by Adam LeBor
Kanafani was not the only Palestinian writer to pay with his life. Back in 1949, after their failed attempt to cross the border illegally at Tayibe, the Andraus children and their aunt Fahima had moved to Bir Zeit, just north of Ramallah. There they lived with the Nasser family. Kamal Nasser was a journalist and poet, author of verses such as ‘Palestine the Proud’, ‘British Injustice’ and ‘Jewish Flood’. Kamal gave his room to the Andraus children. Like Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the Russian Revolution, he scrawled his verses on the walls, and the Andraus children enjoyed deciphering them. After 1967, Kamal Nasser was expelled by the Israelis from the West Bank. He moved to Beirut, where he edited the PLO journal Falastin at-Thawra. Like Ghassan Kanafani, he was an articulate and fluent writer, and was a natural choice to be PLO spokesman. In April 1973 a team of Israeli commandos, led by Lt. Col. Ehud Barak disguised as a woman, landed in Beirut. Barak had three targets: one of them was Kamal Nasser. All three were shot dead with silenced pistols. Back in Tel Aviv at the debriefing, the raid was judged a resounding success. In Jaffa, at the Andraus household, there were no celebrations. The news of Nasser’s death caused great sadness. Suad says, ‘He was a very gentle man, an intellectual, not a terrorist.’
Ofer Aharoni, son of Yoram, decided there was only one way to conquer his fear of heights, and that was to join the paratroopers. Born in 1952, Ofer spent a happy youth in Tel Aviv going to school, studying, working, partying and chasing girls. ‘I also spent a lot of time in Jaffa, helping my father deliver coffee to the coffee houses. It was amazing, there were so many different people from all over the world, and all their languages. Bustros Street, or Raziel, was one of the best and most beautiful in Jaffa,’ explains Ofer. In the long term, Ofer was not sure he wanted to take over his father’s shop. But he had three years in the army to think about it. The military was the glue holding Israeli society together. Military service was compulsory, three years for boys and two years for girls. Arabs did not serve, apart from the Druse, Circassians and some Bedouin. They missed more than military service – it was in the army that life-long friendships were forged, easing the path through civilian life. ‘The army gives Israeli society a cohesion and a shared set of values,’ says Ofer. ‘I grew up in north Tel Aviv, a middle-class area. In the army I met people from kibbutzim, from small towns, completely different types. Some of them couldn’t even speak Hebrew properly, but we became great friends. I met Yemenis, and Moroccans, and they all had something to contribute. It taught me that homogeneity is not good for society.’
When the call came, Ofer was ready. He had spent many hours with his father and his friends, listening to their exploits in the Stern Group. Ofer’s brother Dov had joined the air force as a pilot, the most prestigious of all the armed forces. The pilots were the elite of the elite, and their uniform was a guaranteed magnet for the girls. In February 1971, Ofer was accepted as a paratrooper. The training lasted eighteen months, and was tough and dangerous. Most days began at 4.30 a.m., and ended at 11 p.m. Ofer and his comrades were taught close-quarter fighting in urban areas and in open spaces, and how to jump from aeroplanes. The first jump was the worst. ‘I was very anxious. You see your friends disappear into the air, and in a second you will be there with them. But you jump. You do what you have to do. You fall for about fifteen seconds and then the parachute opens automatically. Once it happens it is incredible.’
After eighteen months Ofer was promoted to corporal. The ceremony took place at Masada, a two-millennia-old mountaintop fortress near the Dead Sea. Masada had a powerful resonance: in the year 66 the Zealots, a fanatical Jewish sect, captured it from the Romans. The Zealots, barely one thousand men strong, held out against fifteen thousand Roman troops for almost two years. When the Romans eventually breached the walls, the Zealots committed suicide en masse. The message was clear: modern-day Israel will never surrender. It had been a very difficult eighteen months for Ofer – some of the soldiers had dropped out in the middle, or were wounded or killed accidentally in training. Barely a year later, Ofer would see his comrades die around him in a real-life battle. He would need all his military skills, courage and plenty of luck to survive.
