by Jeremy Bowen
The children were brought up to believe that they would return. In the fifties and sixties they went to summer camps together. They would travel to a spot overlooking the West Bank where they could see a tree that stood near their old home. When Israel captured the West Bank, their first thought was to go back. Victory had filled Hanan Porat and the others with religious zeal. They did not regard themselves as occupiers. The biblical heartland of the Jews was not Tel Aviv and the coast. It was the mountains of Judea and Samaria – in other words, the West Bank – and now, through God’s will, it was back in Jewish hands. The Arabs could stay if they lived by Jewish consent in a Jewish state, or they could get out.
Within Israel a noisy public debate started about the territories. Ten thousand Israelis signed a petition calling on the government to keep the land. A new political movement started to campaign for the annexation of the ‘liberated’ areas. Groups calling themselves ‘Action Staff for the Retention of the Territories’ and ‘Movement for the Annexation of the Liberated Territories’ called for ‘the immediate settlement of the entire West Bank’. Fifty-seven prominent Israelis, including reserve generals, rabbis, the Nobel laureate for literature S. Y. Agnon and well-known kibbutz leaders formed the ‘Movement for a Greater Israel’. They published a declaration on 22 September that stated that the victory had brought Israel into ‘a new and fateful era’. The land of Israel was ‘indivisible’ and no government had the right to divide it again.
The same day the advertisement appeared in the papers, Eshkol met Hanan Porat and the other would-be settlers. He told them that the future of the West Bank was not decided. But with instinctive sympathy for them, he promised to help. Two days later, on 24 September, Eshkol told the cabinet that the Etzion bloc would be resettled. Other settlements were to be set up at Kfar Banyas, east of the old frontier with Syria, and Beit Ha-Arava, at the northern end of the Dead Sea. All were classified as special cases because their roots went back before 1948. But the principle was established. Jews could live in the Occupied Territories.
The Americans and the British tried, half-heartedly, to dissuade the Israelis. They believed that Jewish settlement in the territories would put peace even further out of reach. In Washington the State Department said, ‘The plans for the establishment of permanent Israeli settlements would be inconsistent with the Israeli position as we understand it – that they regard occupied territories and all other issues arising out of the fighting in June to be matters for negotiation.’ The Americans sent their ambassador in Tel Aviv a quotation from a treatise on international law, stating that a military occupant has a duty to administer the country according to its existing laws and rules. But the State Department was not optimistic that it would have any effect on the Israelis. In London the Israeli ambassador explained the settlements were ‘only temporary military holding operations … to counter subversive activity without setting up a strong military regime, and simultaneously to hold internal pressure for the reoccupation of Israeli settlements destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948’.
At the foreign ministry in Jerusalem the veteran Israeli diplomat Arthur Lourie complained that Eshkol had agreed to the establishment of the settlements ‘without thinking’, and without consulting the cabinet, and as a result he had ‘pulled the rug out’ from under foreign minister Abba Eban at the UN in New York. The settlements, he said, meant there was less chance that the West Bank would be surrendered in peace talks. The emotional reaction to Eshkol’s decision in the press meant ‘this was just one more item which the Israel government could plead that it was unable to reverse without dire consequences to itself from the voting public’. Eban himself feared the ‘great gusts of theological emotion’ that were sweeping across Israel. A new religious dimension had appeared in what had been entirely secular calculations about the security of the state.
If, as Arthur Lourie said, Eshkol had not had to think too hard about allowing the first settlements in the West Bank, that was because the development felt entirely natural to the founding generation of Israelis. In mainstream Zionism, settlement was a sacred duty. As Yigal Allon put it, ‘The true frontier of the State of Israel moves and forms according to the movement and location of Jewish workers of the earth. Without Jewish settlement, defence of the country isn’t possible, even if we double the size of the army.’ Pushing out the frontier by settling Jews in Arab areas had been a fundamental and highly effective tool in the construction of the Jewish state. What started with a few toeholds in the dust and swamp of Palestine in the years before the First World War had, in a few generations, become an independent country and regional superpower, capable of beating all its enemies in less than a week. By 1967 the job of settling the land within the 1948 ceasefire lines was almost over. The organisations responsible for the process were running out of work. Now suddenly there was a vast new territory for them to get their teeth into. The only problem was that the Palestinians who lived there already thought it was theirs.
