by Jeremy Bowen
UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, faced its biggest ever challenge. Before the war it already had 332,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war on its books in Jordan. By mid-June they had been joined by 140,000 more refugees from UNRWA camps in the West Bank and 33,000 from camps in Gaza. In addition, there were 240,000 more displaced Palestinians who had never been refugees before. Suddenly Jordan, a country with almost no natural resources, was dealing with 745,000 refugees.
Levi Eshkol, echoing Dayan’s 25 June assertions, told the International Committee of the Red Cross that the refugees left the West Bank ‘deliberately and of their own free will, long after the fighting had stopped. As a rule, it was because of family links or to pick up an official salary or pension, or remittances sent from people who had left to work in the Arab countries that produced oil.’ The truth was much more complicated. Some refugees, like the British diplomat’s houseboy, were worried about their pensions. But most of the 240,000 ‘new refugees’ were peasant farmers and their families from the West Bank. They came from tightly knit traditional communities, which had barely changed in hundreds of years. A survey of 122 families from 45 different villages in the West Bank was carried out by researchers from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in September 1967. It found that a large proportion of them had lived in their home villages all their lives. Four-fifths of them had owned good plots of land, of more than two and a half acres. In other words, they had every reason to stay. Sitting stunned by what had happened to them eight to ten weeks after the event, they showed deep attachment to the people, homes and land they had been forced to leave behind.
Most of them left because they were terrified – 57 per cent said because of air attacks. Around half of them left because of the direct actions of Israeli troops, including ‘the eviction of civilians from their homes, looting, the destruction of houses, the rounding up and detention of male civilians, the deliberate shaming of older persons and of women and the shooting of persons suspected of being soldiers or guerrilla fighters’. Shaming was especially important. Palestinian society in the 1960s, in the towns as well as the country, was deeply traditional. Honour, dignity and pride were valued above all else. The obligation to protect and uphold the honour of the family, especially of the women, was paramount. Nineteen years after the massacre at Deir Yassin, it was still mentioned by some families as an example of what Israelis were capable of doing. But simply being refugees fed their feelings of humiliation. The AUB researchers found that ‘they cannot live with the idea that they have lost their country, honour, pride and still not being able to do anything about it … this is their greatest source of aggression against themselves, their leaders, Israel and the great powers.’ Children who were born during the exodus or in the camp were given names like Jihad (struggle), Harb (war) and A’ida (one who will return).
Nils-Goran Gussing, the special representative of the UN secretary general, investigated why people had fled the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. The CIA described his report as ‘the most authoritative available’. Before 5 June some 115,000 Syrians lived on the Golan Heights. A week later only around 6000 were left. Gussing investigated Syrian claims that Israel had made ‘systematic efforts to expel the entire original population’. The report concluded that, whatever the policy of the government on the matter, ‘certain actions authorised or allowed by local military commanders were an important cause of flight’. In a dusty refugee camp outside Damascus thirty years later, where refugees from the Heights still live, village headmen told me they were evicted at gunpoint from homes that were then destroyed. On the West Bank, Gussing found there had been acts of intimidation by the Israeli army and that Israel had made attempts, using loudspeakers, to suggest to the local population that ‘they might be better off on the East Bank’. The report’s conclusion was that the main reasons why Palestinians left were the impact of war and occupation, particularly because the Israelis made no effort to reassure local Palestinians.
Many young men in Gaza had no choice in the matter. They were rounded up and bussed out to Egypt. By late June they were crossing the Suez canal at the rate of 1000 a day. A group of students from Gaza City, who were being taken across the canal in a fleet of small boats, told a British reporter that they had been ‘taken forcibly from their families and driven by truck to a collection point near Beersheba’. Many complained they had been beaten up and robbed by the Israeli soldiers and that they were not given any water on the journey across the desert. The flow out of Gaza continued. The CIA pointed out that ‘Israel would like to retain Gaza, if the bulk of its Arab population went elsewhere’. In October around 500 new refugees were crossing into Jordan every day. Many of them came from Gaza.
