Top Quotes: “Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917–2017” — Ian Black
Introduction
“Israel’s dominant narrative emphasizes its own readiness to compromise and to make peace while the other side has repeatedly missed opportunities to do so. The ‘dove’ is forced to fight. Unrelenting and pervasive Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility is blamed far more than Israel’s own actions — whether in 1947 and 1948, or over decades of settlement in the territories it conquered in 1967 and the military occupation it has maintained in Judaea and Samaria’ (the West Bank) and its unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem, now part of the country’s ‘united and eternal capital’. (Under international law Israel remains responsible for the Gaza Strip despite its 2005 withdrawal, as it does for the West Bank partially controlled by the Palestinian Authority.) It is common for Israelis to claim that they have no Palestinian “partner’ for peace and that their enemies are motivated by hatred and prejudice, not a quest for justice and an end to conflict. Terror continues.
Palestinians describe themselves as the country’s indigenous inhabitants who lived peacefully for centuries as a Muslim majority alongside Christian and Jewish minorities. Theirs is a story of resistance to foreign intruders, starting in Ottoman times but since 1917 under a perfidious British Empire that betrayed the cause of Arab independence and put its own interests first. Three decades of Mandatory rule, which promoted Jewish immigration and land purchases, were followed after the crimes of the Nazi era (for which they were in no way responsible) by an unjust UN partition plan that Palestinians rejected and fought. Then came war and ethnic cleansing in 1948 and, nineteen years later, the occupation of the rump of the country between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan. Israel’s independence was the Palestinians’ catastrophe. The right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes was recognized by the UN but never by Israel. ‘The essence of the encounter’, in the words of the Palestinian scholar Nadim Rouhana, ‘took place between a group of people living in their homeland and a group of people who arrived from other parts of the world guided by an ideology that claimed the same homeland as exclusively theirs.’ Yet Palestinian leaders still agreed to accept a state on only 22 per cent of the territory — a historic compromise described as ‘unreasonably reasonable.’ The Nakba continues as memory and ‘present history’. That is marked by ongoing occupation, land confiscation, expanding Jewish settlements, the threat of annexation, house demolitions and an *apartheid wall’ built to protect Israel’s security — a disaster without end. Sumoud (steadfastness), the preservation of national identity — and resistance — carry on in the service of a struggle for freedom, dignity and human rights.”
“The Israel-Palestine conflict has escalated, despite (or perhaps because of) efforts to ‘manage’ rather than resolve it. In the twenty years between 1967 and the start of the first intifada, 650 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. From late 1987 to September 2000, the death toll was 1,491. From the second intifada to the end of 2006, the figure was 4,046 Palestinians and 1,019 Israelis. The Gaza Strip, now home to 2 million Palestinians, has seen four fully-fledged military campaigns since 2006. In the 2014 war, up to 2,300 Palestinians died. The conflict remains an issue of global and regional concern, a source of instability, misery, hatred and violence.”
Pre-Independence
“On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organ- ization, to inform him that:
His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably — neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy — ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.’ liloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant’ and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location — its ‘fatal geography’ — to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India. Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal (Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America: Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.”
“Zionist-Arab tensions pre-dated the epochal events of 1917. The following year the British military administration counted a population of 512,000 Muslims, 66,000 Jews and 61,000 Christians. The Arabs were largely peasants and artisans, and, in the countryside, where Bedouin tribes still roamed, overwhelmingly illiterate. Large tracts of land were the property of absentee owners. Urban notables had played an important role in the just-departed Ottoman administration. Jerusalem, where signs of modernization were spreading beyond the walls of the Old City, was still dominated by wealthy, patrician families such as the Husseinis and Khalidis; Nablus by the Touqans and Abdel-Hadis. Jaffa, known as ‘the bride of the sea’, was the country’s gateway to the outside world, while Haifa, further north, was also undergoing rapid development. Beyond the replacement of the Turks by the British, the most significant novelty was that by 1918 some 15,000 Jewish newcomers were living in 45 rural colonies (moshavot) that made up the ‘new’ Zionist camp — and were quite distinct from the 50,000-strong ‘old’ Yishuv (Jewish community).
Palestine’s Arabs were well aware of their presence, and of the differences between the two groups. Jews had been part of the landscape for as long as anyone could remember. Over the previous century Ashkenazi Jews had come to study and pray, subsisting on halukah or charitable contributions in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed, where they mourned the destruction of the Temple and awaited the coming of the Messiah. Most were Russian or from other Eastern European countries. The majority had come after 1840, when the Ottomans defeated a rebellion by the Egyptian pasha Muhammad Ali. A minority were native-born Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews, whose ancestors were from Spain, North Africa, the Balkans and as far afield as Yemen and Bokhara in Central Asia. Many spoke Arabic or Ladino. Their identity was religious, not national in any sense. Most were Ottoman citizens and were referred to in Arabic as abnaa al-balad (sons of the country/natives) or yahud awlaad Arab Jews, sons of Arabs). Relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews were largely untroubled, each community living within its own traditions under the Ottoman millet system of communal religious autonomy under the sultan in Istanbul. Inequalities existed in status and taxation but there was tolerance in mixed neighbourhoods. In Jerusalem, Ashkenazis formed a majority, speaking a Palestinian variety of Yiddish, the vernacular of the Russian ‘Pale of Settlement’ (where East European Jews were concentrated), but replete with Arabic words. Sephardim were culturally closer to Muslims than to Christians.’ In Jaffa, Jews made up a third of the population. In Haifa there was ‘no more friction than is commonly found amongst neighbours’.
Palestine’s connections with the wider world had deepened.”
“On the ground, another important effect of the 1929 violence was to increase the physical separation between the country’s tw communities. Jews left Hebron completely, though three dozen Sephardi families returned in 1931. The few Jews in Gaza and other overwhelmingly Arab areas of Palestine also left. Under the pressure of a short-lived Arab boycott movement, Jewish merchants left the Old City of Jerusalem as well as Arab parts of Haifa and Jaffa and moved to predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods, or to Tel Aviv. Acre’s small community of Salonika Jewish fishermen decamped to Haifa. Arabs also left Jewish-dominated areas. “Arab drivers are afraid to go into Jewish quarters and Jews into Arab ones’, recorded the wife of a British official in Jerusalem. “And then one takes a car with Hebrew numbers, thinking one has a Jewish driver, and finds oneself with an Arab who has put up Hebrew numbers to get custom. All the drivers take two hats, to wear a tarbush or an ordinary hat according to the district’ Demarcation became sharper. ‘In every respect the schism between the two people was now open and undisguised.’”
