by Jeremy Bowen
Legacy
Every year on the anniversary of the 1967 war, Israel celebrates what it calls ‘Jerusalem Day’. Several thousand young people assemble, many sporting the tribal symbols of right-wing religious nationalism, T-shirts printed with political slogans, skullcaps made of coloured, knitted cotton for the men and long skirts for the women. They parade around the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, which is mainly populated by Palestinians, waving Israeli flags and chanting and singing patriotic songs. Quite a few of them are armed. Hundreds of paramilitary border police are deployed to protect them. The intention is to celebrate Jerusalem as the unified, eternal capital of Israel. But it demonstrates the opposite, that Jerusalem is deeply divided. A few weeks after the victory in 1967, Israel pulled down the concrete walls that physically divided the city. But they are still standing in people’s heads. Most Palestinians keep out of the way when the march is going on, but their sullen, unseen presence is always in the air.
Jerusalem repelled me when I first lived there. I loathed the place. Hatred and conflict seemed as pervasive as the dust, noise and the blinding sun. But Jerusalem gradually pulled me in, as it does with most people in the end. Part of it was the light, bright and hard at midday, soft on the rocky hills in the evening. It was also that history is alive in Jerusalem. Events that in most places are safely tucked away in books belong to everybody’s present, and not always in a good way.
When the sun was going down and the jackals were starting to howl in the hills, the pink and gold walls around where I lived let go of the heat that had been blasted into them all day. For Israelis and Palestinians, the stones of Jerusalem also give off power. The two sides share a unrequited desire to possess them absolutely. Palestinians love to tell you that they have outstayed the Jordanians, the British, the Ottomans and the Crusaders and they will do the same for the Israelis. Israelis warn their enemies not to underestimate their attachment to their only home. A religious Jew, an immigrant from Latin America, on an isolated settlement near the fiercely nationalistic Palestinian city of Nablus, told me that he had returned to live on land that was a gift from God. He talked about how Jews had been driven out by the Romans and fought their way back as if it was a personal trauma that happened last week, rather than a saga that had unfolded over almost two thousand years.
When two rabbis from Vienna came to Palestine on a fact-finding mission in 1897, they sent back a telegram: ‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.’ Arabs and Israelis were fighting over the land long before 1967. But decisive victories change conflicts decisively. The 1967 war made the Arab–Israeli conflict what it is today. The only way to make peace is to unravel what 1967 left behind.
Israelis call it the Six-Day War. Arabs call it the June War. Whichever name you prefer, it was one of the greatest military victories of the twentieth century. Across the world it made the reputation of the Israeli Defence Forces. Most, though not all, of the Israeli veterans of 1967 I spoke to when I was doing my research believed that their victory had been squandered. Palestinians I met in the West Bank and Gaza lived lives so dominated by the grinding misery of the occupation that sometimes it was difficult to jerk them out of the present long enough to talk about the past.
Jerusalem, 28 September 2000
In Jerusalem, at three minutes to eight on the morning of Thursday, 28 September 2000, Ariel Sharon, seventy-two years old, retired Israeli general-turned-politician, walked through a stone arch in one of Jerusalem’s ancient walls. Sharon’s squat, heavy frame was almost lost in a thick crowd of bodyguards. Israeli sharpshooters were deployed on rooftops. He was entering the walled compound around the Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, since 1967 the most contested piece of land in the Middle East. Sharon has always denied that he was out to provoke Palestinians who had gathered there to protest about his visit. In a way, he is telling the truth. His target that day was Binyamin Netanyahu, a rival for the leadership of the Israeli right, who he planned to upstage by demonstrating that Israelis can go wherever they like in Jerusalem. What Palestinians thought about his walk in the September sun was not the issue. In his long career, the feelings of Arabs had never been Ariel Sharon’s greatest concern.
