by Jeremy Bowen
Mr Shaheen would prefer to see them going to school. He is the headmaster of Deir al Balah Elementary. Its 945 boys use the buildings in the mornings. In the afternoons another school moves in, one of dozens that are run for refugee children by UNRWA. They had their own buildings, close to Kfar Darom, a Jewish settlement nearby. But the Israeli army decided the UNRWA school was too close for comfort, so they told them to get out. Mr Shaheen is a mild and polite man. He hates the occupation that has gone on for most of his adult life.
‘We’re still suffering from what happened in 1967. We’re occupied. They kill people and demolish houses nearly every day. A stranger comes and kicks me out of the land where I was born. It’s miserable and the world watches and doesn’t do anything, especially the strong countries. But we are still hopeful, to be steadfast and achieve victory, which would be the liberation of Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. I believe in two states. It’s the best political solution.
‘The children hear the stories of what’s happened in the occupation and they’re well aware of the situation. They see killing and demolition and uprooting. When a child hears his family talk about their history and they see what the Israelis do, they start to hate. Most people in this part of Gaza have lost a member of their family, or property, or trees. It makes us think we should be persistent in resisting, to defend our land until they find a just solution.’
Down the road from Deir al Balah is Shara Abu Shakrah’s house in Khan Younis. After her husband and the other men in the family were killed in 1967, Shara was left alone in a society that did not value lone women, with four daughters and three sons. The eldest was eleven. She still yearns for the life they had before the war, when her husband, who was called Zaid, made a good living selling tomatoes, potatoes and okra. The widow of her husband’s brother Mustafa, who was also killed by the Israelis, lives next door. Between them the two women raised twelve children.
She is still terrified of Israeli soldiers. When she heard the night prayer coming from the mosques, she felt sick with fear. Sometimes, she says, the soldiers came during the night to search her house. ‘They used to say don’t scream, you’ll wake the children. They beat me, they pushed me around every time they came, they knocked me down to the floor.
‘My daughter once said to me, “Wake me when the Israelis come, Mummy, so I can be with you.” I have no idea how I raised my kids. Many people helped me. No men were left in the family. We depended on alms for the poor.’
She insists that her family’s dead men were not involved in politics or resistance. ‘The men were kind, decent, lived good lives, kept themselves to themselves.’
No one from her family is in politics, she says, or in prison, even after two intifadas. Now her sons have grown up and married and had their own children, she is terrified that the Israelis will come back and hurt them or kill them. One of her sons left to go to study in Poland at the beginning of the first intifada. In sixteen years, he has never been in touch. Perhaps he could no longer stand the strain of living in a house so full of poverty and grief.
Shara Abu Shakrah, who is now seventy-five years old, must have been a woman of great strength. She sits on a plastic chair in the doorway of her house. Children are everywhere, as usual in Gaza. Shara has thirty-five grandchildren. As she told her story, she was joined by her only daughter who never married, who was around forty years old. Unlike her mother, who wore a loosely knotted traditional Palestinian headscarf, she was fully veiled. She must have heard her mother talk about 1967 many times, but as she listened tears blotted through the black crepe of her veil in two dark lines. Shara wept too, for everything that has happened to her, for her dead husband and her lost son and a life that she never expected would be easy, but which became brutally harsh.
Qalqilya
I tried to get into Qalqilya on one of the West Bank’s biblical winter days. If you are on foot, which you will be if you are not riding in an Israeli jeep or tank, the only way in is along a barbed wire passageway. Rain lashed at the Israeli sentries, wind howled through the barbed wire and lightning crashed into the hills. It feels like paying a visit to a prison, which is about right, because that is what Qalqilya is now. Israel treats the 42,000 Palestinian men, women and children as convicts, even though the vast majority of them have never been convicted of anything. They need special permission to leave, even to visit one of the outlying villages which used to be a couple of minutes away by car. Unemployment stands at 80 per cent. Procreating children and watching television are two of the main pastimes left to Qalqilya’s people. When the curfews are in force, sometimes for weeks at a time, even the procreation of children is difficult in the town’s chronically overcrowded homes. That leaves watching the television. In the last few years satellite channels like al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based station which is one of the few Arab forums for free speech, have become very popular. From Qalqilya the news of the last few years looks like a consistent campaign of Western aggression against Muslims.
Their jailers are the Israeli border policemen who guard the gate of the town. If the Israeli authorities judge the Palestinians inside are in need of discipline, soldiers and tanks from the regular army help the paramilitary border police administer collective punishment. I was not the only person visiting Qalqilya on a foul Friday during the holy month of Ramadan. Families and friends from other parts of the West Bank who had been granted visiting rights were queuing up either side of the barbed wire to go in or come out. The border police were having some fun. They were Israelis of Russian origin who were much less worried by the winter weather than the Palestinians.