“Attacks on the police in the alleys of Jaffa’s old city, overlooking the port, were punished by the destruction of more than two hundred buildings, ostensibly to improve health and sanitation but in fact to improve access for the British military. Up to 6,000 Arabs were left homeless. No longer would ‘this rancid town’, as an exultant Ben-Gurion called the old city, be the first sight for Jewish immigrants as they reached the shores of the homeland. ‘If Jaffa went to hell, I would not count myself among the mourners’, he noted. The mufti’s actions, it was said, had achieved what Zionist principles could not. Critics of the Palestine government accused it of using kid gloves and making it hard for troops and police to suppress the unrest.”
Independence/Catastrophe
“On November 30, 1947, armed Arabs ambushed a Jewish bus at Kfar Sirkin en route from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five passengers. This incident, just hours after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, is generally regarded as marking the start of Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinian Nakba or ‘catastrophe’. The motives of the perpetrators were said to be clannish and criminal rather than ‘national’, though the distinction was either lost or ignored at the time and has been forgotte since. Later that day another bus was attacked on the road from Hadera, leaving one Jew dead and several injured. Other attacks marked the descent into all-out conflict that was driven by an accelerating cycle of retaliation and revenge.
On 13 December a teenage Palestinian boy watched in horror as a black car stopped outside the Damascus Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City and ‘the occupants rolled two cylinders with burning wicks into the milling crowd’. Twenty people died.Two weeks later, fighters of the Lehi underground — the ‘Stern Gang’ to the British — targeted a coffee house in Lifta, killing six. On 30 December Irgun men threw grenades into a crowd of Arab workers outside Haifa’s oil refinery, once notable for its cross-community trade union co-operation: eleven died. In the ensuing fury thirty-nine Jewish employees were killed by Arabs wielding metal bars, knives and hammers. Six Arabs were also killed. On the first morning of 1948 Haganah units raided nearby Balad al-Sheikh burial place of Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam. Several dozen people, including women and children, lost their lives. Local incidents fuelled a country-wide crisis. Full-scale war seemed inevitable as the new year dawned.”
“In September, seven of the UN committee’s ten members recommended partition into two states, with international status for Jerusalem. The minority (India, Iran and Yugoslavia) proposed a federal state with Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab Higher Committee expressed ‘amazement and disbelief as this was ‘contrary to the UN charter and to the principles of justice and integrity.’ Britain announced that it would leave Palestine in six months’ time if no settlement was reached. No one seriously imagined that it would be. On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, leaving Jerusalem under UN supervision as a ‘corpus separatum’. Intense Zionist lobbying secured a majority of thirty-three to thirteen with ten abstentions — a close-run thing since a two-thirds vote was required. UN Resolution 181 was backed, crucially, by both the US and USSR — the world’s great powers in the early days of the Cold War. It was opposed by the Palestinians and by Arab and Muslim states infuriated by American susceptibility to the Zionists. The proposed Jewish state was to consist of 55 percent of the country, including the largely unpopulated Negev desert. Its population would comprise some 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs — a very substantial minority. Jews, at that point, owned just 7 per cent of Palestine’s private land. The Arab state was to have 44 percent of the land and a minority of 10,000 Jews. Greater Jerusalem was to remain under international rule. The mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, declared the UN vote ‘null and void’. Jamal al-Husseini, vice-president of the Arab Higher Committee, had already warned that it was ‘the sacred duty of the Arabs of Palestine to defend their country against all aggression’. Now he rejected the proposed border as a line of blood and fire.’ The Palestinian view was that “partition did not involve a compromise but was Zionist in conception and tailored to meet Zionist needs and demands.’”
“Independence for the neighbouring French Mandate territories of Syria and Lebanon in 1946 had underlined the painful fact that Palestine, trapped in its iron cage’, was still nowhere near to achieving self-government under its Arab majority and that the Palestinians were still unable to develop their own national institutions and identity. It was a debilitating weakness.”
“The AHC faced ‘the colossal task of building up Palestinian Arab military strength virtually from scratch, under severe handicaps. Nothing on the Palestinian side matched the resources and organization of the Haganah. No master plan existed for fighting the Jews, whose capabilities were simultaneously underestimated and exaggerated. The Arab effort was also beset by rivalry: it was not until January 1947 that two existing paramilitary groups, the Futuwwa and the Najada, were combined into a single Arab Youth Organization. Veterans of the Arab rebellion had military experience but only a few thousand had joined the British army, and many had been discharged or had deserted. In December the AHC set up the Jaysh al -Jihad al-Mugaddas (Army of the Holy Jihad, AHJ) under Abdul-Qader al-Husseini (the son of Musa Kazem) and ‘the ablest and most courageous of the Arab commanders’.
National committees were formed in villages and towns as they had been during the rebellion. Weapons were purchased in neighbouring countries and Europe, but it proved difficult to distribute arms and fighters as needed. Volunteering was not common.”
“Palestinian civilians began to flee from the start of the hostilities. In early December 1947 the Haganah reported that wealthy Arabs were moving temporarily to winter residences in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. Others left for inland villages. Around 15,000 Arab residents, a fifth of Jaffa’s population, had left by mid-January. By late January, 20,000 Haifa residents were estimated to have abandoned their homes. Residents of Arab villages adjoining Jewish areas of Jerusalem left too. The Arab Higher Committee tried to stem these departures by radio broadcasts, by appealing to neighbouring governments not to grant entry to fleeing Palestinians and by ordering local commanders to stop people leaving. From Cairo, the mufti urged the national committees to halt ‘desertion from the field of honour and sacrifice.’ But the effort was confused and advice often contradictory. Fear of attack, as in any war, was the main reason for the flight of civilians, at least at this stage, and it did not go unnoticed by the Jewish leadership.”
“On 10 March 1948, Haganah commanders meeting in Tel Aviv looked ahead to the next stage of the war in a document known as Tochnit Dalet (Plan D). The plan was designed to secure control of Jewish-held territory — within and beyond the UN partition borders — ahead of the approaching British departure. In case of resistance, Arabs were to be expelled. If there was no resistance, they could stay under military rule. Decades later opinions still differed sharply as to whether this constituted a master plan for expulsions or “ethnic cleansing’ — a term borrowed from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the title of an influential work by the anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. Israeli and pro-Zionist scholars had traditionally described Plan D as defensive and the Palestinian exodus as unexpected. Walid Khalidi, the leading Palestinian historian, took the opposite view. Benny Morris, the pioneering ‘new’ Israeli historian of this crucially formative period, argued that Plan D was implemented, but only in piecemeal fashion. The Palestinian refugee problem, in Morris’s much-quoted assessment, was “born out of war, not by design.’ Still, a predisposition to population ‘transfer’ and tactical military considerations in fast-moving circumstances inclined Haganah commanders towards removing Arabs, given the opportunity. The language employed was certainly highly suggestive. The Hebrew word ‘thur’ (‘purifying’) was used repeatedly in internal documents. The codenames chosen for operations — Matateh (Broom) and Biur Chametz (Passover Cleaning) seemed inspired by this mindset. Pappé and others have argued that the record shows that the removal of Palestinians was ‘more premeditated, systematic and extensive’ than Morris acknowledged — even in the face of his own evidence. No high-level Jewish political discussion is known to have been held to explicitly discuss expelling Arabs, but many expulsions unquestionably took place. And the results, in the end, mattered far more than intentions.”