The War of Attrition had ended in 1970 with Israel feeling more powerful than ever, a pride rooted in 1967. The speed and extent of Israel’s conquests in the Six Day War – of Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – had fostered a sense of invincibility. A complacent military and political leadership claimed that the Egyptians would never be able to cross the Bar-Lev line of forts and ramparts on the eastern, Israeli-held side of the Suez Canal; Israel’s intelligence establishments ignored several warnings that a new war was likely. The political situation, too, had developed. Anwar Sadat, more pragmatic than Nasser, was prepared to consider making peace with Israel if it withdrew to the pre-1967 lines. But Israel’s refusal only hardened his determination to recapture Sinai.4
In April 1973 Sadat gave an interview to Newsweek magazine, in which he again threatened a new war. Words were one thing, deeds another. That summer, Egypt and Syria conducted several large-scale military exercises, including an Egyptian training operation along the banks of the Suez Canal. Each exercise put the Israeli military on alert, but any sense of urgency faded when the attacks failed to materialise. Worried that a new conflict might entail further territorial losses for Jordan, King Hussein flew to Tel Aviv on 25 September, his ninth secret visit to Israel, to warn Prime Minister Golda Meir that Syria was positioned to attack. Golda Meir seemed unconcerned, and travelled to Strasbourg the next day. Even the expulsion in early October of the last Soviet advisers in Egypt failed to sound the alarm. It was the pride that comes before a fall.
‘I didn’t like the atmosphere in 1973. It felt as though the government was incompetent,’ recalls Ofer Aharoni. ‘But it was more than that. The other part was the legacy of 1967, that it was such a victory, so in 1973 people thought they could do everything and anything and it would be successful. It was too much.’ The fall began at 2 p.m. on 6 October, when Egyptian guns opened fire over the Suez Canal, and the Syrians bombarded the Golan Heights. Egypt and Syria hoped that by launching the war on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, they would catch the country by surprise, and they did. Israel was outnumbered five to one in tanks, and twenty to one in guns. This time it was the Arab armies that launched a lightning strike. Over 150 Egyptian planes attacked Israeli bases inside Sinai, while tens of thousands of artillery shells and mortar rounds rained down on the Bar-Lev line.5
Despite the ferocity of the bombardment, this war was not an attempt to annihilate Israel, unlike 1967. Rather Egypt and Syria aimed to recapture enough of the territory lost in the Sinai and on the Golan Heights to both salvage Arab honour and deliver a bloody nose to Israel. Initially at least, it seemed they would triumph. The Bar-Lev line, in which the Israelis had placed so much faith, proved as effective as the French Maginot line in 1940. The Egyptians used high-power hoses to wash away the mud that made up the foundations of Israeli fortresses. They poured across the Suez Canal, broke through the Israeli defences and advanced fifteen kilometres into the Sinai. An air umbrella of SAM missiles protected the troops from the Israeli air force. By 4.15 p.m., just over two hours into the war, ten brigades had crossed, a total of 25,000 soldiers. By 11.00 p.m. six heavy bridges spanned the canal, and Egyptian tanks, artillery and armoured vehicles rolled into the Sinai. By the evening of 7 October one hundred thousand troops and over one thousand tanks had crossed the canal. As Benny Morris notes, the Egyptian troops of 1973 ‘proved to be of radically different stuff from those encountered in 1948, 1956 and 1967’.6
Israel counter-attacked on the morning of 8 October, aiming to destroy the Egyptian bridgeheads in the Sinai and even cross over to the west bank of the canal. But the Israeli generals ignored intelligence about the heavy concentration of anti-tank weapons, and the attack was reprised, with both sides losing eighty tanks. At both command headquarters and on
the front lines Israeli officers and troops were in shock at their failure to beat back the Egyptians. A stalemate settled for the next few days as both sides considered their options. On 14 October the Egyptians advanced again, along the 160 kilometre-long front. This time Israel regained momentum, and counter-attacked with speed and dexterity. The Egyptian tanks, Soviet T-55s and T-62s, were far inferior armour to Israel’s Centurions and Pattons. By now the Egyptian armour was outside the SAM umbrella, and was easy prey for the Israeli fighters.
The following day a division led by General Ariel Sharon managed to punch through the Egyptian lines and build a bridgehead on the east bank. By dawn on 16 October, over seven hundred Israeli paratroopers had crossed the waterway and were dug in on the west bank, backed up by tanks and other armour, which had been transported on amphibious vehicles.7 But the Israeli forward position was dangerously exposed. There was still no bridge across the canal, and no secure road to bring up more armour. An Israeli tank attack to secure one approach to the road was beaten back. The second option was to clear out the Egyptian troops at a site known as the ‘Chinese Farm’, a large agricultural project. Ofer Aharoni’s battalion was sent into action there. Nothing in his training could have prepared him for the hell in which he soon found himself: ‘There was one road to our bridgehead. Our commander ordered us to advance during the night to clear out the Egyptian commandos holding the road. We were infantry with light weapons. But they weren’t just commandos, they had a whole division, one thousand strong, with tanks and machine guns, dug into the sand. They saw us coming. They waited until we were between fifty and one hundred metres away, and then they opened fire.’
