by Robert Fisk
In his theatrically arranged kuffiah headdress,87 his khaki uniform and his silly pistol, Arafat was now a strangely dated figure, a revolutionary from the past who would soon have to put aside childish things. Even the word “revolutionary” sounded odd. Arafat’s revolution was now over. For the half-million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who could now never return to their 1948 homes in what is now Israel—for the final settlement of Oslo was scarcely going to allow them to “return” to Haifa and Netanya and Galilee—it was a betrayal. “I could accept him,” an Israeli soldier told me as he was helping to impose another curfew on Hebron in early September of 1993. “Compared to the others, he wasn’t that bad a terrorist.” What an obituary on the revolutionary life of Yassir Arafat.
Revolutionaries are supposed to be intellectuals. Robespierre, Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Atatürk, Nasser, Castro, Guevara: they wrote books or talked grand philosophy amid their struggles. Not so Arafat. He could rarely be seen reading books, let alone writing them. What he had, however, was single-mindedness. There was a certain self-dedication in this—and a lot of arrogance—but it was a great strength. From start to finish, it was Palestine, Palestine, Palestine. For the Palestinian poor, his uniform and headdress—fancy dress to Westerners and Israelis—were necessary, part of the binding of the spirits amid exile. But those spirits were now to be abandoned.
I was in Egypt when first word of the Oslo agreement leaked out, and I called Mohamed Heikal. Arafat, I suggested, was like a man with a mortgage trying to sell his house back to the bank. “You’re wrong,” Heikal admonished me. “Arafat has already sold the house—twice over!” And from the very start—from those speeches on the White House lawn on 13 September—it was possible to see how Oslo would unravel. Israeli prime minister Rabin spoke movingly of his new “peace partners.” “Let me say to you, the Palestinians, we are destined to live together on the same soil on the same land,” he said. Arafat’s speech was more specific, as if he knew what would lead “this historic hope” to catastrophe. “Enforcing the agreement and moving toward the final settlement, after two years, to implement all aspects of UN Resolutions 242 and 338 in all their aspects, and resolve all the issues of Jerusalem, the settlements, the refugees and the boundaries will be a Palestinian and an Israeli responsibility,” he said.
“All aspects”? And then, a repetition, “in all aspects”? Jerusalem? Settlements? Refugees? He was asking the Israelis for gifts but offering no more than “peace” in return. He called it “the peace of the brave”—Arafat picked up the phrase from Clinton—and probably did not at first realise that this was an echo of General Charles de Gaulle’s “peace of the brave,” the final agreement that gave Algeria its independence. The parallel was more painful than Arafat—or the Israelis—understood.
In Beirut, Chafiq al-Hout, the PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon who organised Haj Amin al-Husseini’s funeral back in 1974, received a phone call from Arafat. “He has changed the charter of the PLO, he has given up the right of return of about three million Palestinian refugees and it was all done in secret,” he cried to me in despair. “It is not my PLO which now exists. Arafat telephoned me and called me ‘brother,’ but I cannot go on. I told him there had been no Palestine National Council meeting to discuss this. I said we did not know the details of this agreement. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 said that the Palestinians could return to homes in what is now Israel. Now Arafat has given it all up. I have resigned. I am no longer an ambassador.”
WHEN SHAKR YASIN lays the front-door key on the table of his Lebanese refugee slum hut, it glows a dull gold, the handle worn smooth, the bit glimmering in the light—as it must have done when he and his family fled their home in Palestine in 1948. From a black tin tube, Yasin, who was only five when he was made a refugee, pulls out a thick, torn wad of British Mandate deeds—British royal coat of arms at the top—to the Yasin family property, a house in the village of Ezzib, 10 kilometres from Acre, and a clutch of citrus groves. “I kept these because I believed I would one day go home,” he says. “But now I know the truth. Arafat has not included the 1948 refugees in his peace plan with Israel.”
Nineteen forty-eight. The date is sprinkled through every conversation in the huge, crammed, boiling, angry camp at Ein el-Helweh in Sidon, through every complaint and every formal speech. Almost all Lebanon’s Palestinians are refugees—or the children or grandchildren of refugees—of the Arab exodus that followed the original partition of Palestine. Some 65,000 of them live in the squalor of Ein el-Helweh. “The television and the papers say this is a wonderful peace but they never mention us,” Mohamed Khodr mutters as he limps along the alleyways that pass for roads in Ein el-Helweh. “Our leaders are liars. They told us we would go home. But the peace agreement will only cover some of the Palestinians who became refugees in the 1967 war. What are we supposed to do?” Khodr was an eight-year-old when he travelled out of Palestine and into Lebanon on the same dilapidated truck as the Yasin family, just four days before the declaration of the state of Israel.
