Gurion – who would one day become Israel’s first prime minister – has no intention of staying neutral. Like Jabotinsky, he wants Jews to fight on behalf of the empire in charge. Unlike Jabotinsky, he was initially certain that the Ottomans would remain in charge. In fact, he dreamed of mobilizing every Jew in the Ottoman Empire to press the Turkish Parliament to grant the Jews a home in the region. To be entirely fair to him, Ben Gurion was studying law in Constantinople, now Istanbul – the heart of the Ottoman Empire. And when you’re at the center of an empire, it’s hard to see its edges crumble.
Unfortunately for Ben Gurion, a few months after the war began, he’s forced to admit that he had been wrong.
Djemal Pasha, the newly-instated Ottoman governor of the Levant, has absolutely zero sympathy for any form of non-Turkish nationalism. Arab nationalists in Syria and Lebanon call him “the Butcher” for his unfortunate tendency to hang anyone who suggests that perhaps the Ottomans shouldn’t control everything forever. Armenians have an even harsher name for him: “the overseer of the Armenian Genocide.”
As soon as he takes command, Pasha disbands Ben-Gurion’s Ottoman-allied Jewish defense organization, shuts down the Zionist newspaper, declares every Zionist an enemy of the state, and deports roughly 18,000 Jews from Pre-State Israel for good measure… including Ben Gurion. Who, I probably don’t need to say, is now firmly on the side of the Allies. These deportations were meant to weaken the Zionist movement. Instead, they were the impetus that made Jabotinsky’s dream of a Jewish Legion of the British Army into a reality.
Until the Ottomans enter the war in November of 1914, Jabotinsky reported from Europe. But now that a new front is opening – a front that might include the region – he needs to get closer to the heart of the action. So he makes his way to North Africa, where he meets the one-armed poet and warrior who is about to change everything.
Joseph Trumpeldor didn’t expect to ride out World War I in a British detention camp in Egypt. (Nerd Corner: if you’re wondering why the Ottomans deported Jews to a British detention camp, well, they didn’t, exactly. The Ottomans didn’t care where these Jews went. They dumped roughly 6,000 deportees in British-controlled Egypt and bounced before anyone could ask questions. These refugees made their way to the British military barracks, not as fighters, but as, well, refugees. And before you ask: I don’t know how it’s possible for a country at war to deport people into enemy territory, but can we all marvel at the Ottoman Empire’s chutzpah for a second?!)
Where was I? Oh yeah, Joseph Trumpeldor. He’s so awesome. In 1915, he’s 35 years old, a five-time decorated veteran of the Russo-Japanese War and the second Jew to become an officer in the Russian army.
We’ve talked about him before, so I’m just gonna play this for you:
[season 4 excerpt]
Trumpeldor wasn’t the kind of guy who sat around thinking “gosh, I sure wish there were a Jewish state.” No, he was the kind of guy who established a thriving Zionist group while held hostage in a Japanese POW camp. All of the Russian-Jewish soldiers in the camp were welcome to join. There must have been a bunch of takers, because Trumpeldor’s group ran a school, library, theater troupe, and weekly Hebrew and Yiddish-language newsletter. In a Japanese POW camp! In the early 1900s!
Oh, and he did all this with one arm.
But Trumpeldor wasn’t going to let something as silly as an amputated limb get him down. “I still have another arm to give,” he reportedly shrugged. (And, by the way, on top of all his other talents, the man was also ridiculously handsome. We’ve linked a picture in the show notes.) In short: he had all the makings of a Zionist hero.
[back to Noam]
When World War I broke out, Trumpeldor was peacefully farming in a Jewish commune in the Galilee. (Nerd corner alert for the die-hard fans: that commune was Kibbutz Deganya, aka “the mother of the kibbutzim,” for those of you who remember our episode on the Kibbutz movement! I love crossovers like this one.)
Trumpeldor probably didn’t expect to come out of retirement for yet another war, but hey, when life gives you lemons, establish the first Jewish fighting force since Bar Kokhba took to the Judean hills. Apparently, long before Brett Favre, some people just weren’t very good at staying retired. And if you don’t get the Favre reference, learn your NFL history, folks. (And yes, I could have gone with MJ, but don’t want you to think I only think about basketball. I also care about American football. I know, I’m a real jack of all trades.)