Ofer and his comrades were trapped beneath a rain of bullets, rockets and artillery. They could not move forward or back, and they only had light weapons: bazookas, Uzi submachine guns and semi-automatic rifles. Ofer saw his friends killed and wounded all around him. The air hissed with shrapnel and bullets; the shells lit up the night like staccato flashes; everywhere was the smell of blood and cordite. The screams and moans of the wounded carried clearly through lulls in battle. ‘The Egyptians did not know how many of us there were. If they had moved out from their positions, they could have walked over us,’ says Ofer. It was the longest night of his life. By the next morning, of the two hundred soldiers in Ofer’s unit, forty had been killed and sixty wounded. A tank force, commanded by Col. Ehud Barak, broke through and rescued the survivors.
On the northern front the war against Syria initially went just as badly for the Israelis. The Syrians captured Mount Hermon and pushed south towards the Sea of Galilee. But after three days of ferocious fighting the Israelis rallied, and repulsed the Syrians. By 14 October the Israelis had advanced far enough to shell the outskirts of the capital Damascus. Once again there was even talk of rescuing the last Syrian Jews. The United States helped its ally with an airlift of M-16 automatic rifles and anti-tank weapons. The Israeli offensive in Sinai continued, and by 19 October the situation had reversed. Israel had 350 tanks massed on the east bank of the canal, while Israeli troops on the west bank were pushing forward into Egypt. Now Cairo, not Tel Aviv, was panicking. Sadat soon pressed for a ceasefire and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Moscow to discuss how the United States and the Soviet Union could end the war. Both superpowers were fearful that the war could trigger a regional conflagration. On 22 October the UN Security Council passed Resolution 338, which called for a ceasefire, but this was swiftly violated by both sides, and Israel launched a futile attempt to capture Suez City on 24 October. By 25 October, however, the Yom Kippur War was over. By the time the fighting had stopped, Israeli troops had captured sixteen hundred square kilometres on the west bank of the canal, and they were ninety-seven kilometres from Cairo and only forty from Damascus.8
Ofer Aharoni eventually met his brother Dov on the west bank of the canal. Dov was a helicopter pilot, and had brought souvenirs for the Israeli soldiers in the field hospital: captured Egyptian pistols. By the end of the war Ofer was twenty-two years old. His hopes and dreams were those of any young man: to make a successful career, marry, have a family, but the latter had nearly been denied him. The magazine of his Uzi sub-machine gun had saved him from a shrapnel wound in the groin. Ofer survived the battle for the Chinese Farm, but it changed his life for ever. ‘The middle of a war is not like a training operation: it is a big mess, so much so that you cannot understand how it continues. When so many people are killed around you, and you go on to fight again, it has a dramatic effect. It changes your life and your values completely. It’s very tough to experience. You come from a group of guys who listened to rock and roll and used to smoke pot, and were quite happy. After the war you are not the same. You were in hell, and you are lucky because you are alive, but you are changed. I went to a concert with my friends. The audience was sitting, all really into the music, clapping their hands and shouting. I looked at them and I thought, what’s the matter with them? They have no idea what is really happening out there.’
Both the international situation and Israeli politics had also drastically altered. The Yom Kippur War was a stalemate – the Arabs had not won, but, for the first time, nor had they lost. After months of negotiations and shuttle diplomacy by Henry Kissinger, in spring 1974 Israel pulled back more or less to its 1967 lines, surrendering strips of territory in Sinai and on the Syrian border where UN troops would henceforth be based. Strategically the concessions, just a few miles wide, made little difference, but they were psychologically significant. The Yom Kippur War was a profound shock to Israel. Sadat had destroyed the myth of Israeli military invincibility, a necessary precursor, many believed, for any longer-term peace agreement between Israel and its neighbours. On the home front, the acrimonious fallout from the Yom Kippur War would eventually end twenty-five years of Mapai rule.
19
Talking and Fighting
1973–early 1980s
It is no small thing for a people who have been wronged as we have to take the first step towards reconciliation for the sake of a just peace that should satisfy all parties.