The new settlements were built by a branch of the army called Nahal, a Hebrew acronym for Fighting Pioneer Youth. Pushing out the frontier was their job. Since 1948 Nahal had created military outposts in the border lands, which were eventually turned over to civilians. Most of the settlements that have been built in the Occupied Territories since 1967 started out as Nahal outposts. Some Israelis saw the dangers ahead. Shlomo Gazit, the co-ordinator of government operations in the territories, whose own plan for a demilitarised Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza never took off, described the Nahal outposts as ‘inevitable time bombs because of the way they turned into permanent civilian settlements’. On 15 December 250 intellectuals placed a newspaper advertisement warning that ‘the Jewish features of the state as well as its humane and democratic character’ were in danger. In London The Times welcomed the advertisement as an ‘encouraging note of dissent’ against what was becoming a mainstream view that the territories, especially the West Bank, were Israel’s to keep.
On Israeli state radio, the newly Occupied Territories were included in the weather forecasts. Arabic place names were changed to Hebrew versions. Sharm al Sheikh, for example, was referred to as ‘Solomon’s Bay’. The right-winger Menachem Begin said it was unthinkable that any of ‘Eastern Israel’ – the West Bank – be returned to Jordan. By July 1967 Hebrew street signs were appearing in East Jerusalem. So were branches of Israeli banks and post offices. The tourist industry was getting excited about the money that could be made from the attractions they captured from Jordan. ‘If our dreams come true – Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho – they’ll all be terrific,’ one official told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, whose story was headlined ‘Israel Digs In, Victor in Mideast War Plainly Plans Long Stay in Captured Arab Lands’.
Journalists had started noticing what was happening. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote in the Washington Post on 22 October that ‘no matter what they say publicly, the Israelis are performing exactly as though they plan a permanent occupation of the historic lands west of the Jordan River’. In November 1967 Michael Wolfers of The Times toured the Occupied Territories and saw that Greater Israel was ‘fast becoming a reality … the statement “other places we can give back but this place never”, which I first heard in Jerusalem in June, is now being heard from Israelis standing on what less than six months ago the world regarded as Syrian and Jordanian soil’. Money was pouring into infrastructure investments, from the settlements themselves to new roads and phone lines. New bus shelters and traffic signs on the Golan seemed to be ‘a thorough bid to turn a Syrian landscape into the usual Israeli urban scene … [W]ith the speed and efficiency that the Israelis bring to this kind of pioneering it cannot be long before the Israeli occupation of the Golan becomes as difficult to unscramble as its hold on Jerusalem already is.’
The Washington Post visited the settlers in the Etzion bloc and concluded that it would ‘never peacefully return to Jordan’. It added that it will be a ‘near miracle if the Israeli government, w
hich has no clear idea of what West Bank settlement it really wants, can withstand domestic political pressures for many more Etzions’. Hanan Porat and the others Etzion returnees had sworn at the gravesides of the settlers who were killed in 1948 that they were going home, never to leave again. They returned in a convoy led by an armoured car that had evacuated them in 1948. Porat went on to become one of the leaders of the settler movement. The settlements have expanded enormously: more than 400,000 Israelis now live on land occupied in 1967. They are heavily defended, at great cost, and are the focus for violent Palestinian action against the occupation.