It was a meeting of the minds. Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky like each other immediately. Together, they petition the British to create a Jewish legion within the British army, and it works. By 1917, a five-battalion Jewish Legion within the British Army had attracted roughly 5,000 volunteers, made up of Jewish fighters from the region of @Pre-State Israel. Israel, Britain, and North America. This is a proper force, deployed to defend the Holy Land. And because history has a sense of humor, David Ben Gurion is among its first recruits. So is Jabotinsky, who left the army with an MBE from King George V. (Nerd corner alert: An MBE, Member of the Order of the British Empire, is a fancy acronym that recognizes outstanding service to a particular community. The singer Adele has one too, so great company for Jabotinsky!)
But it didn’t matter whether the Jewish legionnaires received an MBE or not. The real award was the realization that Jews did not have to be powerless anymore. They now have proper military training to defend what is most precious to them: the growing communities of the Yishuv. It was an important lesson. Because the so-called “War to end all wars” was just the beginning of the fight for the Jews of the Pre-State Israel.
Chapter Two: The Empires Strike Back
After World War I, Britain and France gleefully carved up the carcass of the Ottoman Empire. The Brits took over most of what is today Israel, Jordan, and Iraq, while the French got a chunk of land that eventually became the modern states of Syria and Lebanon, plus a little nub of what is today northern Israel, stretching from the Sea of Galilee, aka the Kinneret, all the way up into the border of what is today Lebanon.
Today, roughly 50,000 Israelis live in this little nub, known as the Galilee Panhandle. But back in 1918, the roughly 100 Jews of the Panhandle were a tiny minority among more than 10,000 Arabs, who were a mix of wealthy landowners, peasant farmers, Bedouin nomads, Christians, Shi’as, Druze, and more. (Nerd corner alert: For the purposes of this episode, I’m going to refer to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the North as Arabs, but that’s a catch-all term for a very diverse group of people with their own interests, conflicts, and complicated identities. Some of these groups had good relationships with the tiny Jewish communities of the north, though the turbulence of the times often challenged these friendships.)
Especially once the Arabs declared war on the French. Again and again, they asked the four Jewish communities of Metula, Hamara, Kfar Giladi, and Tel Hai to join in. But all four refused, wary of any action that could threaten their vision for a Jewish state.
To their Arab neighbors, this neutrality was nothing short of betrayal. Rumors began to swirl that the Jews of the Galilee Panhandle were not only sympathetic to the French, but actively collaborating with them to destroy any prospect of an independent Syrian state.
To be clear, from my understanding, this was untrue. The Jews of the Yishuv had very little affection or respect for the French government, and they were under no illusions of French support for the Zionist cause.
But. (And there is a but.) Two of the four Jewish communities did allow French soldiers to make camp on their property occasionally, mostly because it was bad form for a stateless minority with dreams of a homeland to tick off a global superpower.
And since most of the Jews flocking north to the Galilee Panhandle were of European descent, local Arabs saw them as yet another example of encroaching European imperialism. If they couldn’t take down the entire French empire, they’d settle for taking down its suspected collaborators.
So “random Arab raids” soon escalated into an organized, targeted campaign against the Jewish inhabitants of Metula, Hamara, Kfar Giladi, and Tel Hai. The Jewish self-defense organization, HaShomer, watched in alarm, aware that they needed serious help. A handful of volunteer guards wouldn’t cut it against a targeted campaign of violence.
So they called in Joseph Trumpeldor.
At the time, Trumpeldor was busy with the Yishuv’s version of shuttle diplomacy, traveling constantly between Jaffa and Haifa to urge local Zionist leaders to stop arguing and work together, thank you! So when HaShomer asked him to help coordinate the defense of the north, Trumpeldor must have breathed a sigh of relief. Sure, he was being pulled into combat, but at least he could stop listening to cranky socialists complain about each other.