“Yigal Allon, commanding the Palmah, organized a ‘whispering campaign’ to frighten Palestinians into leaving the area, telling local Jewish mukhtars to warn their Arab contacts to flee while they still could before Jewish reinforcements arrived. The ploy worked: tens of thousands left their homes and abandoned villages were burned. In Beisan the remaining inhabitants were expelled across the Jordan or to Nazareth. Acre, besieged and demoralized by the fate of Haifa, fell too, its defenders divided between supporters and opponents of the mufti. Only 3,000 of its 13,400 residents remained, and others left after the conquest. Hava Keller, a young Polish-born woman serving with the Haganah, went into an Arab apartment that had just been abandoned and was disturbed to see a pair of baby shoes, which made her wonder about the child’s fate years later.
The Haganah took the offensive and made other gains in areas across the country where the armies of the neighbouring Arab states were expected to invade when the British left. In the south, on 11 May, the Givati brigade raided Beit Daras and the residents fled to nearby Isdud. In an adjacent village the mukhtar’s house was blown up and four people were executed. ‘Now it is a mass psychosis and an all-out evacuation’,
Haganah intelligence reported. ‘Arabs have abandoned hamlets before the Jews took any action against them, only on the basis of the rumours that they were about to be attacked.’* By mid-May, 250,000–300,000 Palestinians had already fled or been expelled from their homes.”
“The second stage of the war began on 15 May. It was then, according to plan, that the British finally quit. High Commissioner Cunningham departed by launch from Haifa harbour, the formality of the occasion masking what was an ignominious departure after thirty years, the country already engulfed in war. The previous evening at a ceremony in the Tel Aviv museum, the sovereign state of Israel was solemnly proclaimed — the crowning achievement of the Zionist movement half a century after its founding congress — as David Ben-Gurion read out the declaration of independence on behalf of the provisional government, prompting feelings of ‘elation’, recalled his colleague David Horowitz, “mingling with dread’s The new Jewish state was recognized within hours by both the US and the USSR. Ben-Gurion was declared prime minister and minister of defence.
Units of four Arab armies began to invade, having waited scrupulously for the Mandate to end. The collapse of the Palestinians, the failure of the ALA and swelling refugee flows had left the Arab states little choice but the intervention by Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt was chaotic in conception and execution, the gap between rhetoric and reality embarrassingly wide. Abdel-Rahman Azzam Pasha, the Egyptian head of the Arab League, had warned of a conflict that ‘would be a war of extermination and momentous massacre’, though his words were distorted or misquoted to occupy a prominent place in the Zionist narrative of the conflict. The Syrian president, Shukri al-Quwatli, invoked the memory of the long Arab struggle against the Crusaders. Egypt announced it was acting ‘to re-establish security and order and put an end to the massacres perpetrated by Zionist terrorist bands against Arabs and humanity’. The Jews, with ‘no real knowledge of the Arabs’ true military capabilities … took Arab propaganda literally, preparing for the worst and reacting accordingly’. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the sense of existential threat was all too real.
Initial Arab plans focused on invading northern Palestine with a view to reaching Haifa. Lebanon had been expected to take part but opted out at the last minute. Far more significantly, King Ab- dullah announced that Jordanian forces would head for Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron on what later became known as the West Bank. This suggested that he was seeking to avoid war with the Jews by refraining from entering areas allotted to them by the UN such as Netanya and Hadera. It appeared to confirm suspicions about collusion between the Hashemites, British and Zionists and, in turn, caused a change of plan in Cairo. The Egyptians had originally planned to move forces up the coast towards Gaza, Isdud and perhaps to Tel Aviv. But now, concerned about Hashemite ambitions, they added a second invasion route that would take their forces, via Beersheba, east to the Hebron area — an obvious attempt to deny it to Abdullah. By the end of May, however, they had run out of steam on both axes. The Israelis encountered only Iraqi and Syrian forces in the Jordan Valley — also outside the area allotted the Jewish state by the UN — but no Egyptians at this stage. Iraqi units based in Qalqilya did nothing, telling puzzled
Palestinians who asked why: ‘maku awamir’ — Iraqi Arabic dialect for *we have no orders.’ Token Saudi and Yemeni forces were also deployed.
Palestinian fighters were helped in Jerusalem by the arrival on 19 May of Jordanian Arab Legion forces, who were greeted by jubilant crowds. Armoured cars negotiated the alleys of the Old City and strengthened its defences. Following the destruction of two of the Jewish Quarter’s ancient synagogues, the Jews surrendered. The Haganah fighters were taken as prisoners of war to Transjordan and the civilians were released. Looting ensued. ‘The bombardment had destroyed the houses .. what was left was still plundered, swarms of Arab children and women came into the quarter, most of them from the surrounding villages and tore out window shutters, half-burned doors, railings etc. and took them away either to sell them in the Arab market or out of the city to their villages.
In Jerusalem and elsewhere the Arab invasion posed difficult challenges for Jewish forces. But it did not save the Palestinians. On the contrary, it worsened their plight because more territory was lost and more Arabs became refugees. Understanding of the war has deepened as archives have opened and old narratives have been challenged, but it is hard to better the conclusion reached by the British author Christopher Sykes in the mid-1960s: ‘The unpreparedness, disunity and even mutual hostility of the Arab forces, in contrast with the single-mindedness of their en- emies, ruled out the possibility of their victory.’ Musa al-Alami, Ben-Gurion’s Palestinian interlocutor from the 1930s, put it even more succinctly: ‘It was obvious that our (Arab] aims in the battle were diverse, while the aim of the Jews was solely to win it.’”
“In Lydda on 12 July, Israeli forces who had believed that the battle was over encountered a small Arab Legion force entering the town, triggering what looked like an armed uprising. During the ensuing firefight about 250 Palestinians sheltering in a mosque compound were killed by men of the ID’s Yiftah Brigade. It was ‘a sign of panic, of a lack of confidence in the troops’ ability to hold the town, of their inexperience in governing civilians.’ Later eyewitness accounts by Israeli participants ensured that the incident gained lasting notoriety.
It was the biggest atrocity of the war.
Equally notorious was the subsequent expulsion of 50,000 Palestinians on Ben-Gurion’s orders to the Israeli commander, Yitzhak Rabin, who later described how the prime minister gestured with his hand and said brusquely: ‘Remove them.’ Ramle’s residents were bussed out, but their neighbours from Lydda were forced to walk miles in punishing summer heat, in the middle of the Ramadan fast, to the front lines, where the Arab Legion struggled to provide shelter and supplies. Unknown numbers of refugees died from exhaustion or dehydration. George Habash, a medical student from Lydda’s Greek Orthodox community, never forgot what he witnessed: Thirty thousand people walking, crying, screaming with terror … women carrying babies on their arms and children clinging to their [skirts], with the Israeli soldiers pointing their weapons at their backs. Some people fell by the wayside, and some did not rise again. It was terrible.’ Rabin wrote in his memoirs (which were initially censored, though the original version was subsequently leaked):
‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion.