Successive Israeli governments have not accepted that they are occupiers at all. They say that the West Bank and Gaza were not part of any sovereign state before 1967. The territories, therefore, are administered, not occupied. Israel’s interpretation is not accepted by the UN Security Council, the International Red Cross and most of the rest of the world. But Israel defends its position fiercely because if the territories are legally classified as occupied land, its settlement activities since the end of the Six-Day War amount to multiple, serial violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is one of the main planks of international humanitarian law, which forbids the colonisation of occupied territory. Israel argues the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to its activities in its ‘administered’ territories, though it says it applies the ‘humanitarian’ provisions of the Convention, without saying which ones it means. Even so, Israel has violated other aspects of international law during the years of occupation, by torturing suspected terrorists, demolishing houses, jailing suspects without trial and deporting people it says are dangers to the Jewish state. Sooner or later serious peace talks will start again. They will fail if they cannot find a fair way of fixing the mess the 1967 war left behind.
Refugees
Refugees continued to pour out of the West Bank into Jordan after the war ended. Finding justice for the refugees was – and is – at the centre of Middle East peacemaking. As early as the second day of the war, Walt Rostow, the White House National Security Advisor, said that a definitive Middle East peace settlement depended on ‘a broad and imaginative movement by Israel on the question of refugees’. In his speech on 19 June President Johnson said ‘there will be no peace for any party in the Middle East unless this problem is attacked with new energy by all, and, certainly, primarily by those who are immediately concerned’. The same week, something similar came from Britain’s foreign secretary George Brown: ‘The hopes for any enduring settlement will depend to a large extent on Israel’s actions now. The generous and humane treatment of the Arab population in the occupied areas could contribute to a breaking down of the barriers of hatred and hopes of a reconciliation at some date, however remote.’
Moshe Dayan, by now seen as the authoritative voice on the Occupied Territories, told a news conference in Jerusalem on 25 June that the vast majority of the refugees would not be allowed back. They were the people who wanted to exterminate Israel only twenty days earlier, so it was what they deserved. Dayan brushed aside earlier government claims that the ‘extent of the movement was greatly exaggerated’ and accepted that 100,000 Palestinians had crossed to the East Bank. Even that was a major underestimate. The next day UNRWA put the figure at 413,000. Dayan was not sympathetic. He said most of the refugees were landless people from camps who had nothing to lose and would continue to get their UNRWA rations wherever they were, or otherwise they needed to go to Jordan to pick up the remittances they lived off from relations in other Arab states.
By the time Dayan made his views on the refugees clear, Israel was at the start of an organised process of encouraging Palestinians to leave the West Bank that went on for the rest of the year and into 1968. The first wave of refugees, who had left home in a panic because of the war and the new occupation, stopped crossing by around 15 June. For almost a week, that seemed to be that. Then, from 20 June, a second wave started arriving on the East Bank. They were transported from Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jenin and Qalqilya to the river Jordan by the Israeli army in trucks and buses. Israel did not repeat the forcible evictions that happened in Qalqilya, Tulkarem, the Latrun villages and in some of the villages around Hebron during the war. The second wave left ‘voluntarily’, taking up an offer that was usually broadcast from loudspeakers mounted on jeeps moving slowly up and down streets that had been emptied by curfews. In Bethlehem, for instance, Samir Elias Khouri says Israel ‘started asking people to leave about a week after the occupation started. They brought buses to Manger Square and many people went, especially if they had relatives in Jordan. My brother gave them his ID and left.’ They were given ‘every facility to leave … none to return home’. Israel also stopped the limited amount of two-way traffic that it had been allowing across the Jordan.
Israelis in favour of absorbing the West Bank realised it would be easier if there were fewer Palestinians. Eshkol’s advisers told him on 13 September that West Bank Palestinians would have to be encouraged to emigrate to have any chance of even keeping population growth to the pre-war rate of 1 per cent a year. Israelis feared the Palestinian birth rate. It was one area in which they could not overtake the Arabs. Some politicians in 1967, like Justice Minister Shapiro, warned that the Jewish nature of the state would be in danger if it tried to absorb an area populated by Arabs. If Israel did not give up territory, he warned, ‘the whole Zionist enterprise is over. We’ll be in a ghetto.’ Since Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002, fears about a Palestinian majority between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean have resurfaced. The latest predictions say it is around a generation away.