Said Hammami, writing in
The Times, 16 November 1973
Less than a month after the Yom Kippur War, Said Hammami, the PLO ambassador in London and a cousin of Fadwa and Hasan, published a lengthy article in The Times. It called for ‘a just peace’ and a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, implicitly rejecting the PLO’s demand for a ‘secular democratic state’ in all of pre-1948 Palestine. Such arguments are now theoretically accepted by all sides, but then they were revolutionary. Said and his family had also fled Jaffa in 1948, when he was seven years old, and travelled east to Amman. He studied English at Damascus University, and worked as a journalist and teacher. Said’s foresight and willingness to compromise with Israel would eventually cost him his life.
His article outlined the shift in thinking of one wing of the PLO. It was described as his ‘personal view’; but as the editor’s introduction explained: ‘Since he is known to be very close to the PLO chairman, Mr Yasser Arafat, his decision to make his views public is of considerable significance.’ Headlined ‘The Palestinian Way to Middle East Peace’, the article argued, ‘Such a Palestinian state would lead to the emptying and closing down of the refugee camps, thereby drawing out the poison at the heart of Arab-Israeli enmity.’ It did not guarantee that the PLO would fully recognise Israel and sign a peace treaty – the ultimate diplomatic card – but that was certainly implied. Hammami also referred twice to Israel by name, instead of using the usual term ‘Zionist entity’, which was preferred by most Arab commentators. Said’s article reflected the new geo-political reality in the Middle East. The situation after the 1973 war, in which neither side could claim absolute victory, upset the old order. Israel had paid a high price: more than two and a half thousand servicemen had been killed, and more than five thousand wounded. More than one hundred combat aircraft had been shot down. Public confidence in the government and the military wa
s severely shaken by the speed and severity of the two-front Egyptian-Syrian attack, and the slow pace of Israeli counterattacks. Despite this, Labour won the elections in December 1973. But Prime Minister Golda Meir and her government resigned in April 1974 after the Agranat Commission, formed to investigate the conduct of the war, was strongly critical of Israeli military intelligence. Labour remained in power under a new government, headed by Yitzhak Rabin, a former Chief of Staff for Israel’s armed forces, and ambassador to the United States.
Behind the scenes, secret negotiations and contacts between moderate Israelis and Palestinians were under way. Like every national liberation movement, the PLO began to split between the realists, ready to sacrifice principles for compromise, and the ideologues. Both wings were embodied in two refugees from Jaffa: Said Hammami and Sabri al-Banna, better known as Abu Nidal. Said Hammami and his family lived in Berkeley Court in London’s West End, a luxury block of flats not far from Marble Arch. Curiously, the Hammamis’ flat shared a kitchen wall and a long balcony with the next-door residence of an Israeli diplomat. It was impossible to tell if there was contact between them, recalls one neighbour, but the layout of the flats would have facilitated clandestine meetings: the back doors to both opened onto the balcony.1 The neighbour recalls: ‘Said Hammami was always very friendly and dapper, dressed in a western style. I once met his children in the lift and when I asked them where they came from, they told me that they were homeless, as their country had been taken from them.’
For Sabri al-Banna, Said’s overtures, supported by the PLO leadership, were treachery. He split from Fatah and formed the Fatah-the Revolutionary Council, better known as the Abu Nidal group. Some believed his extremism and violence were rooted in a fractured childhood. Al-Banna’s elderly father, Khalil, owned substantial orange groves on the coastal plain south of Jaffa. Khalil had eleven children by his first wife, and then took a second, a sixteen-year-old girl who bore him Sabri in 1937. He was never accepted by his siblings and in 1945, when his father died, his mother was thrown out, further fuelling his anger at the world.2 The family lost everything in the Nakba. After scraping a living in refugee camps, al-Banna moved up the ranks of Fatah. He was appointed its representative in Sudan and Iraq, where he developed strong links with Iraqi intelligence. The Abu Nidal group was the most extreme of the ‘rejectionists’. Its targets were almost exclusively moderate Palestinians, and other Arab politicians. Some claimed it was connected to Mossad. In the 1970s Abu Nidal worked for Saddam Hussein, and launched terrorist attacks inside Syria. In the 1980s he moved to Damascus and attacked Jordanian targets. When Abu Nidal met the British journalist Christopher Hitchens, he told Hitchens to warn Said Hammami about the consequences of ‘treason to the revolution’.3 Hitchens duly passed on the threat.