But Palestinians regard the territory upon which he was stepping as their own. It is the holiest site in the Islamic world after Mecca and Medina. The Israeli authorities were so certain that Palestinians would give Sharon a rough ride that they deployed 1500 heavily armed police to protect him. Under Jerusalem’s two holy mosques, the remains of the Jewish Temple lie unseen and unexcavated. The Temple is at the heart of modern Israel’s claim to Jerusalem. For almost 2000 years after the Romans destroyed it and expelled the Jews from the holy city, they prayed for their return. Refugees in the Palestinian Diaspora put images of the Dome of the Rock and of al-Aqsa on the walls of their homes, just as Jews, also removed by war from Jerusalem, remembered the Temple. For Palestinians the mosques have become national symbols that are every bit as potent as the memory of Jerusalem was during the Jews’ exile.
Riots started as Sharon left the compound at 8:31 a.m., thirty-four minutes after he had entered it. Since then, the violence has not stopped. In 2002, in response to savage attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians, Israel smashed Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and reoccupied the areas in and around the main Palestinian towns. Since then millions of Palestinian men, women and children have suffered harsh collective punishments and been imprisoned in their homes by curfews for months. The Palestinian economy has collapsed. Israelis have had periods of relative quiet, but the suicide bombers have always returned to kill more civilians.
Afula, November 2002
Doron Mor was waiting for me in a café in a shopping mall in Afula, a town in northern Israel on the border with the West Bank. He had brought his grandson with him. Indulgently, he gave him cash to play video games and to buy a burger and an ice cream. Piped music tinkled around us. A pretty girl delivered a menu. Most Israeli towns, even small ones like Afula, have malls. They show just how far Israel has come in the lifetime of a man like Doron, who grew up when Israel was small, poor and ambitious. When developers built malls in the eighties and nineties, shoppers liked them because they were modern, Western, a little bit flashy, just like the places where Israelis, who love shopping, visited on holidays abroad. Israelis still like them – not because they feel like America or Europe, but because malls are a little safer than traditional markets and high streets. They have a limited number of doors. Security people at the mall in Afula search everyone who comes in. The man who frisked me concentrated on the places where bombs could be strapped.
Doron Mor is a sun-tanned, fit-looking man, who lives on a kibbutz. In 1967 he was a major in the Israeli paratroop brigade, the deputy commander of the battalion that fought in the battle of Ammunition Hill. He is proud of what his generation achieved – and sad about what happened afterwards. ‘In 1967 we were in real danger. We were surrounded by three nations. It was the first time we proved that we were strong. We were shocked we won so quickly. It made us think we were supermen and we paid for it … We’re still making the same mistakes. Since the intifada [Palestinian uprising] started we have proved we can’t stop terror. For true peace I’d give up all the territories and also Jerusalem. If it’s true peace, you could go there freely anyway.’
Jacov Chaimowitz fought with Doron Mor at Ammunition Hill. After the war he took the Hebrew name Hetz. Now he is an engineer living with his wife and eight children in a relatively peaceful corner of northern Israel. After the war Hetz, who was decorated for his bravery, went on to become an officer and to command the unit he fought with in 1967. He showed classic signs of ‘survivor’s guilt’ that is often suffered by people who have seen their friends die. ‘I felt desperate because of so many dead. I took many months to understand what had happened. I was upset because some of my friends were killed and I just had scratches from shrapnel and blast, and a gashed hand from when I tried to open an ammuniti
on box with a bayonet … I felt like a robot most of the time in battle. It was him or me. I thought it was tough, but I also thought it was the last battle in the Middle East.’ Now he knows it was not. Like all Israelis and Palestinians, his life has been dominated by the way 1967 changed the Middle East. I met him a day or two after yet another suicide attack in Jerusalem. ‘We need a proper border. A year after the war I realised that the only solution was peace. I would swap the West Bank for peace any time. The settlers have to leave the Occupied Territory, so we can have a border we can defend.’
Before I met Mor and Hetz, I had been on the West Bank, in Jenin. It used to be easy to drive the few miles between Jenin and Afula, across the border, which is known as the green line. The first time I went that way was on a cold night in November 1995, straight from a huge commemorative rally in Tel Aviv for Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had been assassinated a week before.