The news that Jews were moving into the West Bank plunged refugees into even deeper gloom. They had been hoping that international pressure would force Israel to allow them back. The return of settlers to the Etzion bloc near Bethlehem took those hopes away. Some of the bitterness and anger that was brewing was taken out in nasty incidents in the camps.
Since there were no legitimate ways of crossing the Jordan into the West Bank, many people tried to use clandestine methods. By September 1967 the Mayor of Jericho claimed that 100 people from his area had been shot trying to cross the Jordan illegally. In a single incident on 6 September fifty civilians tried to cross the river near Damia. Eight were shot dead and the rest sent back to the East Bank except for one man who hid and later made it to Jerusalem. It was difficult, though, accurately to assess the numbers killed, because the Israeli soldiers had a tendency to bury the people they had shot without informing their relatives or even finding out who they had killed.
Despite Dayan’s insistence in June that most of the refugees would not be allowed back, the Israeli government raised expectations that it might change its mind when, in August, it agreed to a scheme supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross. After difficult negotiations – one problem was Jordan’s objection to the form Israel provided for the refugees to fill in, because it was headed ‘Government of Israel’ – 167,500 refugees applied from 9 to 17 August.
Then Israel announced the scheme would end on 31 August. When the ICRC representative protested that it would be impossible to get 100,000 refugees across the bridge by the end of the month, his Israeli interlocutor’s only comment was that the word ‘impossible’ did not exist in the Hebrew language. On 30 August the ICRC in Geneva sent an urgent telegram to Eshkol, asking him to extend the deadline ‘to permit continuation of return operations and to avoid creating undue hardships and discrimination among returnees’. Eshkol ignored the ICRC’s appeal. He did not reply to it for nearly two months. Israel gave permission to only 5102 to cross. By the time it reached its own 31 August deadline, it had not processed thousands of the forms it had issued through the ICRC. No permission was given to anyone from refugee camps on the West Bank, or from Jerusalem or Bethlehem. At 10 Downing Street, the British foreign secretary reported to the cabinet that Israel’s rejection of applications from people displaced from those areas ‘may signify that they are thinking in terms of a long stay on the West Bank and wish to limit their own refugee commitment there’. In the end only 3824 of those 5102 returned in the time allotted, mainly because of extra restrictions imposed by the Israelis. In some cases families were not allowed to bring back their older children, so they stayed put. No one was allowed to come back with a car. No livestock were allowed back, which ruled out shepherds and small farmers who had driven their flocks into Jordan. In Amman the British ambassador thought Israel’s performance had been ‘half-hearted and dilatory’.
Once the deadline had passed, the facts were clear. Israel had blocked some 150,000 Palestinians who had wanted to return home. A campaign in the Israeli press said it was all because King Hussein was out to exploit the refugees for ‘political ends’. It was dismissed as ‘irrelevant … argument about petty details’ by Michael Hadow, who had defended Israel’s insistenc
e on controlling the rate of return of the refugees for security reasons. If Israel, he said, was worried about letting Hussein score political points because of the suffering of displaced Palestinian civilians then there was an obvious answer – offer to take back all the refugees so the king would have none left to exploit. But the refugee crisis was useful for Israel. It kept Hussein off-balance. Israel put even more pressure on the Jordanians and the international agencies that were struggling to cope with the refugees by denying a right of return to the big, well-equipped refugee camps that were lying empty in Jericho. The Palestinians who had lived in them since 1948 had left at the height of the fighting. Most of them were living in desperate conditions a few miles away on the other side of the river Jordan. New camps had to be built, at huge expense.