Another 1.5 million of the 1948 refugees were scattered now across camps in Jordan and Syria, a further million in Gaza and the West Bank, some of whom will find themselves in Arafat’s little statelets. But they will not be going “home.” An estimated 3 million Palestinians—approximately half the entire Palestinian population—will not enjoy the “right of return” because their homes were in what is now Israel. In Ein el-Helweh, however, the towns and cities from which the refugees fled, frozen in time, each slum quarter named after the lost towns. Refugees from Acre live in a group of streets called “Acre,” those from Haifa in “Haifa,” those from Hittin in “Hittin.” Yasin lives in “Acre” because this was the nearest town to Ezzib. For twenty-seven years, he was a guerrilla in Arafat’s Fatah army, crossing the Israeli border at night in 1969, surviving the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982, even the camps war of 1985 and 1986, certain of Arafat’s promise of a return to “Palestine.”
“There was never a day we didn’t hope and live in hope,” he says. “One of my brothers was killed in 1981, by a shell fired at Sidon by Israel’s militia allies. We suffered so much, we couldn’t afford to lose hope. My father believed in God and his country. He wouldn’t let himself believe he wasn’t going home. Yes, we are for peace. We want peace. But it must be a decent peace and not this agreement which is unfair to us. I came from Ezzib, my father was from there, my grandfather and great-grandfather are buried there. We must all go back to our villages.”
It is hopeless, of course. Hopeless to explain that Israel would never allow 3 million Palestinians across its frontiers, hopeless to remind 1948 Palestinians that 400 of their villages were destroyed by the Israelis in the two years that followed their exodus, that in most cases their “home” no longer exists. Yasin knows this as a fact but does not comprehend it. His mother, Mariam, remembers the day she, Tewfiq and their fifteen children fled, and the clothes and lentils and oil she left behind in the house—because she thought she would be able to return in a week, a month at the outside.
“It was a village house, whitewashed with a big brown front door and wooden stairs,” she remembers. “It was pretty with the lemon trees round it. But a friend of ours managed to go back briefly some years ago and found that all our homes had been destroyed, even ours. The only building left is an old stone house that was at one end of the village. The Israelis have turned it into a hotel.”
Yasin picks up his key and turns it in his hand, clutching the bit in his fingers as if he is opening a door. “For twenty days now, since we first heard about all this, we’ve been living on our nerves, us Palestinians here,” he says. “Still I don’t know my fate. I hope that in the agreement—somewhere—Abu Amar [Arafat] says there is going to be something for those of ’forty-eight, that we can go back to our homeland.” Yasin weighs the family key in his hand—a key to a house that no longer exists—as if it might provide an answer. “I am the keeper of this key, this treasure, for over forty-five
years. I have safeguarded this metal cylinder containing all these papers and deeds so that one day we could find a solution to our problem . . . I wouldn’t have carried these things for so long—looked after them under shells—if there was no hope . . .”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Last Colonial War
And the Lord spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan, near Jericho, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan; Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it . . . But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.
—The Bible, Numbers 33:50–53, 55
BEN GREENBERGER DOESN’T TRUST the Arabs. He doesn’t trust the Americans. He doesn’t trust a lot of Israeli politicians either. Only God unites the Jewish people with their land. God, I have to say, occupies a lot of space in my Middle East notebooks. It is spring 1992. The Oslo agreement is just eighteen months away. Judaea and Samaria are safe—for the moment.
The land in Greenberger’s case happens to be Arab—it lies just inside the occupied West Bank—but the deputy mayor of the Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, the largest in the West Bank, doesn’t accept this at all. His face betrays not a scintilla of doubt about the propriety of building new Jewish homes on the hills of rock and poppies that stretch out towards the Mount of Olives. His manner conveys more than conviction. The Arabs would claim it was fanaticism, although they would be wrong. Righteousness is the word that comes to mind.
“Of course it’s our land,” he says in his New Jersey accent, pale blue eyes studying my face. How dare I question this assumption? “If Tel Aviv is Jewish then Hebron is more Jewish. It’s unfortunate that other people live there. But we’ll all have to learn to live with that.” It is the Arabs who refuse to compromise, whose leaders are demanding the return of Arab land—“Jewish land,” Greenberger insists—as the first stage in the liquidation of Israel. “I don’t trust them. By all means, let the Palestinian Arabs have “autonomy,” let them govern their own lives, but that does not mean a state. This should all be Israeli. We should have annexed this place in 1967. If we had done so, we would not have these problems with the Arabs now.”
