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From the pages of OUTLOOK |
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Outlook, May/June 2007 Homage to Nissan Rilov (1918-2007)By Akiva Orr The Israeli painter Nissan Rilov died in Paris on Saturday, March 10, 2007. He was one of the few children in the first Zionist moshav (agricultural settlement) in Palestine—Nahalal, founded in 1921. The moshavim were different from kibbutzim in that moshav members cooperated in working the land but owned their houses and plots, which were leased by the Zionist authorities, who acquired the lands as “Property of the Jewish People.” The rules of the Jewish Agency prohibited the moshavim from employing Arabs as hired labour. Nahalal was erected on the lands of the former Palestinian village of Ma’alul. Nissan Rilov’s father was in charge of the defense of Nahalal against surrounding Palestinian villagers whose lands had been sold by their owners to Zionist authorities. These lands had previously belonged to Arab owners living in cities who had leased it to the peasants; the sellers were not the people who lived and worked on the lands. In 1845 the Ottoman Turkish rulers of Palestine (then known as South Syria) introduced a new law (and government office) of land registration. The purpose was to register all land owners and their lands in order to tax them. But most Palestinian peasants did not know how to read or write, and asked relatives and lawyers living in the cities to register their lands for them. Many of them then registered the lands under their own names. So the legal owners were not the legitimate owners who had lived on the lands and cultivated them for centuries. When the Zionist immigration began after World War One, many nominally legal owners realized they could get high prices for lands from the Zionist authorities, who were keen to buy any land they could. Many Palestinian “legal” owners sold lands without the real owners knowing that their lands had been sold from under them. When the buyers came to take possession of their newly purchased lands, the peasants were forcibly evicted by the British police and by the Haganah. Rilov was a childhood friend of Moshe Dayan, who also grew up in Nahalal. The poet Hannah Senesh (who during World War Two was parachuted into Hungary and killed there) was a student in the Agricultural College for Girls in Nahalal, and Rilov was her boyfriend. During the 1936-1939 rebellion of the Palestinian Arabs against British rule in Palestine, Nissan joined the Special Night Squads (SNS) organized by British army officer Charles Orde Wingate. Wingate mobilized Jewish boys to form mobile squads moving at night into Palestinian villages to preempt Palestinian attacks on the oil pipeline from Kirkuk in Iraq to Haifa in Palestine. The Palestinian rebels would dig up the pipeline in the Valley of Jezreel, shoot into it and then set fire to the oil spurting upwards. The pillar of fire was seen for many miles around and demonstrated British inability to stop it, thus encouraging more Palestinians to join the rebellion. Wingate decided to put a stop to this, and used the SNS for this task. Nissan related how Wingate took them one day into a village whose inhabitants he suspected of giving food and shelter to the rebels who blew up the pipeline nearby. He told the SNS to bring all male peasants aged 16 to 60 to the village central square and organize them in a big “U.” He then called one peasant to stand next to him on the open side of the U and shouted: “in whose house did the rebels stay last night ?” When no one answered, he hit the skull of the peasant next to him with his rifle butt. He repeated his question, and when again no one answered he repeated the blow. He went on without receiving a reply until he smashed the skull of that peasant, killing him. Watching this spectacle, Nissan vomited. Wingate then told the SNS boys to dip rags in gasoline and throw them in front of each peasant, forcing each peasant’s head into the rag as one does to cats who relieve themselves on an expensive carpet. When the SNS left the village, Wingate said to them, “I can afford to behave like this because I’ll leave this country. You must not do it as you will stay here and live with them.” A short time later Nissan was called on to disperse Palestinian peasant women who obstructed the tractors coming to plough lands recently acquired from Arab landlords. The women lay across the dirt track and the tractor could not pass, so Nissan and the Jewish boys had to pull them by their legs off the track. He told me that this experience put an end to his Zionist convictions. Next night Nissan was on duty in an ambush against Palestinian peasants who returned to their former plots to pick their vegetables. It was full moon and he saw an old peasant picking vegetables. His Haganah commander ordered him to shoot the peasant but he refused, saying: “I don’t shoot old people.” He was court-martialled and expelled from the Haganah. This also meant excommunication by his family and friends. He could not stay in Nahalal, where he was treated as a pariah. He left Nahalal and moved to Tel Aviv, where he joined the Palestine Communist Party (which was an illegal organization). Shortly afterward, World War Two broke out and he joined the British Army. After the war he returned to Palestine. He studied painting in the school of Avni and in the early 1950s emigrated to Paris, where he first worked as a builder and studied painting. Soon he succeeded in selling his paintings. He developed a unique technique of tearing up painted sheets to create collages. The result was neither naturalistic nor abstract, but it had an emotionally coherent effect. Nissan remained active in supporting the Palestinian struggle for independence and during the first Intifada (1987-1992) he staged an art exhibit entitled “Stones,” in support of stone-throwing Palestinian peasant women. He was a simple man, with the hands and soul of an honest, hard- working peasant. He had a strong sense of morality and the courage not to bend under pressure of majority, friends, and family, even if this cost him dearly. There are not many such people around. Missing Nissan, AKIVA ORR is the author (with Moshe Machover) of the 1962 book Peace, Peace and No Peace (Hebrew), a survey of Israeli politics from 1948 to 1960. His other books include The unJewish State: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Israel (1983) and Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises (1994). In the 1990s he published five more books in Hebrew, including From Protest to Revolution. From Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine, Vancouver, BC. Outlook Website |
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