Rabin knew a lot about the occupied territories. More than any other Israeli, he was responsible for Israel’s stunning victory in 1967. But years later Rabin had realised that however many tanks and helicopter gunships Israel possessed, it would never have peace while it tried to control the lives of four million Palestinians. Peace meant dismantling the territorial legacy of the 1967 war. Since it was his greatest victory, a majority of Israelis trusted him to do it. Some did not. For months before he was killed, a poisonous cascade of hatred was directed at Rabin and his family. Rabbis cursed him. Extreme right-wingers waved pictures of him dressed in a Nazi uniform. Some of them believed Israel needed the land to be safe from the Arabs. Others believed it was God’s miraculous gift to the Jewish people, the restoration of the sacred territory that the Romans took from them in the first century AD. How, they asked, can a Jew return what God intends him to have?
No one knows how far he would have taken the process of disengaging from occupied land, because on 4 November 1995 he was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic called Yigal Amir. It was one of the most effective acts of political violence in modern history. Eight years after Rabin’s assassination, more Jews than ever were settled on the occupied land. Terrible violence was part of daily life. Israel was mired in an unwinnable colonial war.
A week after Rabin was murdered, when young Israelis were lighting candles and weeping for everything that Amir had taken away, I watched the last Israeli troops leaving Jenin. A few minutes later, after their jeeps had headed off towards Afula, uniformed Palestinians arrived, hanging off the sides of their vehicles and firing guns into the air. Everyone who was there rambled around the old Israeli base, looking at the cells in which some of them said they had been held. On other freezing nights that winter most of the major towns on the West Bank were handed over to Palestinian self-rule. Israel continued to control the roads in and out of the towns and to take land by force to build Jewish settlements. But, at first, a majority of Palestinians and Israelis thought they were on a one-way street to peace.
Some Israelis say that the roots of today’s conflict are not in the occupation, but in the Arabs’ desire to destroy the Jewish state. It is true that Palestinian extremists swear that they will fight until the Jewish state has been destroyed.
But the violence of the occupation has given them a prominence they would not otherwise have. During the time that Palestinians hoped the Oslo process was working, the extremists were in the fringes where they belong. Violence pushes the extremists from both sides into the mainstream. Palestinian extremists found more people prepared to listen to their bloodthirsty dreams, while Ariel Sharon appointed ministers to his cabinet who believed that Palestinians in the West Bank should be expelled. When, in Rabin’s time, Palestinians thought the occupation was ending, suicide bombers were deeply unpopular in the West Bank and Gaza. Now that Israeli tanks are back on their streets, the bombers’ approval ratings are very high.
Bethlehem
Mrs Badial Raheb was sitting in a smart jacket in a beautiful vaulted room in her house opposite the Church of the Nativity. Framed pieces of Palestinian embroidery hung on the walls. Less than a hundred yards away in Manger Square, an Israeli tank was parked outside the Nativity church, its turret moving back and forth across the square every few minutes. Palestinian boys peered round the corners of the church at the tank, and ducked back every time the barrel came their way. In her serene sitting room, Mrs Raheb was embarrassed and upset to talk about the past. When the Israelis were advancing into Bethlehem, she had taken her son to hide with hundreds of others in the church.
‘My husband came to get us. He took one look at the people sheltering there and said if we’re going to die, we’ll die at home. I was pregnant and the next day I had a miscarriage – I suppose it was because I was so afraid. It was ten days before they could get me a doctor.
‘After the war the Israelis used to drive round with loudspeakers telling everyone not to be afraid. For days people were under curfew. They said they wouldn’t hurt us. They brought in basic essentials and sold them very cheap. They were trying to get us to like them.’
She laughed. ‘They fed us honey and then onions.’ There were no massacres in Bethlehem when Israel moved in. But the neighbours who left for Jordan never came back.