But by the time Trumpeldor rode north in late 1919, there was almost nothing left to defend. Two of the settlements had already been evacuated, and one of those was burned to the ground. Only Tel Hai and Kfar Giladi were left. Roughly forty young Jewish farmers, surrounded by enemies. In a letter to the leadership, Trumpeldor warned, quote, “they know that the reckoning will come, whether sooner or later, but it will come.”
Zionist leaders called an emergency meeting to discuss the situation up north. Once again, Jabotinsky and Ben Gurion found themselves butting heads. But they didn’t take the positions you might expect.
Pretend for a second that you’re Jabotinsky: decorated war veteran, famous firebrand, agitator for the creation of a Jewish fighting force, and spiritual forefather of Israel’s right-wing. This is the guy who advocated in a famous 1923 essay for the creation of an “Iron Wall” – a united front of Jewish self-defense so strong, so implacable, that it could never be dislodged. Exactly the guy you’d expect to adopt a hardline position on the Jews of the northern Galilee – you know, stay and fight, hold the line, never surrender, never give up.
But he didn’t.
Jabotinsky was a dreamer, but he was also very much a pragmatist. Forty Jewish farmers against ten thousand angry neighbors? It just wasn’t worth it. As he wrote in a Ha’aretz editorial, quote, “What is the purpose… Defending the site is impossible because we don’t have an adequate force.” After all, Trumpeldor had warned that “gangs of bandits roam, drunk with victory.” How could a tiny commune defend itself amid this kind of lawlessness?
But Jabotinsky’s rival, Ben Gurion, totally disagreed. To Ben Gurion, and to many of his allies, a retreat from the Panhandle could be read as a retreat from the entire Zionist dream. If they gave up here, what compromises would they end up making in the future? Berl Katznelson, who was Ben Gurion’s buddy and colleague, and the founder of the Yishuv’s labor union, the Histadrut, summarized their party’s position as follows, quote:
…it is not a question of a plot of land and a little Jewish property, but a question of the Land of Israel. Because abandonment and retreat set an example that proclaims our weakness and futility.
For their part, the farmers of the North agreed. Weeks before his death at the hands of marauding Arab gangs, twenty-one-year-old Aaron Sher wrote, quote: “Forsaking the site is out of the question; a place once settled, should not be abandoned.”
Remember, this was the tail end of 1919. No one knew the future borders of this hypothetical Jewish state. Any inch of territory ceded now could mean a significantly smaller state in the future. Once Trumpeldor arrived in the north, HaShomer believed there might yet be a chance for Kfar Giladi and Tel Hai to come through the chaos unscathed.
Trumpeldor may have been a legend, but he was also just one man. He couldn’t defeat ten thousand Arab fighters single-handedly, pun intended. But of course, he didn’t have to. Because HaShomer was staffed by pioneers as unflinching, patriotic, and determined as he was. People as ready and willing to give everything to the cause.
People like Devorah Drechler.
Devorah had made aliyah alone at 17, joined a commune established by HaShomer, and immediately started to make herself a pain in the neck.
The men of HaShomer expected her to cook and clean and do laundry, but she hadn’t come to the land of Israel to be a glorified maid. She fought like hell to be in on strategy meetings, agricultural planning, hard labor, even guard duty. Eventually, the men relented. So when HaShomer sent Devorah to help protect the northern communities in 1919, she jumped at the opportunity.
Her friend Manya tried to talk her out of it, insisting it was a suicide mission. But Devorah was a soldier through and through, practicing her shooting every day. As she saw it, “On the front you go where they send you, no questions asked.” It was a very Trumpeldorian sentiment, and I like to think he approved of her determination and single-minded focus.
The guardians of the north couldn’t wait for Yishuv leadership to send them the additional guards they needed so desperately. So they used every means at their disposal to attract more volunteers, from taking out ads in local newspapers to putting up HELP WANTED posters to just calling on their friends.
That was how the Americans showed up.
Jacob Tucker and William Scharff were what modern Israelis might call lone soldiers, aka chayalim bodedim: Diaspora Jews who left their homes to defend the Land of Israel. Both men had fought in the Jewish Legion of the British Army – which, as you’ll remember, was the brainchild of Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky. They were not the onlyJewish Legion vets to arrive north – a few dozen showed up in total – but they were the only Americans.
