In the Kinneret cemetery, not far from the tomb of Rachel the poetess, stands a tombstone with a palm relief on the back.
Whoever set fire to the 500 dunams of Kibbutz Almog's date grove last week did not intend to burn only trees. He intended to burn first what the name stamped on the front of this tombstone represents: anIsraeli Benzion.
Ben-Zion was not born "Israeli." He was born Ben-Zion Chernomorsky in the town of Glokhov, Ukraine, and studied Talmud Torah at the age of 15. What made him "Israeli" was the same event that caused Bialik to write the famous words "blood vengeance, a little boy has not yet created Satan" - the Kishinev pogroms.
Three years later, at the age of only 15, Ben-Zion immigrated to Israel, devoting his life to two fields that today's State of Israel has forgotten are inextricably linked – agriculture and security.
Ben-Zion and his friends, founders of the Kinneret Group, asked themselves what could be grown in the burning wilderness of the Jordan Valley. All the answers were not easy to implement, but the initiative to grow dates faced a particular difficulty: in 1933, Ben-Zion went to Iraq, on a first-of-its-kind, secret and dangerous voyage, in order to smuggle out wires, which the countries of the region guarded against because date cultivation was a central component of their economy.
The wires smuggled by Ben-Zion were planted in Rachel's Garden on the Sea of Galilee, which served as a nursery for the "mothers" of the modern Land of Israel date – and from there they were distributed in settlements along the Jordan River to Sodom. The descendants of these "mothers" were burned last week in the orchard of Kibbutz Almog.
The repeated trips of an Israeli and his successor, Yanni Avidov, to Arab countries and Persia also had additional significance – they spread the message of the rebirth of the Jews in the Land of Israel among the local communities, and encouraged and assisted (through the Mossad for Aliyah Bet, whose commanders were also Kinneret members) to make aliyah from there.
In 1934, Ben-Zion dedicated an entire trip to meeting the communities of Kurdistan and Iraq, and when he returned he worked among the Yishuv's leadership for their immigration to Israel. Those who sought to plant trees found themselves planting Jews in their homeland.
The opposite is also true – whoever burns wood seeks to uproot Jews from their land. All Jews. Not only the plantation manager of Kibbutz Almog, Moshe Gazi, whose troubled smile when he was interviewed and told about the destruction of his life's work seemed to me like the last refuge of an impressive man from crying.
Agricultural terrorism seeks to return us all from "Israeli" to "Chernomorsky" or any other name we adopted in the many exiles from which our ancestors came. At the end of this reverse process, if, God forbid, we allow it, nothing better awaits us than the starting point - Chisinau.
What do we do with it? What awaits someone who destroys the life's work of a Jewish farmer in the land of his forefathers? Last week we were informed of the ILA's decision to transfer ownership of 480 dunams of grazing land from Kibbutz Moran to a convicted agricultural terrorist.
The name "Israel Land Authority" is misleading. This is an authority to turn an "Israeli" into a "Chernomorsky."
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