It is estimated that a further 100,000 Palestinians became refugees in the course of those ten days alone. ‘The feeling was bad but we deceived ourselves, thinking we would be back next week’, recalled Abu Naim, from Ijzim, south of Haifa.”
“It was so sad to see men, women, old people and children hurrying away, carrying everything they could in handcarts or cloth bundles.. Suddenly we heard a lot of trucks coming into the village and the sound of shots being fired into the air. We could hear loudspeakers and we rushed to the village square to see what was going on. It was the Israelis and they were saying in Arabic, ‘Leave your homes and go to Gaza where you will be safe. If you don’t leave we will kill you.’ People started to panic. Nobody knew what to do…Then we heard the gunshots — the Israelis had killed two men from our village at point blank range. They were lying dead on the ground in a pool of blood and their women and children were hysterical. The villagers were herded into the Israeli trucks like cattle, the killings had made them silent and obedient, everyone was in a state of complete shock. We got in the trucks too. We didn’t have time to pack, all we had were the clothes we were wearing, and all around us was the sound of women wailing and the explosions of Israeli mortar fire.”
“Overall Palestinian casualties, complied by different sources, are estimated to have been 13,000; the Egyptians 1,400, and the Iraqis and Jordanians several hundred. Israeli fatalities were 4,000 soldiers and 2,400 civilians, around 1 per cent of the entire Jewish population.”
“The fate of the Palestinians in 1948 was a hotly disputed issue from the start, entangled in propaganda, polemics and white-hot anger. But the facts about the central event of the Nakba are less contested than ever, with figures ranging from 700,000 to 750,000 for the number of Palestinians who were expelled or fled.”
“The key decision, however, was and remains the Israeli government’s flat refusal to allow the refugees to return to their homes and land. That was the defining characteristic of the 1948 war and its aftermath.
By July 1949, when Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, it controlled 78 per cent of Mandatory Palestine — a considerable improvement on the 55 per cent it had been allocated by the UN twenty months previously. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem with its Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy places, was occupied by Jordan. The ceasefire line, marked in green ink on UN maps, became known as the ‘green line’. The Gaza Strip was administered by Egypt. Palestinian political divisions and social and military weakness, at this desperately low point, were exacerbated by the increasingly open rivalry between these two Arab states: King Farouk backed the short-lived All-Palestine government run by the mufti in Gaza, while King Abdullah convened the Jericho Congress to call for the unification of the West and East banks of the Jordan. The map of the Middle East had changed. Israel was a reality. Arab Palestine was no more.”
“In the course of twenty months about half the pre-war Arab population had fled or been driven out; 350–400 villages had been depopulated, and many destroyed or settled by Jewish immigrants. In places, families were divided by the armistice lines, which left a minority of 156,000 Palestinians in the new Jewish state, 15 per cent of its population. Of these, 75,000 people were categorized as internal refugees, or, in the bizarre terminology that began to be used, ‘present absentees’ who had lost homes and land.”
“In September Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund was appointed to chair a ‘transfer committee’. Weitz, anxious to block refugee returns, had lobbied the Haganah to evict Arab farmers in the Beisan area and near Haifa, and had pressed for the destruction of abandoned villages unless they could be used for Jewish settlement. A second committee concluded that the refugees were responsible for their own flight and must not be allowed back, and drew up plans to resettle them in Arab countries. The official Israeli narrative about the causes of the Palestinian exodus took hold quickly and was reflected by influential foreign journalists such as Kenneth Bilby of the New York Times.”
“In the years to come the Hebrew word mistanenim (‘infiltrators”) was used to describe Palestinians who were now seen as an external threat and subsumed under the general category of unrelenting, undifferentiated Arab enmity. This perception was especially true of the large number of Jewish immigrants who arrived after the war. These newcomers were
unfamiliar with pre-state realities and regarded Arabs as an evil presence lurking beyond the armistice lines, eager to undermine the new life they had laboriously begun to build. They did not see a struggle between two peoples, Jews and Arabs, for the same turf; they saw an Arab-Israeli conflict, a clash between Israel and the Arab states.”
“In all about 20,000 people were able to get home, particularly to Galilee, but many more failed. Several thousand Palestinians lost their lives in the attempt.”
The 50s and 60s
“Israel’s declaration of independence hailed the rebirth of the Jewish people in its ancient homeland, and promised equality for all citizens. But the state had been born in war and moulded by Arab hostility throughout the Mandate era. Security was the main prism through which the government viewed the Arab minority. Jewish immigration and economic development were its most urgent priorities. Building this new nation meant primarily the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ (kibbutz galuyot) in fulfilment of Zionist ideology. British restrictions on immigration had been lifted immediately. In July 1950 the Law of Return, a key piece of legislation, granted Jews the world over the automatic right to live in Israel, privileging their rights over native non-Jews. With the gates now wide open, the Jewish population rapidly swelled to 1.5 million by 1951, most of the first newcomers arriving from Arab countries such as Iraq and Yemen, where animosity towards Jews and levels of persecution had grown because of the Palestine disaster. The absorption of Holocaust survivors and the memory of the recent war, with over 6,000 Israeli dead and thousands injured, served as an unshakeable justification for Israel’s independence and the priority and privileges given to Jews.”
“Overall, Israeli government policy towards non-Jews operated on the time-honoured colonial principle of dividing and ruling, seeking out minorities within the minority. The country’s 20,000-strong Druze community, whose leaders had been cultivated by the Jews since the 1930s, was accorded a special status, having reached a nonbelligerency agreement in Galilee in April 1948. Circassians (the descendants of Muslim immigrants expelled from the Caucasus in the nineteenth century) and Bedouin in the south also got preferential treatment. In January 1949 the IDE created a “minorities unit’ comprising 400 Druze, 200 Bedouin, and 100 Circassians, commanded by Jewish officers, and deployed it to ambush Palestinians trying to cross the armistice lines. Druze later became subject, like Jews, to compulsory conscription, gaining a reputation for cruel behaviour in the war on infiltration. Their role was described by one Israeli official as a ‘sharp knife in the back.’”
“Sheikhs, religious judges or other notables, were granted privileges and special dispensations that strengthened traditional social relations and made co-optation a convenient, inexpensive and effective technique of gaining access to the Arab population’. Collaborators were key to the control of Arab areas, and some were long-standing acquaintances of the Israeli security officials. Collaboration brought benefits and favours — work and travel permits, firearms licences, an official blind eye to criminality, financial reward and, at the higher level, even political office. Arabs in Jish, in Galilee, were not allowed to use the nearest telephone, in Safsufa less than a mile away, without written permission from the military government — whose representatives came to the village twice a week to answer petitions. In order to get business permits, or in the beginning, to get travel permits week after week, you had to provide something in return, explained a man from Kufr Qara.