I want to pause there for a second, because I want to talk about solidarity.
Most of the Jews who immigrated to the Yishuv were fleeing something – usually persecution, pogroms, neighbors with pitchforks, etc. But if you were an Eastern European Jew fleeing pogroms, the region of Palestine was not your only option. Between 1881 and 1924, close to three MILLION Jews arrived on the shores of the so-called goldene medineh, the golden country, AKA the US. In fact, 90% of Eastern European Jews who fled between 1881 and 1924 chose to go to the US. Which means that the Jews who chose the region of Pre-State Israel weren’t desperate…They were idealists. Dreamers. Pioneers. Zionists. They were not JUST running away from something, PUSHED out of somewhere, they were ALSO running to something, PULLED back to their homeland.
And so were Jacob Tucker and William Scharff.
Most of their biographical details are lost to history, but we do know this: as Americans, Tucker and Scharff had other options.
They didn’t need to join the Jewish Legion. They didn’t need to come at all. And they certainly didn’t need to ride north to Tel Hai, to defend a handful of Jewish farmers against ten thousand angry neighbors. They did all this because – like everyone else in this story – they believed in the mission. Because they had a sense that Jewish history was being written, and they wanted to be holding the pen.
Tel Hai had its defenders. The community was as ready for battle as it would ever be. They didn’t have to wait long for the violence to arrive.
Chapter Three: The Battle at Tel Hai
March 1, 1920 was sunny and bright – a perfect day to go hunting for French soldiers.
Kamal Hussein Effendi was not yet 20 years old, but he was already a powerful man. He had led his native village of Khalsa since he was 17, growing increasingly protective of his territory as the French encroached on his home. As a young teen, he’d been enamored of the local Arab activists fighting the Ottomans, and now that the Empire was gone, he had no intention of allowing a new one to take its place.
He had no particular animus towards the Zionist movement. In late 1919, he sent the four Jewish communities of the north a letter assuring “our Jewish brothers” that “your fate is our fate.” But since those friendly salutations were followed by Effendi’s strong recommendation to evacuate the area, the northern Jewish farmers viewed the young sheikh with suspicion, declining his offer to look after their property and animals while they fled to safety.
So when he arrived at Tel Hai on the morning of March 1, accompanied by a couple hundred men, the tensions were sky-high. The men demanded to search the commune for the French soldiers they were convinced were sheltering there. From next door, the residents of nearby Kfar Giladi – which, that morning, included Trumpeldor and several of his men – could see hundreds of Arab raiders converging on Tel Hai. Immediately, Trumpeldor and his fighters saddled their horses and rode wildly towards Tel Hai, hoping it wasn’t too late.
When they arrived, the crowd of Arab raiders parted easily. Maybe the situation could still be salvaged. Maybe, if everyone kept their cool, they would all come out of this alive. And maybe, in an alternate timeline, things would have been fine. Maybe the people of Tel Hai could have negotiated away this problem, explaining to Kamal that they were not sheltering French soldiers. Maybe they could have lowered their guns and submitted to this insulting search, and maybe that would have been enough. Maybe Kamal and his men would have ridden away, satisfied. Maybe everyone could have lived happily ever after.
But in this timeline, this universe, that’s not what happened.
This is where the accounts begin to diverge.
Did the residents of Tel Hai open their doors right away, inviting the men to search? Did the raiders perform their search, find nothing, and then demand that the Jews hand over their weapons? That’s one story, based on testimony from both Arabs and Jews who were there.
But others tell it differently.
They say that the small group of defenders left at Tel Hai kept their guns trained on Kamal and his men, aware that one wrong move could set off a firefight, but unwilling to let their guard down. They say that as the raiders moved through the commune in pairs, ostensibly searching for French soldiers, someone fired a gun.
But who?
Some say it was Trumpeldor, after hearing Devorah cry from the upstairs room “they’re taking my pistol!” Some say it was Devorah, shooting at Kamal’s men in surprise as they came up the stairs. Some say the men tried to take her weapon, discharging a bullet in the process.