By the end of the year the outlook was bleak for the refugees. Violent resistance to the occupation had started, making it even less likely that Israel would take them back. None of the 150,000 refugees who were turned down by Israel after they filled in an International Red Cross repatriation form had been allowed home. Around forty people were allowed back under Israel’s own scheme for family reunification. And it seemed to be getting worse. British diplomats in Jerusalem believed Israel was using security as an excuse to force more Palestinians out, reporting ‘increasing evidence of Israeli efforts to swell the numbers of refugees on the East Bank by wholesale evictions of people on the ground that they had been involved in sabotage – for example the eviction of 195 members of the Arab al Nasariah tribe in the Arja area on 6 December’.
Israel seized on statements on Radio Amman that returning refugees would join the struggle against occupation. The Israeli ambassador in London explained that his government ‘did not want to find itself forced into a campaign of repression to deal with the attempts of a deliberately introduced fifth column to disturb the peace on the West Bank’. Israel would suffer a damaging loss of face among the local Arab population if it admitted ‘a disruptive element which would disturb the present tranquillity of life’.
But life was not tranquil.
Violence
The occupation generated bloodshed from the outset. Israel used violence to maintain and deepen its occupation. Palestinians soon realised that if they wanted to resist the occupation, they would have to do it for themselves. Arab governments were not going help them. Armed groups and political movements stopped looking to Nasser or to Ba’thism. Instead, they developed a distinctly Palestinian identity. Moshe Dayan, in keeping with his view that the Israelis and Palestinians were in a perpetual war, saw what was coming. He predicted to foreign minister Abba Eban that the Palestinians would use terrorism to fight Israeli rule. When Eban asked him how he knew, he said, ‘because that is exactly what I would do if I were in their place’.
The occupation’s capacity to create violence was there for everyone who chose to see it. An editorial in the Washington Post on 22 October 1967 said it was a ‘bitter pill’ for Israel to swallow to ‘to have taken territory to assure security, and then to learn that the security menace has merely been shifted from outside to inside one’s borders … [N]o more than any other nation which harbors an alien people and denies them the right of self-determination, Israel cannot expect to avoid the embarrassment and harassment of local Arab resistance.’
There were forty-eight attacks that were considered to be serious terrorist incidents from July to the end of the year along with many more minor ones, as well as eighty-four serious incidents involving Jordanian, Egyptian or Syrian troops. A typical night was spent by paratroopers from Battalion 202 racing round the town of Khan Younis in Gaza on 7–8 July. Earlier in the day they had captured a Palestinian ‘informer’ who was with them. At 8:15 p.m. they saw a group of men moving towards the beach. Seven were arrested. One was shot ‘while charging’ at one of the soldiers. At 11:30 the informer took them to a house where they found a cache of weapons. At 4:44 a.m. they caught an Egyptian second lieutenant who had been in hiding. At 5:00 the informer tried to take them to an Egyptian captain, but when his house was raided he was gone. From 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. the paratroopers searched an orchard where the informer said fedayeen were hiding. One man escaped, one was captured. At 8:00 a.m. the informer took them to another Egyptian, who they found hiding in a stable. Fifteen minutes later, as they were on their way back to their camp at Gaza City, the informer pointed out another ‘Egyptian’, who was arrested.
There were many more serious incidents. September 1967 was much worse for Israelis than many of the months before the war. On the 8th a mine killed an Israeli officer and wounded four soldiers. On the 15th an Israeli train was derailed by sabotage close to the border of the West Bank near Tulkarem. On the 19th a bomb in West Jerusalem wounded seven civilians. There was more sabotage on 21, 22 and 23 of September. On 24 September, the day Eshkol announced the start of settlement in the Occupied Territories, thirteen guerrillas from Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s faction, were captured after a gunfight near Nablus. The next day Fatah blew up a house at a farming cooperative in Israel, killing a child and wounding the parents. On 27 September, the day that settlers returned to Kfar Etzion, two border policemen were killed and one wounded in a shoot-out with Fatah, a train was derailed near Gaza by sabotage and three unprimed hand grenades were found outside the prime minister’s house.