You had to give them information, to collaborate … They wanted to know who in the village still had guns and ammunition, who was politically active in a nationalist movement, who was talking against the Jews. Also, they had a problem with infiltrators coming across the Jordanian border into Israel.”
“The ‘second round’ that Arabs and Israelis had expected since 1948 sent shockwaves across the Middle East and the world, spelling an end, in time, to Britain’s presence in the region. The Suez war also had an impact closer to home. On the eve of hostilities, on 29 October 1956, the Israeli authorities imposed a 5 p.m. curfew on villages near the border with Jordan. In Kafr Qassem border guards shot and killed forty-nine unarmed Arab citizens, including women and children, who were returning from their fields and had breached the curfew because they were unaware of when it came into effect. Eyewitnesses described police repeatedly firing rifles and machine-guns at villagers as they arrived back at the village on foot, on bicycles, by donkey or on trucks. The victims were buried that night in a mass grave. The aftermath saw the unit’s commander and seven other soldiers sentenced to prison terms of between eight and seventeen years; damages paid to the families of the dead and injured; and a new IDF rule obliging soldiers to refuse to carry out any order they deemed to be ‘manifestly illegal.’”
“By the end of the fighting the separate parts of Mandatory Palestine had been reunited; the Jordanians and Egyptians had gone, replaced by Israeli military governors. The conquest of Sinai and the Golan added to the feeling that little Israel had acquired an empire. Emotions ran highest over East Jerusalem, with its Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy places, which had been inaccessible to Israelis since the fighting ended in 1948. The IF central front commander, General Uzi Narkis, talked of ‘erasing the stain’ of its loss in the war of independence. ‘Each of us knew in his heart that once we took the Old City we could never give it up’, Teddy Kollek, the Israeli mayor of West Jerusalem, wrote later. New facts were quickly created on the ground. On the evening of 10 June the 650 Palestinian residents of the Maghariba (Moroccan) quarter, extending right up to the Western Wall, were given two hours to evacuate their homes, which were dynamited and bulldozed into rubble, along with two twelfth-century mosques, to make room for a featureless plaza that was intended to accommodate future crowds of Jewish worshippers. ‘My overpowering feeling was: do it now,’ as Kollek put it. ‘It may be impossible to do it later, and it must be done.’ Kollek called the buildings ‘hovelslums.’ But the pro-Palestinian camp lamented the loss of ‘a pleasant and architecturally distinctive quarter of freshly whitewashed roof terraces, gardens and neat unattached houses built in North African style.’ David Ben-Gurion, still serving as an MP with the centost Raft faction, along with Dayan and an ambitious younger colleague named Shimon Peres, also proposed tearing down the sixteenth-century Ottoman walls surrounding the Old City. On that point wiser counsels prevailed. Ben-Gurion demanded that the street sign ‘Wailing Wall Road’ in English and Arabic be taken down. And Rabbi Goren, it emerged later, had proposed blowing up the Dome of the Rock. On 14 June, when public access was allowed, vast crowds of Israelis streamed into the Old City, marvelling at its sights and significance while Palestinian residents watched silently from their windows.
On 27 June the government voted to unite the western and eastern sides of Jerusalem, more than doubling municipal jurisdiction to include the newer Arab suburbs as well as 12 villages, incorporating 69,000 Palestinians and extending nearly to Ramallah in the north and Bethlehem in the south. The next day the Knesset passed the decision into law. Engineers and demolition crews were sent out to remove the barbed wire, anti-sniper walls and the debris of two wars. The famous Mandelbaum Gate checkpoint was dismantled. The Israeli move, condemned by Palestinians as well as internationally, was officially described as ‘integration’ or “‘municipal fusion’ rather than annexation, for fear of adverse reactions and pressure to withdraw. Israeli embassies abroad were instructed to use the same terminology. Separate roads, water mains, telephone and electricity networks were reconnected but the mood was anything but mundane. ‘Jerusalem is beyond time, it belongs to the scriptures — that is to eternity’, Eshkol’s adviser, Yaakov Herzog, explained. ‘We must prevent history and geography from re-dividing it like another Berlin.’”
The 70s
“Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza depended on more than just security measures and repression. Within months of the war’s end Palestinians began to cross the green line to work in Israel, where the economy was expanding. Palestinian unemployment had been severe before 1967 and was aggravated by the war, but it gradually declined in its aftermath. Initially, West Bankers travelled to farms or building sites near the green line, especially in Jerusalem, to be recruited by intermediaries and labour contractors — many of them Arab Israeli citizens who were well-placed to take advantage of a fresh supply of cheap labour. By the end of 1968 5,000 people were working in Israel, so the following year the government set up labour exchanges in the main towns. This enabled workers to obtain benefits such as holidays and health insurance, though the majority probably continued to work unofficially — to avoid paying taxes and social security contributions. Palestinians were in any case defined as day labourers, which meant they did not qualify for the same level of benefits as Israelis; nor were they permitted to join the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation. Israelis also earned six times more than West Bankers, and eight times more than Gaza’s inhabitants. Workers were banned from staying in Israel between midnight and 6 a.m. By 1974 the number of Palestinians working in Israel had reached 68,000. Two Palestinian families in five were sending one of their members to work in Israel. Most commuted daily, but a tendency grew, especially among Gazans who lived further away, to risk arrest and stay, illegally, overnight in their workplaces or makeshift quarters. For the first time since 1948 Palestinians again became a familiar part of the Israeli landscape, replacing Jewish workers in agriculture, construction work, restaurant kitchens and other menial jobs. ‘Arab work’ acquired a negative connotation of being cheap and shoddy. The massive influx of workers into Israel and the virtual elimination of unemployment boosted growth in the West Bank by nearly 60 percent by 1973. The exception was in East Jerusalem, where Israel’s annex- ation and the abolition of its separate administrative status was a blow for Palestinian doctors, lawyers, civil servants and the tourist industry because of direct competition from Jews. Between 1968 and 1972 GNP rose annually by 16 per cent in the West Bank and 20 per cent in Gaza. Private consumption also increased rapidly.
Exposure to Israel’s economy and society — not just to the relatively small numbers of soldiers and officials who maintained the apparatus of occupation — was highly unsettling. With the ‘June war’, observed Aziz Shehadeh in Ramallah, ‘all previous modes of life were shattered. The whole social structure was challenged. All previous values and convictions were put to the test Everyone could see the progress the Jews had been able to make. The organisation of … society … values … ideals were all upset.’ For a visiting American-Palestinian expert, the Israelis brought a ‘western-style bureaucratic and legal system, rationalized by an ideology of the rule of law. The indigenous Palestinian society, on the other hand, was organized on a kin and highly personalized basis. The growing numbers of Palestinians working in Israel were sharply aware of the differences between the two sides of an increasingly porous green line. Labourers from villages or refugee camps left a house in the morning that had no electricity, running water, or sewage, and worked all day in an environment where these utilities were taken for granted’, commented one analyst.”