Let me ask, in the end, does it matter who fired the first shot? Whether it was Drechler, or Trumpeldor, or any of the people in the courtyard, their stomachs churning with nerves, their trigger fingers growing itchy?
The result was the same.
Devorah Drechler was the first casualty. Kamal’s men shot her in the mouth, sprayed the room with gunfire, and threw in a grenade for good measure. In an instant, three of Tel Hai’s defenders were dead. Devorah and her friend Sarah, whose bodies were found clinging to one another. And the American William Scharff, who had ridden to Tel Hai with Trumpeldor just hours before.
In the courtyard, Kamal Hussein pleaded for everyone to just chill out, what are you doing, stop shooting, that’s enough! But it was hard to hear him over the hail of bullets, and later, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in the Galilee wrote:
I am sure that if the father of Kamil Effendi, Sheikh of Khalsa, were alive with us today, he would have behaved quite differently with our farmers who had no quarrel with the Arabs. But his son, Kamil Effendi, is still too young to lead the tribe. I suspect that in his impulsive behavior he will lead his tribe to destruction, which is a pity. If this boy had good advisers, the blood-shedding events of this week would not have happened.
In other words, Kamal’s pleading was too little, too late. No one had wanted this battle. But now that it was here, no one at Tel Hai would give an inch. Maybe, if Trumpeldor hadn’t taken two bullets, he could have worked with Kamal to calm tempers and trigger fingers. But Trumpeldor did take two bullets, remaining conscious but transferring command to someone else. And in the heat of the fight, no one was listening to Kamal Effendi. Especially not after his men began to drop like flies.
The firefight lasted for hours. When it finally ended that night, five Jews were dead: Devorah Drechler, Sarah Chizik, William Scharff, Jacob Tucker, and Benjamin Munter, a pacifist and socialist who had not come to Tel Hai to fight, but to build. An unknown number of Kamal’s men were dead, too. And Trumpeldor was hanging by a thread.
Now that the battle was over, he could allow himself the luxury of medical treatment. But it was too late. By the time Kfar Giladi’s doctor arrived – another American veteran of the Jewish Legion – Trumpeldor was nearly gone, and all the doctor could do was watch helplessly as Trumpeldor murmured his last garbled words.
Ein Davar. Tov lamut b’ad artzenu.
It’s nothing. It’s good to die for our homeland.
At least, those were the words that Dr. Gershon Gary reported.
After all, let’s be real. Trumpeldor’s spoken Hebrew wasn’t great, and his Russian accent was thick. And who knows how good Dr. Gary’s Hebrew was, or how intelligible the dying man’s last words really were.
But the story was too good to question. Of course the great war hero Joseph Trumpeldor, who had reacted to the loss of his arm with a shrug, who had given his sweat and blood to the Land of Israel, would have found it good to die for one’s homeland. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, as the dazed survivors dug graves, no one challenged Dr. Gary’s account. By the time the story escaped the north and made its way around the Yishuv, it was too late.
The Yishuv had lost a living legend. But it had gained a different legend.
Chapter Four: Is It Good to Die for One’s Homeland?
How is a legend formed? How many people need to repeat it, believe it, before it enters the canon? And what does a legend need in order to grow?
I can’t answer the numerical questions. But I can tell you that the Yishuv in 1920 was a perfect breeding ground for national mythmaking.
Consider the population. The Jews of the Yishuv were dreamers. Idealists who believed that they were writing the next chapter of Jewish history with their sweat and their blood. So they were perfectly primed to receive the story of Trumpeldor’s famous last words, because it checked all the boxes.
It was a rallying cry for a people who likely understood that many, many more would die for the sake of a country that didn’t yet exist, a heroic spin on the tragedy and waste of a young person’s death. It was comfort, and within days, it became creed.
Because when you really think about it, the battle of Tel Hai was in many ways a pointless tragedy, based on a mistake. Yishuv leadership had debated the utility of these isolated northern outposts, and the battle at Tel Hai proved Jabotinsky had been right. A handful of farmers and volunteer defenders had not solidified the Jewish hold on the Galilee Panhandle, which was hastily evacuated in the wake of the battle. (Though, Nerd Corner Alert: Jews did return a year later, when the British and French drew new borders for their respective mandates.) The fight for the north had taken eight promising, patriotic, young people with so much left to give.
