of the herdsmen taking on biblical dimensions at times. But it was not a national conflict. Much like the Wild West where cattlemen were pitted against homesteaders, everyone did as he wished; to survive, a man—no matter how inherently nonviolent—had to learn to shoot, to fight, to ride a horse, and to defend his life, his honor, and his property.
Mes’ha’s residents drew a sharp line between friendly and unfriendly neighbors. Kafr Kama, where they sent their children to grind flour, was very friendly. The Maghreb villages whose population stemmed from North Africa were not considered dangerous. From beyond the hills, fruit and vegetable sellers came to peddle their produce. And within the village itself, each and every farmyard had a shack for the harat and his family. A harat was usually a landless peasant who hired himself out in exchange for 20 percent of the harvest. He worked alongside the farmer in any job that needed doing, plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing. His wife would spend the day with the farmer’s wife, helping with the housework, seeing to the tabun fire, washing the laundry, and doing the heavy work. Their children, too, would lend a hand and they played with the Jewish family’s children, speaking a Yiddish mixed with Arabic and Hebrew. The farmer and the harat would take their meals together in the field, tasting one another’s morsels. If a cow was stolen from the farmyard, the harat joined in the chase after the thief. During harvest, he too was recruited for guard duty. Nonetheless, the idyll was shattered at times: a harat might be suspected of pilfering from the farmer’s harvest and his wife and children “accused of” impertinence and a lack of hygiene. Quarrels could degenerate, a harat and his family resorting to violence against the farmer.52 But this show of muscle, as in Russia, was the exception to the rule; it made no real dent in the way of life. The lack of green, the smoke of the tabun, the argot of playing children, the dirt, and the neglect all lent Mes’ha the appearance of an Arab village, no different from its surroundings.
The ICA’s contracts stipulated that hired hands could be used only in the high season, and Reuven Paicovich’s contract stated explicitly that only Jews could be hired.53 It was an impossible demand. Mes’ha’s residents hailed from Rosh Pinnah, Metullah, and Zikhron Ya’acov. All of these communities, especially the last, had used Arab labor, and their former residents saw no reason to change in their new location. Besides, integrating into the surroundings meant also fostering Jewish-Arab relations. The guarding of Mes’ha was thus placed in the hands of one Hamadi, the most infamous local bandit, while harats were accepted into Mes’ha’s homes. They knew the local conditions forward and backward; they taught the farmers the secrets of the fields while their wives taught the farmers’ wives the secrets of the tabun. But this situation caused Mes’ah to have a population that consisted of more Arabs than Jews. And a niggling fear lingered among the Jews that “the Arabs would rise up one day and make mincemeat of their Jewish exploiters.”54
The mixture of intimacy and dependence often spawned true affection; some harats became part of the family, remaining loyal even through the hard times of riots and bloodletting. Other relationships ended in lifelong enmity. Unlike the colonies that did not employ Arab labor, at Mes’ha, Arabs were not strangers, not an unknown quantity. Their persons, language, conduct, and customs were part of the village tapestry; they were not foreign, but flesh of the land, integral to the landscape. The ideology of “Jewish labor” that dictated against employing Arabs created a complete separation between Eretz Israel and Palestine—in consciousness if not in actuality. The former was entirely Jewish and not overly welcoming to Arabs; the latter was Arab, a foreign land that aroused anxiety and alienation in the Jews: to them, Palestine was mysterious, ominous, intangible.
At Mes’ha, Arabs may have been neighbors or friends or even thieves, but there was nothing mysterious about them. They were real. Of course, this had no bearing on the larger picture of Jewish-Arab relations in the land of Israel, questions that were still sealed in the future, especially for people with a horizon blocked by Mount Tabor. At Mes’ha, Jewish-Arab interdependence peeled away the mystery, which, potentially, could have formed a cultural, national shell.