“Naji al-Ali, a refugee from al-Shajara in Galilee who had fled to Lebanon as a child in 1948, made a lasting contribution to humanizing his much-misunderstood people: Handala (a bitter, wild gourd in Arabic), the barefoot, spiky-haired but faceless cartoon character he drew for a Kuwaiti newspaper, came to symbolize Palestinian suffering and patience. “Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old’, al-Ali explained. ‘At that age, I left my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him. He is unique. Things will become normal again when the homeland returns.”
“Sharon looked at the big picture between the Mediterranean and the Jordan: his strategy was to build a bloc of Jewish settlements to break up the contiguity of the Arab population on both sides of the 1967 border, simply ignoring the green line. New highways would link Samaria to the coastal plain in the west and the Jordan Valley in the east. Military logic was at work too, as it had been when Jewish outposts were established in Mandatory times. ‘Individual settlements were located on strategic summits, thereby allowing them to function as observation points: maintaining visual connection with each other and overlooking their surroundings, main traffic arteries, strategic road junctions and Palestinian cities, towns and villages.’ Tents, caravans and prefabricated homes on West Bank hilltops replaced tanks as the basic battlefield unit. ‘Homes, like armoured divisions, were deployed in formation across a theatre of operations to occupy hills, to encircle an enemy or to cut its communication lines. For Sharon the key was the motivation to defend a place. ‘The fact that you are present, that you know every hill, every mountain, every valley, every spring, every cave; the curiosity to know what is on the other side of the hill — that’s security,’ he explained. But all this required more than small numbers of Gush Emunim activists equipped with religious fervour and a few caravans. It needed ordinary Israelis taking a practical view of how to improve their standard of living, given the opportunity of moving into a house rather than a cramped apartment, benefitting from tax exemptions, cheap mortgages and other incentives. Families could move to the West Bank and enhance their quality of life and still be in short commuting distance from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem or “five minutes from Kfar Saba’ as the cheery advertising slogan went, emphasizing ease of access and comforting familiarity. The old green line was becoming a thing of the past.”
The 80s and 90s
“By the mid-1980s an estimated 250,000 Palestinians had experienced detention or interrogation — a staggering 10 percent of the entire population of the occupied territories. Ali, from Jenin, described what happened when his thirteen-year-old son was gaoled for the first time:
Someone from his class threw a stone at a passing Israeli car, so troops came, gathered together a group of ten-year-olds, and asked them to state the names of their friends. My son’s name was on the “list’. His second arrest came four years later … he was elected by the prisoners to be head of the committee that distributed meals and cigarettes. Imagine it! My son, in charge of 25 people. One of them was president of the teachers’ union; another was an employee at Birzeit university … When he came out he was more calm, more deep in thought. He had lost some of his bad habits. He used to be careless. Now he is responsible. He came out more active than before. He became politicised.
Every day courts sentenced Palestinian youths for stone-throwing, tyre-burning, demonstrating and raising PLO flags. They spent weeks or months in custody before they were picked up again, often guilty of nothing more than being identified as a ‘troublemaker.’ Many young ‘graduates’ of the notorious Faraa detention centre near Tubas, proud of having spent time there, went on later to serve spells in detention on the basis of secret Shin Bet evidence.”
“The impact of Har Homa was unusually powerful. Settlement activities generally attracted less attention than headline-grabbing attacks or carefully spun diplomatic manoeuvres. Israel’s settlement project was by its nature slow-moving, a process rather than single events, and was obscured by complexity, bureaucracy and subterfuge. Palestinians were, however, intensely aware of it. Arabic media monitored the construction of roads, land seizures and the number of homes being built — issues that were largely taken for granted in Israel. The cumulative effect was shocking. ‘Israeli leaders’ tearful declarations about peace didn’t tally with what they were doing with their bulldozers’, wrote Sari Nusseibeh.
By focusing on the details — a demolition order here, a new bypass road there, on thousands of new housing units on a hillside — it’s easy to lose sight of the systematic nature of the expansion. Years that were supposed to build trust between the feuding parties saw a doubling of the settlement population, from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand: hardly what we had in mind when we danced on the streets after Oslo. That settlers got away scot-free with murder and other depredations quite literally added insult to injury.”
“Each side experienced the war very differently. Only small numbers of Palestinians were actively involved, unlike in the first intifada. But weapons, many held by PA forces under the Oslo arrangements, were used on a far larger scale. And many more non-combatants faced prolonged curfews and closures which disrupted normal life and caused severe hardship, especially in areas close to Israeli settlements and army positions. Of all ‘Israel’s measures, none was so frustrating and wearing as the checkpoints and blocked roads that turned forty-minute journeys into agonizing odysseys by taxi, foot and even donkey, accompanied by frayed nerves and edgy soldiers. Palestinians needed special permits to use some 450 miles of West Bank roads. Others were completely prohibited. ‘Checkpoints did not stop suicide bombings but they did close down lives’, noted a foreigner who commuted between Jerusalem and the West Bank, braced for random car searches. The worst soldiers to deal with are the new immigrants — Russians, Ethiopians, complained Dr Samir Khalil, a Ramallah neurologist queuing to cross the teeming Qalandiya checkpoint to reach an East Jerusalem hospital. ‘Can you imagine someone who has been in this country for one year, telling me I don’t have the proper papers to get to work?’ Boredom was as much a hazard as danger. Trying to maintain everyday routines and simply ‘getting by’ in the face of insurmountable obstacles and time-wasting bureaucracy was an expression of sumoud (steadfastness). Conditions in Gaza were especially harsh, with unemployment at nearly 50 per cent and thousands surviving only with food aid from UNRWA. Offshore fishing was banned for long periods, and orchards were uprooted and houses bulldozed when the Israelis said they were being used for cover by gunmen. There was international criticism and debate in Israel over the demolition of buildings in the Rafa refugee camp following one attack. Israel also withheld tax revenues due to the PA — a pressure tactic that was used many times.”
The 2000s
“Something was changing: in June 2002 the cabinet voted to begin constructing a new ‘separation fence’. Polling showed massive popular support. It was in fact part fence and part concrete wall up to twenty-four feet high, and comprised barbed wire, sensors, cameras and watchtowers. Initially it was planned to run for seventy miles, on or close to the green line, but it also cut eastward beyond it to take in Jewish settlements. The first section was completed by summer 2003 and was presented by the government as an anti-terrorist measure without political implications, though it was an obvious example of creating facts on the ground.