Repeating it is good to die for our homeland, our country, was a balm. A reminder of heroism, rather than a pointless waste of these lives. And I get that impulse: to mythologize, to canonize, to burnish a legend til it outshines our often grim reality.
Three years after Tel Hai, Jabotinsky founded a Jewish self-defense organization in his friend’s memory. He called it Betar – a name that in and of itself conjures up two foundational Jewish myths.
Betar is the ancient village perched in the Judean Mountains, where Bar Kokhba made his doomed last stand against the Romans. But it is also an acronym for Brit Yosef Trumpeldor, i.e. the covenant or alliance of Joseph Trumpeldor.
Which made Jabotinsky’s old Socialist enemies absolutely furious.
People are possessive of their national myths. They don’t appreciate their political rivals co-opting what they see as their story. To quote the scholar Yael Zerubavel, who writes about Israeli mythbuilding, quote,
“As the Socialists saw it, the Revisionists had betrayed the defenders of Tel Hai in a time of need and therefore had no moral right to use the battle, and the names of the fallen heroes, as their symbols. By co-opting the sacred myth of Tel Hai and its major commander, Yoseph Trumpeldor, the Revisionists were manipulating the past for their own political purposes.”
Of course, Jabotinsky saw it differently. Zerubavel writes, quote:
“…he maintained that he had shown better judgment and more concern for the settlers by calling for their immediate withdrawal than those who had let them expect help to no avail. Jabotinsky now went further than he had in 1920, directly blaming the Socialists for the death of the defenders of Tel Hai and thereby denying their moral right to the myth.”
Always fun when two people who are supposedly on the “same side” start fighting about who history belongs to! But Zerubavel explains, quote:
“…The different versions of the myth also had a direct bearing on the immediate political scene. The Revisionists mobilized Tel Hai in support of their call for armed resistance, maintaining that it was a symbolic expression of armed confrontation, blood, and sacrifice as central principles of the Yishuv’s national ideology. The Labor movement, in contrast, saw it as supporting their advocacy of restraint on the use of force against the Arabs and the British, and of pursuing the national mission of settling and working the land.”
To say it for the millionth time, myths are powerful. The same set of facts can be spun in 20 different ways, used for 20 different purposes, depending on who is speaking. To Revisionists, Trumpeldor was a military hero, an exemplar of the confrontational approach that building a homeland demanded. To Socialists, he was a simple farmer more invested in working the land than in fighting over it.
The truth, of course, was never so binary. Trumpeldor did love the land, but he also didn’t shy away from confrontation. He knew that building a Jewish state would demand blood sacrifice, and he was willing to put himself on the front lines. I can’t help but imagine how annoyed he would probably have been to hear his old friends squabbling over who had the “right” to invoke his memory.
But that’s what happens when you become a myth, rather than a real person. When you’re no longer around to speak for yourself, it’s easy for others to make you their puppet. To put words in your mouth and convictions in your heart without asking for your permission or approval.
The internal argument over Trumpeldor and Tel Hai more or less died after the State of Israel was established. Once the state existed, it was silly to squabble over who had the “right” to claim the myth. The site became a national memorial site and park, where a “trail of the injured,” or Shvil HaPt’zuim, marks the path of the wounded Jewish defenders who made their way from Tel Hai to Kfar Giladi that night. Near the trail’s end, a cemetery and a looming stone statue of a lion commemorate the fallen: eight people buried together in a mass grave, where people gather each year to remember. The nearby village of Kiryat Shmoneh is named in their honor: the town of the eight.
Israeli textbooks portrayed Trumpeldor as both a farmer and a fighter, neatly reconciling the Socialist vision with the Revisionist one. Every Israeli schoolchild learned about the hero and his famous last words.
