Spy stories: Not what we see, it’s how we see it

They were a small group of pioneers with a mission. The year was 1940, and Jews by the tens of thousands were being herded into the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe. And while the Nazi hierarchy was meeting to determine the “final solution to the Jewish problem,” this small group was preparing the groundwork for what they believed would be the influx of refugees who would need a home and a place to call their own.

It is hard to imagine the vision required for a group of Jews in 1940 to believe that there was a need to create new towns and villages in the barren lands that were years away from becoming the State of Israel, but these young men and women believed, against all the odds, that they were on the threshold of the fulfillment of a 2,000 year old dream, and that at long last, after so many years of wandering, the Jewish people were ready to begin coming home.

The infamous British “White Paper” severely limiting Jewish immigration to the land of Israel was in full force, and a scant 7,500 Jews from the millions desperate to get out of Europe would be allowed into a country surrounded by hostile Arabs and facing a heavy-handed British mandate openly resistant to their efforts.

They discovered that the land was filled with boulders and hard rock; completely untamable, the experts said. The winters were harsh, often making the meager roads impassable, and they found themselves between the very large Arab populations of Beit Lechem in the North and Hebron in the South. They saw the ancient Roman ruins; the caves, where tens of thousands of Jews had been forced to live in hiding, remained.

Against all the odds, the Etzion Bloc, four Jewish villages in the Judean hills, was born. They cleared the boulders with their hands, hauling dirt and rock with donkeys and leaving their families for an entire year, having decided that the land and the climate were too treacherous and difficult for mothers and children to join as yet. They were on a large and powerful mission, to see if the land their ancestors had left behind so long ago could become once again, their home. Where others saw only rocks and weeds, they saw a vibrant and living Jewish community in a modern State of Israel.