Palestinians protested from the start, dubbing it the ‘apartheid wall’ — part of an increasingly frequent comparison being made between Israel and white-ruled South Africa, including by a former Israeli attorney-general, Michael
Ben-Yair. If it was only about security, they argued, it would have followed the green line, which was why some called it the ‘annexation wall.’ In fact, according to the UN, only 15 percent of the wall followed the green line, while the remaining 85 per cent cut up to eleven miles into the West Bank, leaving some 25,000 Palestinians isolated from the rest of the territory. It cut off Palestinians from land and jobs, creating severe practical and financial hardships, while Jewish settlers enjoyed unimpeded access on dedicated bypass roads that were closed to their neighbours. ‘This stupid wall has nothing to do with Israel’s security,’ protested a Ramallah resident. It does not separate Israel from Palestine, it separates Palestinians from Palestine. The economist Leila Farsakh described a process of ‘Bantustanization’ by which the occupied territories had been transformed into a population reserve serving the Israeli economy but unable to access it or evolve into a sovereign independent entity. Between 2001 and 2002 the Palestinian economy shrunk by 40 percent, as measured by GDP per capita.
Preventing suicide bombings trumped all other arguments. “Nearly all Israelis like the promise of this fence,’ noted a Jewish activist who did not. ‘They have, and seek, no idea of its human cost and no understanding of its deeper purpose. They also probably have no particular compunction about taking a little more land. Voices on the left and centre protested at the government’s lack of vision but there was still massive public support for an effective security response, however narrow that was.”
“Tension mounted in the run-up to the evacuation, which began in mid-August 2005. Many of the Gaza settlers, wearing orange clothes (inspired by the recent revolution in Ukraine) to express their opposition, left peacefully, though some had to be forcibly removed by the IDF in an operation that was cosily named Yad leAchim (Helping Hand). Orthodox protesters at eve Dekalim, the largest settlement, struggled as troops dragged them on to buses. At Kfar Darom residents barricaded themselves in the synagogue. Paint was thrown at troops and police and some evacuees coached their children to leave their homes with their hands up, or wearing a yellow star to evoke Nazi persecution.
Palestinians celebrated as the operation got under way, Israeli troops firing shots into the air, to halt a march towards Gush Katif. The crowd burned a cardboard model of a settlement complete with an army watchtower. In Gaza City Hamas activists hung out banners proclaiming: ‘The blood of the martyrs has led to liberation.’ In the following days Israeli demolition crews razed 2,800 settler homes. The bodies in the Gush Katif cemetery were reburied inside Israel. Near Khan Yunis an abandoned synagogue was set on fire. The IDF completed its withdrawal a few days behind schedule in mid-September. It was billed as the end of an occupation that had lasted for thirty-eight years. Yet it did not end Gaza’s embodiment, in the words of the Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, of ‘the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict … the central contradiction of the State of Israel — democracy for some, dispossession for others … our exposed nerve.’ Israel retained full control of Gaza’s borders — apart from the short southern stretch with Egypt airspace and territorial waters. In international legal terms, it was still considered the occupying power.”
“Economic conditions were worsened by Israeli restrictions on movement caused by the separation barrier, the settlements and the network of Jewish-only roads that supported them and by more than seven hundred checkpoints that frequently operated in an arbitrary manner. All constituted collective punishment in violation of international humanitarian law, human rights watchdogs complained. Israel’s fragmentation of the Pa estinian territories into disconnected parcels of land had severe practical and psychological consequences. In 2005 the West Bank was divided into ten segments (not including ‘closed areas’ in the “seam’ between the barrier and the green line). Passage through a checkpoint required a permit, and eligibility varied between locations. Different types of permit were issued for individuals, private vehicles, public vehicles and trucks. Blanket restrictions on movement were often imposed, preventing working-age men accessing employment. The segments were further divided into pockets between which movement was restricted by channelling access through choke points such as tunnels under ‘restricted’ roads used by settlers. Checkpoints like the ones at Hawara and Bayt Iba near Nablus resembled permanent border crossings with security procedures to control the flow of traffic: pedestrian and car lanes, bunkers, guard towers bristling with machine guns and shrouded with camouflage netting. In the words of the World Bank: ‘On any given day the ability to reach work, school, shopping, healthcare facilities and agricultural is highly uncertain.’”
“The 1.5 million people living in the coastal enclave had seen little benefit from the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers ten months earlier. On the eve of the disengagement, 65 percent of Gaza’s population lived under the poverty line, subsisting on less than $2 per day, while 35 percent of the workforce were unemployed. Ambitious plans by the World Bank and other international donors for industrial parks, export zones and desperately needed jobs had come to nothing. Israeli restrictions on the border crossings continued so that the number of Palestinian workers en- tering Israel dropped to one-third of the pre-disengagement average.”
“By September that year, the twentieth anniversary of Oslo, the number of Israelis living beyond the green line had more than doubled, from 262,500 to 520,000, including 200,000 in East Jerusalem, the latter (home to more than one-third of all settlers) ignored by government bodies on the grounds that it was not up for negotiation. The total was often cited as a damning verdict on the 1993 agreement and incontrovertible evidence that it could not lead to a resolution of the conflict. In 2013 Israel began work on 2,534 new homes in the West Bank, more than double the 1,133 built in 2012. In January Palestinian activists of the Popular Resistance Committee and international supporters set up a protest camp called Bab al-Shams (‘Gate of the Sun’), named after the novel by Elias Khoury, to lay claim to E1, mirroring the stealth and organization used by Israeli settlers. It was broken up by police after a few days.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century the Israeli presence in the West Bank was no longer marked by clusters of caravans or mobile homes on isolated hilltops, but by rapidly growing towns. The biggest, all close to the green line, were Maaleh Adumim, Beitar Illit and Modiin Illit, each with tens of thousands of residents, some living in tower blocks. The last two were largely Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) settlements, with high birth rates, ‘Sterile’ roads leading to them, bristling with surveillance cameras, bypassed Palestinian areas using bridges and tunnels and were barred to Palestinians. The route of the separation wall encompassed them all.”
“The reality of Israeli politics and life in the West Bank belied the notion that sufficient territory was likely to be surrendered for a future viable peace agreement. Facts on the ground had transformed the landscape of what remained of the 22 percent of Palestine outside the pre-1967 borders. The land occupied by the settlements proper — numbering some 230 by 2015 — was no more than 3 percent of the West Bank, though their areas of jurisdiction, along with the roads, tunnels and other infrastructure that supported them, took up far more. Overall, some 42 percent of West Bank land was in Israeli hands.”
“Israelis overwhelmingly supported the campaign - over 90 percent in one poll; only 4 percent believed excessive firepower had been used,” Controversy erupted over pictures of young Israelis in Sderot eating popcorn and cheering as bombs fell on nearby Gaza as if they were watching an action movie. Critical voices were muted, The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by B’Tselem against a decision not to approve a broadcast of the names of Palestinian children who had been killed during the operation. “Compassion for the other,” commented one left-wing activist, is seen as an act of treason. Journalists were abused simply for reporting the news. Anti-war protests were held in Nazareth and other Arab areas. Avigdor Lieberman called for a boycott of Arab businesses that went on strike in protest at the war, while Haneen Zoabi, the Arab MP, said that kidnappers of the Jewish teenagers were not ‘terrorists’ and described IF soldiers as ‘murderers.’”