One of the Russians, a burly blond six-footer, stopped a man and woman and their five children. The youngest was a tiny baby wrapped in a shawl. He stood in front of them in the narrow wire tunnel, his M-16 assault rifle across his chest. He put his face close to the Palestinian father. ‘Where are you from?’ he bellowed in Hebrew. The wind was strong but he was not raising his voice to make sure his message was heard. He was raising his voice to show who was boss. The man said he was from Bidya, which is one of the local villages. ‘You’re from Bidya? You say you’re from Bidya?’ The Russian yelled again, successfully frightening and humiliating the man in front of his family. ‘Bidya? Bidya?’ He stared at them. ‘OK. Pass.’ He moved aside and let them through. The woman tugged the shawl tighter around her baby. The Russian guard grinned at his comrades. It was the best entertainment on offer on a wet day.
I had an appointment with Maa’rouf Zahran, who was a boy in June 1967 when his family joined the lines of people who had either been expelled or fled in terror across the hills to Nablus. Now he is mayor of Qalqilya. He sat in his office in the shuttered and quiet town hall. Two portraits hung from the walls on either side of his vast, Wurlitzer-like desk. One was Yasser Arafat. The other was Walid Ishreen. In 1967 he was the most glamorous fighter in Qalqilya, a little older than the others. Ever since Fatah had sent him to a training camp in Algeria he had used the nom de guerre Abu Ali Iyad. He was a good looking young man with a neat moustache, dressed in combat fatigues.
Qalqilya stands right on the border with Israel. Its position, which is now a misfortune, used to be its fortune. During the first thirty years or so of the occupation, its people were in pole position to get jobs in Israel. At weekends, during the quieter times, Israelis would come in to do their shopping. The prices were good and it felt a little exotic. It was a couple of miles and about half a world away from the white apartment buildings of Kfar Sava, which is a prosperous Israeli town opposite Qalqilya across the green line. The mayor wanted to talk about the way that Israel was turning Qalqilya into a laboratory for what the occupation might look like if it goes into its fifth decade. Israel has built a high concrete wall along the western edge of the town that faces Kfar Sava. It has watchtowers in it, just like the East Germans used to have in Berlin, only more hi-tech, with bullet proof glass (no one used to shoot at the Vopos who manned the Berlin Wall). To build it, a strip of land 100 metr
es wide was confiscated from the Palestinians. Qalqilya lost thousands of acres of its best fields and nineteen water aquifers, which provided the town with 32 per cent of its water. Road Six, the brand new Israeli highway that runs along the wall, has plenty of water. Its cuttings and embankments are planted with bushes and small trees. Irrigation pipes feed each line of plants. When they grow, there will be a fine display, even in the hottest summers. Palestinians in the West Bank often have days without running water. The wall has been built to stop infiltration into Israel by Palestinian terrorists. It is already hugely expensive. For the time being, it runs for about a mile or so, neatly hemming in Qalqilya.
The mayor talked about the Israeli planes that seemed so untouchable back in June 1967. Plenty of older people in the town still believe that King Hussein colluded with the Israelis to give up the West Bank, and that his troops were firing blanks. Although it is a bizarre story, which lacks motivation and evidence, in Qalqilya it is believed. It helps old folks to have someone to blame for a futile war that has dogged their lives and is now destroying its third generation. Maa’rouf Zahran is an efficient, go-ahead man in his mid-forties. He knew my time was short, because it was Ramadan and because the Israelis made it so hard to get in and out, so he had brought our interviewees to his office. Towards the end of the day, the Palestinians wanted to get home to break their Ramadan fast. I wanted to get back because I was not looking forward to dealing with the guards at the gate of this urban jail after dark. The mayor provided a car to take us to the edge of town. On the way out the driver showed off the memorial they had put up to the Jordanians who died fighting for them in 1967. The Russians were still on the gate, wet and tired but still yelling and bullying their way along the lines of Palestinian families.
* * *
Everyday violence between Israelis and Palestinians has been much worse since 1967 than it was before. Since the latest shooting war started in September 2000, several thousand Palestinian civilians and fighters have been killed by the IDF. Hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed, many of them by suicide bombers. Israel insists it is not fighting a popular uprising. It says that Palestinian gunmen and bombers were let loose by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has returned to his real plan – to use terrorism to destroy the state of Israel.
But young Palestinians do not join armed groups to kill and maim Israeli civilians and soldiers because of blind faith in Yasser Arafat or any other Palestinian leader. Strapping on a belt containing primitive bombs packed with nails and screws, to kill yourself and as many other people as possible in a bus or restaurant or hotel packed with children and their parents, is not a decision that any human being takes lightly. They do it – and are supported by a majority of Palestinians who believe that suicide attacks are legitimate resistance – because the way that they have been forced to live has made them desperate and full of hate.
Israel had plenty of warnings about the dangers ahead. Six weeks after the end of the war the British, who had spent the previous twenty years divesting themselves of Empire, saw that Palestinian violence was already starting in the Occupied Territories and warned the Israelis that ‘the longer a settlement was delayed the greater the danger of Israel falling into the quasi-colonial position which even Britain had in the end found untenable’.