But by the 1970s, the legend was starting to fade. Not much. Just a little. A new biography of Trumpeldor explored the man, in his complexity: not a saint, not a symbol, but a real person. And after three major wars and countless military engagements, many Israelis were beginning to question whether it was, in fact, good to die for one’s country. Wasn’t it better to live? In March of 1995 – the 75th anniversary of the battle – Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave a speech at Tel Hai. In the heady days of the Oslo Accords, when peace seemed so close, the message resonated. He said:
For seventy-five years we have been walking with this story, with the last words of Yosef Trumpeldor: “It is good to die for our homeland.” We have educated generations of warriors on these words… If there is no choice, if a sharp sword is placed on your neck… if everything is at stake – there is no choice, we go to battle, we also go to the loss of life. But I also tell you: it is good to live for our homeland. The death and bereavement that frequently befall us are not a decree of fate, nor a decree from heaven. Another way is possible. We can at least try…. It is good to live for our country – and we will spare no effort, so that you, your brothers, and your friends, will never know war again. We came to Tel Hai today to pay respect to the fallen, to remember and remind. If necessary and obligatory, we will fight war. If it can be avoided, we will fight for peace.
Within months, Rabin would be dead: a casualty of the fight for peace. But more than 30 years later, his words ring true. Tov lamut b’ad artzenu is not a Jewish quote, but a Hebrew translation of the Roman poet Horace’s most famous line: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”For Israelis, the reality is that war is often a necessary evil, but a noble death is not an inherently Jewish value. Living is.
So that’s the story of Tel Hai, and here are your five fast facts.
- After WWI, Britain and France carved up the former territories of the Ottoman Empire, leaving most of modern Israel under British control.
- The Galilee Panhandle, home to four Jewish communities, was nominally under French control, but the chaos made it feel more like the Wild West.
- Zionist leadership argued about the security situation. Unexpectedly, the hardline Jabotinsky argued for evacuating the north, while Ben Gurion believed the communities had to stay and fight.
- Volunteer fighters flocked north, including the legendary Joseph Trumpeldor. On March 1, 1920, a tragic misunderstanding spiraled out of control, and Trumpeldor was killed with five other fighters.
- Even as scholars and critics question his supposed last words, they remain a legend. If you start the sentence – tov lamut b’ad – Israelis will all know how to finish it.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
I’m not usually a huge poetry guy, but sometimes the poets get it right. As I was thinking of the enduring lesson for this episode, I thought about this poem by Mary Oliver. It’s called Sunrise, and it goes like this:
Sunrise
You can
die for it–
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.
Listen, poetry is subjective. Maybe to you, this poem isn’t the diametric opposite of Trumpeldor’s line, it is good to die for one’s country.
But to me, it’s exactly that.
A joyful negation of death.
A joyful negation of dying for a cause, when you can live for it instead.
Joseph Trumpeldor was a patriot. But I think we do him a serious disservice if we let his so-called “last words” symbolize his patriotism. And we ignore his real legacy: the legacy of a man who wrote poetry, worked his fields, and struggled to speak passable Hebrew.
The legacy of a man who wanted to live.
Because patriotism isn’t just measured by what we’re willing to die for.
It’s measured by what we want to live for.
It’s measured in our reasons to wake up in the morning.
It’s measured in the purpose we bring to our days.
And that is, in essence, the whole point of Zionism.
Yeah, yeah, Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. But what does that self-determination look like? What does it mean?
It means the freedom to work your fields. To establish schools. To debate over the dinner table. To raise your kids and create art and wake up grateful to watch another sunrise.
We’re drawn to the dramatic.
To the starkness, the sacrifice, of a line like “tov lamut biad artzeinu.”
We forget that the greatest devotion, the greatest meaning, come from the small, mundane, everyday moments of life.
Zionism was never about dying heroically, or fetishizing martyrs.
It was about making an ordinary, free Jewish life possible.
About building a homeland worth waking up for each morning.
I haven’t read much of Mary Oliver’s work, but even if I never read another poem, I’ll carry this one with me. Because it’s a reminder that victory can be as simple and mundane as watching the sun rise, knowing that the next generation will get to do the same.
Tov lamut b’ad artzenu. YOTER tov lichiyot. It’s better to live.