Casualty figures show clearly how the dangers to Israelis increased after the occupation began. Between June 1965 and February 1967 twelve Israelis were killed and sixty-one wounded in what Israel classified as terrorist attacks. From February until the outbreak of war, when tension was very high, four Israelis were killed and six wounded. But Israeli casualties rose sharply after the occupation began. Between the end of the war and February 1968 twenty-eight Israelis were killed and eighty-five wounded by terrorists. During the same period Israel said it killed forty-five Palestinian gunmen, wounded thirty and detained more than a thousand. By November more than a thousand Palestinian homes had been bulldozed in reprisals. In some refugee camps, all males between the ages of sixteen and seventy were lined up and paraded past men whose heads were disguised by sacks with only their eyes visible through slits. Every time one of them nodded towards a refugee, he was taken away for questioning. The result, according to a British diplomat, was ‘to persuade more families to pack up and trek off to the east’. The spokesman for Brigadier-General Narkiss told a Sunday Times reporter, ‘If you know the Arab mentality, you know this toughness is probably good. I don’t think they really understand any other language.’
Israel went back to attacking Jordan in reprisals for attacks by Palestinians. The huge and miserable refugee camps in Jordan were the best recruiting and training grounds Yasser Arafat and the other guerrilla leaders ever had. With the West Bank gone a weakened King Hussein had no inclination to rein the Palestinians in. Israel responded by shelling the refugee camps. On 20 November, for example, the Karameh camp in the Jordan valley was attacked by 120 mm mortars and field artillery. The bombardment happened in mid-afternoon on a fine day, when the streets of the camp were crowded and children were returning from school. The casualties were taken to a hospital nearby. Twelve people were dead, including three children, one woman, two Jordanian policemen and six other men. The defence attaché from the British Embassy in Amman, a professional soldier, inspected the corpses and concluded they had been killed by the fragmentation of shells. The wounded included seven children (two of whom were unlikely to live), three women, three policemen and sixteen men, one of whom had both legs amputated while another lost an arm. Israel finally sent tanks and infantry into Karameh, which had become a major base for Fatah, on 21 March 1968. They ran into much heavier opposition than they expected from Arafat’s guerrillas and the Jordanian army which had learnt from its traumatic experience of the previous summer. After a day of fierce fighting, 28 Israelis, 61 Jordanians and around 100 Palestinians were killed. For Palestinians the most important legacy of the battle was that it established the legend of Yasser Arafat. Even
though most of his men were killed, wounded or taken prisoner, they had stood up to the Israelis in a way that Arab regulars had singularly failed to do nine months earlier.
Some Israelis predicted the shape of the violence to come. In March 1968 an Israeli who had been transported by the British to a Kenyan jail between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one for resisting their occupation told the British ambassador, ‘It would be all too easy to run a truck into the middle of Dizengoff Circle in Tel Aviv in the rush hour and explode a heavy charge causing some 200–300 Jewish casualties.’ He thought it was unlikely to happen because the Palestinians were not up to it. In 1968 suicide bombers were still twenty-five years away.
Many Israelis believed that Palestinians would never be capable of organised resistance. A year after the 1967 war, the British journalist Winston Churchill had lunch with an Israeli who had been part of the group that bombed the King David hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. When asked whether Palestinians could ever do something similar to Israelis, he replied, ‘Not a chance.’ Unfortunately for Israel’s own future, one of the by-products of their crushing victory in 1967 was overconfidence and complacency, and not just about their ability to stop Palestinian terror. Hubris almost led to disaster in 1973 when they ignored warnings that Egypt and Syria were going to attack. It took nearly three weeks of hard fighting and many casualties before the superpowers ended the war. The 1973 war led to the return of the Sinai and peace with Egypt. Israel’s relations with Egypt ever since have been cold but correct. Israel stayed in the Golan Heights, Syria is still an implacable enemy, but the 1973 war was followed by a disengagement of forces agreement that has kept the border quiet ever since. When they needed a battlefield in the 1980s, they used Lebanon.