Israel denied vehemently that it was putting pressure on the Arab population to leave, an accusation that its minister in London described as ‘a colossal propaganda campaign of defamation’. Palestinians, though, were complaining that they were being made offers of ‘assisted emigration’ that came when they were so intimidated that they did not dare to refuse. Their accusations were corroborated by British diplomats. Ambassador Hadow in Tel Aviv, whose telegrams consistently gave Israel the benefit of the doubt or actively defended it against Arab accusations, told the Israeli foreign ministry that ‘if the Israeli Government went on like this even her friends would have to believe that she was trying to get rid of the Arab population on the West Bank in order to Israelise it’.
Dayan told journalists on 25 June that life was returning to normal on the West Bank, that curfews were being reduced, services were being reinstated and food and fuel supplies restored. But the same day ‘responsible witnesses’ reported to the British Embassy in Amman that Israeli searches, looting, ‘facilities to leave’ and other ‘selective’ pressures, particularly in the Old City of Jerusalem, were forcing out well-established middle-class Palestinians. Any hopes the Palestinians had of ‘a reasonable life there’ were being destroyed. By mid-June many Arabs were leaving Jerusalem every day from Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Old City from newly captured Jordanian Jerusalem. A British diplomat’s ‘houseboy’ was among them, because life in his home village of Issawiya, close to Mount Scopus, was difficult, ‘with Israelis shooting off guns in the middle of the night’, and also because he was worried that he would not be able to get his Jordanian army pension any more.
The way that the process worked was witnessed by Jesse Lewis, a reporter from the Washington Post. Just inside Damascus Gate, Israeli soldiers set up a table, taking names and giving numbers to people who wanted to go to Jordan. A queue had formed, which Lewis joined. When he said he lived in the Old City and wanted to get out, the soldiers gave him a refugee number too. Nearly half the refugees were children. Men were outnumbered by women, who were wearing traditional Palestinian embroidered dresses. Many of them were becoming refugees for the second time. In 1948 a woman called Rashidah Raghib Saadeddin had left her home in Lifta, a village at the western entrance to Jerusalem. (It still stands, as a ruin, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.) Now, with her frail and wrinkle
d mother and her fifteen-year-old son, she was moving again. She said the Israelis did not want them to live in peace. Another passenger, a man called Abdul Latif Husseini, had come to Jerusalem from Jaffa, which had been the main Palestinian town on the coast, in 1948, when he was eleven. He had planned to get married at the end of June. But the bank where he worked had closed, the house he had rented had been damaged and nearly $1000 worth of furnishings had been stolen or ruined by looters. He told Lewis, ‘I can forget you slapping my face but I will pass this on to my children.’
Just after half-past two in the afternoon trucks and four buses pulled up in front of Damascus Gate. The adults scrambled for places. Babies were passed up afterwards like ‘sacks of rice or sand’. Lewis found a space in the back of one of the trucks. ‘As the convoy left Jerusalem, no one in the truck had much to say except the babies, who were crying. It was after 3 o’clock and there were no Arabs on the street and there wouldn’t be until 9 the next morning when the 18-hour curfew ended.’ When the Israeli soldiers who were driving the buses and trucks missed the turning to Jericho and went on towards the Dead Sea, one of the women said, ‘See, this is not the way. They are going to kill us.’ But, eventually, they made it to the Allenby bridge, which formed a ‘grotesque V in the middle of the river’, broken-backed since it was blown up by retreating Jordanian troops. ‘The incline of the bridge was so steep that improvised ladders had been placed along its slanting floor and a rope was strung taut to prevent refugees from falling.’