An hour spent looking down on Jerusalem on a spring day from the Mount of Olives would be better spent than a year locked in the sterile exercise of debating who most deserves to live in the Holy Land. Israel has a considerable claim. So do the Palestinians. Jerusalem has been a holy city for Jews for 3000 years, to Christians for 2000 years, for Muslims for around 1300 years. The answer, of course, is that Israelis and Palestinians deserve it equally, and if they cannot accept that and learn to share it they will never live in peace.
I reject the grim view that the conflict is irredeemable, that the land cannot be split between two viable states that respect each other. It condemns generations of Israelis and Palestinians to perpetual war. Ending the occupation will cut out the cancer that is killing them. Intensive follow-up treatment will be vital to make sure it does not come back, in the shape of international guarantees and the deployment of foreign troops as peace-enforcers along the border between Israel and a Palestinian state.
Unfortunately, the chances of them doing that are not good. Throughout its history, controlling Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land has been a matter of power, not compromise. The last hundred years of bloodshed between Zionism and Arab nationalism have not been any different. It is all down to who has the most guns.
It would be bad enough if the misery was confined to the two nations, the overwhelming majority of whose people are decent men and women who ought to be able to live their lives in peace. But at the start of the twenty-first century, their war affects us all. It is at the centre of the new conflict between the West and the Islamic world which is escalating with alarming speed. The Holy Land, with Jerusalem at its heart, is a place where great tectonic plates of religion, culture and nationalism come together. In the last few years, the fault lines that run between them, never quiet, have opened up again. Ignoring the legacy of 1967 is not an option.
Acknowledgements
I would not have written this book without Julian Alexander, the best agent around. Thanks to all my Israeli and Palestinian friends and colleagues in Jerusalem, especially Jimmy Michel, Rubi Gat and Karen Strauss. My employers at BBC News have been extremely tolerant. Thanks especially to Richard Sambrook, Mark Damazer, Richard Porter, Jonathan Baker, Adrian Van Klaveren and Vin Ray.
Thanks also to my researchers, who found people, books and documents: James Vaughan, Yonit Farrago, Mohamed Shokeir, Taghreed El-Khodary, Linda Tabar, Zeev Elron, Yoni Ben Tovim, Luba Vinogradova, Jonathan Cummings, Ranya Kadri, Sanam Vakil, Sa’eda Kaelani, Nidal Rafa, and Mariam Shaheen. Thanks also to Regina Greenwell at the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; to Moshe and Ava Yotvat, who lent me documents; to Judith Sullivan, who transcribed hours of interviews; to Christopher Mitchell, for allowing me to quote from the documentary Dead in the Water, which he produced and directed for the BBC; to Yoram Tamir and Hagai Mann at Givat Hatachmoshet in Jerusalem; to Mitri Raheb at the International Centre of Bethlehem; to Uri Gil; to Uri Geller; to Dilys Wilkinson who lent me her house to write in at a critical moment; and to Ibrahim Zeghari, the world’s finest barman, who has been keeping me fed and watered at the American Colony in Jerusalem since 1991. Thanks to Paul McCann at UNRWA in Gaza and Susan Sneddon at Save the Children in London who let me look at material from 1967.
Thanks are also due to all the people who invited me to their homes and gave up their time to talk to me about the 1967 war. There are many disagreements in the Middle East, but on all sides there are hospitable and friendly people. The names of most of them are in the book. A few asked for their identities to be disguised.
Thank you to Andrew Gordon and everyone else at Simon & Schuster UK, who were much more relaxed about deadlines than this news reporter believed possible.
Thanks and love to my family, to my parents, who made me what I am, and most of all, to Julia and Mattie, who put up with long absences in the Middle East and even longer ones away from family life.
Notes
Abbreviations
AP
Associated Press
FCO
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (London)
IDF
Israel Defence Force Archive
ISA
Israel State Archives
LBJ
Lyndon Baines Johnson (US President)
MER
Middle East Record
NSC
National Security Council Histories (Middle East Crisis), LBJ Library (Austin, Texas)
NSF
National Security Files (Country File: Middle East), LBJ Library (Austin, Texas)
PRO
Public Records Office (London)
SoSFA
Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs (George Brown, UK)
SWB
Summary of World Broadcasts, BBC monitoring
Introduction
‘The biggest Palestinian attack’: Israeli government website, www.mfa.gov.il/mfa.
‘An investigation by’: Human Rights Watch report on Jenin, www.hrw.org.
‘Lyndon Baines Johnson’: Memo for the Record, 7 June 1967, NSC, Box 18.
‘Four days after the war’: Notes of NSC Special Committee meeting, 14 June 1967, NSC, Box 19.
Pre-war
‘so bone-tired’: Uzi Narkiss, The Liberation of Jerusalem, p. 17.
‘from guilt that Jerusalem’: ibid., p. 14.
‘a multitude of inhabitants’, ‘the inhabitants of the town became panic-stricken’ and ‘Nobody will ever know’: Morris, pp. 203–10.