“Shortly before the law was passed, in one poll, nearly 60 per cent of young Jews in their last two years at high school described themselves as right-wing, 23 per cent as centrists and 13 per cent as left-wing. But an overwhelming majority, 82 per cent, believed there was ‘no chance’ or barely a chance’ for a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Polling among Palestinians provided a mirror image of that pessimism, with two-thirds believing that the two-state solution was no longer practical due to Jewish settlement construction, and 62 per cent in favour of abandoning the Oslo principles.”
“Israeli-Arab citizens flatly rejected calls for the ‘transfer’ of border towns and villages to a future Palestinian state or demands for a loyalty oath’ to the Jewish state. The so-called ‘stand-tall’ generation was more confident than any since 1948. The country’s 1.6 million Arabs were poorer than Jewish citizens and faced discrimination in housing, land allocation, employment, education and services. But they lived much better lives than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza: fundamental freedoms, standards of living and job opportunities were all superior, especially for a young generation studying at Israeli universities in growing numbers — a phenomenon that drew fire from Jewish right-wingers. Still, in 2015 the government announced a five-year-development plan to narrow the gaps between the two communities. In 2016 Arabs made up 25 per cent of the first-year students at the Haifa Technion. The 2017 film In Between provided an intriguing glimpse into the experiences of Palestinian-Israeli women living in Tel Aviv and torn between the conservative values of their families and the liberal lifestyle of the Jewish city.
On the negative side, senior public-sector jobs remained largely closed to Arabs, with a few token exceptions such as a High Court judge — who famously refused to sing “Hatikuah’, Israel’s national anthem and expression of the Jewish soul’s yearning for Zion and a handful of diplomats. Druze, Bedouin and some Christians served in the IDF but the majority of other Arab citizens did not: a Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth who encouraged members of his community to do so was condemned by Arab MPs. In 2016 just 2 per cent of Israeli policemen were Muslims. Security considerations were invoked when the radical northern branch of the Islamic Movement was banned — against the advice of the Shin Bet — following an attempt to bar Haneen Zoabi of Balad from standing for the Knesset. When another Balad MP was accused of smuggling mobile phones into prisons to be used by Palestinian detainees, Lieberman denounced the Knesset bloc as a joint list of spies and traitors’ and vowed to eject them not just from parliament but from the country.
Brighter spots in Jewish-Arab relations included the growth of joint NGO coalitions — though mostly dealing with anti-Arab discrimination — and rising enrollment in a handful of bi-national schools where teaching was in Hebrew and Arabic, despite problems created by the education ministry and an arson attack on the Jerusalem branch of the pioneering network. The slogan posted outside the damaged building — ‘We refuse to be enemies’ — was defiant but optimistic. Right-wing plans to revoke the status of Arabic as an official language alongside
Hebrew were dropped, but road signage was still often inadequate or wrong. Arab citizens were usually bilingual while interest in Arabic among Jews remained limited, with 10 per cent saying they spoke or understood it well; but just 2.6 per cent able to read a newspaper and 1 per cent literature. The majority of young Israeli Jews who studied advanced Arabic did so in IDF intelligence under the rubric of knowing the enemy’.
Comedy was one exception to this indifference: the primetime TV series Avoda Aravit (Arab Labour, with its idiomatic Hebrew meaning of shoddy work) by the Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua introduced an Arab family to Jewish audiences for the first time. Kashua caused a stir in the tense summer of 2014 when the Gaza war was raging and he left his West Jerusalem home to move to the US, declaring: The lie I’d told my children about a future in which Arabs and Jews share the country equally was over. Kashua wrote in Hebrew, like the acclaimed novelist Anton Shammas, who had also emigrated in despair after the first intifada. Another exception was Arab food. Hummus and falafel had long been transformed into Israeli national dishes, generating Palestinian complaints about cultural and culinary appropriation: an ‘Arab salad’ of finely diced tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley, onions, lemon and olive oil, like an elegant Arab house, had an unequivocally positive ring to it. Outside Hadash and small leftist groups, joint Arab-Jewish political activity remained rare and relations between the communites a highly sensitive issue. Mixed marriages were still unusual Racist abuse of Arabs by Jews on Facebook and other social media, monitored by Palestinian groups, was casual and rife, rising during periods of tension. Arab MPs, along with Mahmoud Abbas and Arab soccer teams, were regularly targeted. Fans of the Beitar Jerusalem football club were notorious for their anti-Arab chants. In the dry late autumn of 2016, when severe forest fires ravaged Haifa and other areas, there were accusations that Arabs had launched an ‘arson intifada’ — though no one was charged for having done so.”
“The single most significant change over the years was the number of Israelis living beyond the green line — 630,000 by 2016, close to 10 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population, in some 230 settlements, whether ‘authorized’ by the government or not.”
“Campaigns to improve Palestinian self-reliance — including promoting organic baladi — food and handicrafts by grass-roots organization — seemed more effective than conventional political activity. These combined sumoud with non-violent resistance. Israel’s nervousness about the boycott movement and the official efforts it devoted to fighting it — gathering intelligence about supporters, banning their entry into the country and mounting organized ‘counter-delegitimization’ campaigns. — showed that it took this approach very seriously.”
“The one-state vision, however, was not accompanied by any coherent plan or time-frame. Critics on both sides found it wanting on both political and psychological grounds: in a single state Palestinians would have to live with a large Jewish population and accept the presence of Jewish settlements in the heart of densely populated Arab areas. Economic disparities between the two peoples were enormous: GDP per capita in Israel in 2015 was $37,700, in the West Bank $3,700 and in Gaza $1,700. Without a massive redistribution of wealth and resources, gaps on that scale would condemn Palestinians to be a permanent underclass.”
“The big question, posed succinctly by Nadia Hijab of the al-Shabaka policy network, was this: ‘If a sovereign Palestinian state in the occupied territory has not been possible, how can a democratic state of Israel/Palestine be achievable, one in which all citizens enjoy all human rights — individual and collective, political, social, and economic? Or, to take one or two crucial issues: how, in one state, would it be possible to reconcile Israel’s granting of automatic citizenship to Jews under the Law of Return with the Palestinian demand for the right of refugees to return to their former homes? And how would land, so central to the history of the conflict, be fairly distributed? Israeli Jews found it difficult enough to live with an Arab minority of 20 per cent, it was pointed out; how would they manage with 50 per cent, never mind more? Shaul Arieli of Commanders for Peace and Security warned that one state would mean ‘perpetual civil war, apartheid and socioeconomic implosion’. “Would Israeli Arabs be allowed to volunteer for the army?’ he asked plaintively. Would we let them have guns?””