Another Israeli armoured column was grinding its way through Bethlehem. On a rooftop not far from Mrs Raheb’s house, Raja Zacharia cocked an expert ear. That’s not a tank, he said. It’s an armoured personnel carrier. Raja is an expert diagnostician of the sounds that steel tracks make on the roads on his home town because he has heard them many times since 7 June 1967, the day the occupation started. It was also the day when his father was killed trying to protect him from an Israeli shell. Sometimes it feels as if he has heard Israeli armour every day since then, although that is not strictly true. The first Israeli occupation ended on Christmas Eve 1995. For seven years after that there was relative freedom. Israeli soldiers stood at the gates of Bethlehem and controlled who left and who came in, but it was the closest thing to independence that the people of Bethlehem had ever had. Before the Israelis, the Jordanians were in charge, who had succeeded the British who had followed the Turks and a long time before that were the Romans. In May 2002 the Israelis came back, because the government was under pressure to act and because the army believed its tanks could stop young Palestinians turning themselves into human bombs. The Israelis administered a stern collective punishment to a town that overwhelmingly supported armed resistance. Before the first of what turned into a series of temporary withdrawals, they destroyed millions of pounds’ worth of renovations that had been paid for by the European Union and Japan for the Millennium celebrations, as well as the livelihoods of Palestinians who had invested their life savings in businesses during the years of self-rule.
Raja was standing on his roof listening to the clanking, screeching steel tracks because at four that morning the Israelis had come back again. The day before a Palestinian who was living in Bethlehem had blown himself up in Jerusalem, which is only a few miles down the road. May’s collective punishment had not had the deterrent effect for which the Israelis had hoped. As soon as Raja and everyone else in Bethlehem heard that the suicide bomber had come from their town they knew what would happen. They checked their stocks of food and water and candles and went out to buy what they did not have. Now the whole town was under curfew and would be for the foreseeable future. That meant nobody was allowed out of their houses, though in practice Raja could stand on his roof and some of the children, when the tanks were not around, played in the streets close to their front doors.
Raja Zacharia was six years old in 1967. He was not aware that a war was coming until he heard the shelling. He was his parents’ only child, born after they had been married for fifteen years. His father, Farah, a silversmith, was a talented and versatile man. He wrote, in English, a book of homespun moral philosophy called A Call from the Wilderness. Raja has a picture of him in an illustrated book from the 1960s about a young Swedish girl’s trip through the holy land. Farah i
s showing the grinning little blonde child how he could turn a lump of silver into an elegant crucifix. On Wednesday 7 June 1967 he was outside with the neighbours, on the roof where Raja was standing thirty-five years later, when shells started to land near them. Farah rushed inside to tell his wife and child to take cover. Raja had been asleep. His father grabbed him and lay with him as more shells exploded outside. Then one hit the Greek Catholic church, which was next door to their house. The force of the explosion blew a hole in their wall. Farah, cradling his son, took the force of the blast. Raja was unhurt. The neighbours took Farah out into the street when the shelling stopped to try to find someone to take him to hospital. His wife Natalie was terrified and weeping, almost paralysed with dread at the thought that her husband would die, which he did, two hours later.
‘When the Israelis came back this year, it was much worse than 1967. In ’67 there was no resistance, we had no weapons. It was different this time. I feel very sorry for the people who were killed on that bus in Jerusalem yesterday, but blood brings blood and we’re in a violent circle that never stops. Now we live in a box and there’s no hope. We all want the land of 1967. Israel wants peace and the land. It can’t have both. They signed agreements in front of kings and presidents and now they’ve just torn them up.’
Gaza
Kamel Sulaiman Shaheen sat behind his desk in the headmaster’s office in his school and talked about all the years of occupation. In the winter sun outside hundreds of boys tore around the playground, yelling, punching each other, playing football. Gaza has one of the highest birth rates in the world. The biggest thing that hits you when you walk down any street in Gaza is not occupation, or resistance, or destruction, but children, thousands and thousands of them. Halfway down the Gaza Strip, near Mr Shaheen’s school, the Israelis have built a checkpoint that can cut the territory in half. Actually it is more of a chokepoint than a checkpoint. Closing the checkpoint stops the traffic along Gaza’s only north–south road. Thousands of people stew in the jams until it reopens. Even when the checkpoint is open, progress is still very slow. At either end you move slowly up the line until it is your turn to be examined by invisible Israelis, who are behind bullet-proof reflective glass in thick concrete bunkers. Palestinians believe that the fuller their car is, the more likely they are to be let through. The Israelis, Palestinian logic goes, believe a full car is less likely to contain suicide bombers. Young Palestinians work the queues, offering themselves as passengers to drivers with too many empty seats. They ride back and forth all day, earning a shekel every time.