In this land where everyone did as he wished, the regime intervened only in extreme instances. Amid the eternal conflict between Bedouin and peasantry, law and order was to spring from the society itself. The history of the Second Aliyah reserves a fondness and place of honor for the colonies of Galilee based on field crops: they were the crucible of the independent Jewish agricultural worker, who proved capable of organizing farm work without the need of supervisors. The beginnings of the so-called Labor settlement apparently lay in the attempts and initiatives of individuals to introduce into the Lower Galilee Jewish laborers in place of Arab harats and Jewish guards in place of the Arab master thieves customarily employed. At Mes’ha, the appearance of Jewish farmhands was connected with a man who became a local legend, the teacher Asher Ehrlich.
After Joseph Vitkin despaired of himself and his pupils, he suggested to Asher Ehrlich, who lived in Rehovot, that he replace him as principal. The neglect and backwardness that so depressed Vitkin and the hills that so stifled him—these he described to Ehrlich in glowing colors, firing his idealism with a Zionist educational challenge. Ehrlich, who had been born in a Jewish farming village on the banks of the Volga, Nehar-Tov, and who had endured a four-year ordeal in the czar’s army, was tall, strong in body and soul, brave, and proud. The “long teacher”—al-muallem a-tawil, as the Arabs called him—was a walking example to Mes’ha’s youth of the need for “Jewish muscle.”
Working on the premise of a healthy mind in a healthy body, he regaled pupils with tales of Maccabean heroism and led them on excursions around the Tabor, unveiling before them the delights of Eretz Israel—its plant and animal kingdoms, its trails and landmarks—and teaching them to have no fear of Arab villagers or casual wayfarers. A chance encounter of his with Bedouin went down in the settlement’s annals: one night, while walking alone from Melahamiya to Mes’ha, he came upon two horsemen. One of them asked him for a light. Ehrlich pulled out his gun and offered him the barrel. To Ehrlich’s everlasting glory, the Bedouin fled for their lives. He was able to impress his pupils because he manifested qualities necessary for the wilds of Galilee: communion with nature, physical prowess, courage, and a proud defense of life and property. In the Wild West, decency, determination, and physical strength can triumph over the forces of evil and anarchy. This was the role Ehrlich filled at Mes’ha.55
He won Mes’ha’s hearts not only because of his personal endowments but also because he was ready to help the farmers beyond the call of duty. He lobbied for them before the ICA and initiated a loan fund to see the needy through to harvest. Building on these successes, he tried to institute his long-standing plan of introducing Jewish labor. He did not find Mes’ha to his taste, with its image as a mixed colony where children spoke a brew of Hebrew and mumbo jumbo, with its street that was not Jewish in either form or character, with the fact that its safety was guarded by an outlaw. To him, the import of Jewish labor was the Archimedean screw that could transform Mes’ha into Kefar Tavor. He traveled to Judea, where his infectious enthusiasm motivated others to return with him, marking the start of what was to become the Second Aliyah’s push toward Galilee. All at once, a new spirit infused Mes’ha. Ehrlich made space in his house for a clubroom, and the singing of the hired hands soon dissolved the nighttime terrors and the loneliness that had swaddled the village at dark. Children suddenly had new role models: Jewish guards in abayas and keffiyehs cut dashing figures with their decked-out horses, their ammunition belts, and their weapons. Their imagination fired, Mes’ha’s youth longed to be like Beraleh Schwiger or Yigael the guardsman—a son of Metulla, that is, of Galilee.56
Mes’ha, for one brief moment, was a social and public hub. Here the Second Aliyah founded Ha-Horesh, Galilee’s first workers organization, as well as Ha-Shomer, a body of Jewish guardsmen (which was established on the seventh day of Passover, 1909). Jewish guards and Jewish labor were coming into their own. But the moment passed. Ehrlich became embroiled in a major squabble and was forced to leave the colony.57 With his departure, the bubble burst. A year later the contract with Ha-Shomer for Jewish guards was terminated,