Listening to Greenberger, a forty-two-year-old lecturer in law at the Hebrew University, one keeps asking: Are you sure? And: Are you quite certain? But of course, he is absolutely, irrevocably, morally certain of everything he says. “Every Jewish child who studied his history and Bible recognises this as being the only place which the Jewish people can claim as their home. If Israel today was within its 1967 borders and if Israel was looking with prying eyes towards Hebron, I agree there would be no excuse to start a war for it. But a war was forced on us in 1967. We won and now I find myself in land which I consider mine. So why should I leave?”
There is nothing odd about such views. If Ma’ale Adumim is still expanding— its 16,000-strong Jewish population will grow by 25 per cent in the next year with two-room homes at $90,000 apiece—the settlement of Efrat on the Hebron road, with 3,500 inhabitants, is set to expand almost twice that fast in an area of almost daily confrontation between Arab and Jew. And Bob Lang, native of Manuet, New York, graduate of the University of Wisconsin and resident of Efrat, makes Greenberger sound like a moderate.
“If there is a Jewish people, Judaea and Samaria are their home,” he says. “To tell a Jew he cannot live in Hebron is to deny the existence of the Jewish people and the history of the Jewish people. Ninety per cent of the places mentioned in the Bible are in Judaea and Samaria. So if anything, Judaea and Samaria should form the state of Israel, rather than the coastal strip which is where the Philistines came from—from which we get the name ‘Palestine.’ ” Lang talks with the fierce energy and speed of a true believer, his language at once passionate and biblical. “The land is mine. I feel it in my bones. It’s mine. My grandfather thought he had a home in Germany. He fought for Germany in the First World War but then he fled after Hitler’s Kristallnacht when the synagogues were burned. But here is our land, whether our homes are here or not. It is Jewish land and I feel the history in my bones. I need no other guidebook here but the Bible. When the bulldozers are working to make new homes, they always hit ancient sites—and always those ancient sites are Jewish.”
Of course, there is a problem. More than 1.7 million Arabs also live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were never part of modern Israel—and their first intifada rebellion owed more to the presence of 115,000 Jewish settlers than to any other phenomenon. Not one state recognises Israel’s right to continue holding the occupied territories a quarter of a century after their capture; and although Israel has not annexed them, it has allowed Greenberger and his fellow settlers at Ma’ale Adumim to buy their homes on forty-nine-year leases. Is it any surprise that President George Bush—and we are talking about Bush Senior here, of course—has conditioned U.S. loan guarantees to Israel on a freezing of settlements?
Greenberger and Lang want an end to this shilly-shallying. Forgo U.S. government aid. Ignore Israeli as well as Arab calls for land for peace. Nothing less than outright Israeli sovereignty over the land—annexation—will do. “No wonder we have these problems,” Lang says. “The status quo today is no good. As long as the Arabs living here think they will one day have a Palestinian state, they have no reason to come to terms with us. So Israel should stop the military occupation and annex it all outright and tell the Arabs: ‘Your nationalist rights on this side of the River Jordan are finished.’ The Arabs will accept this when they realise we are serious. After the 1948 war, Arabs in Galilee lived under police control until 1956 when they came to the conclusion that Israel was here to stay. They decided that the only way forward could be by becoming citizens—which they did in 1957.”
If there appears to be an element of generosity buried deep in this ferocious solution, you only have to listen to Greenberger’s version of this scenario to understand its true meaning. “When Arabs in Israel were granted citizenship after 1948,” he says, “it was an evolving process. With a firm hand, that process can be repeated in Judaea and Samaria. If we persevere—once everyone realises there is no turning back—we’ll end this problem.” But what if the Arabs don’t realise this? And what is this “firm hand” of which Greenberger speaks? “Every country has a police force,” he replies ominously. “If there were problems, we’d deal with them.”
It is something of a relief to find Israelis eloquent and brave enough to challenge this colonial mentality, although Dedi Zucker, a liberal member of the Knesset and leader of the Civil Rights Movement, is very much in a minority; he is the sort of man—broad-minded, bespectacled, academic in appearance—whom visitors to Israel seek out to hear what they want to hear. This is our Israel, we say to ourselves when we meet folk like Zucker. This is the Middle Eastern democracy we want to believe in, the one that represents our Western values, the one whose army really does abide by a doctrine of “purity of arms,” that really doesn’t support this loathsome colonial project of building houses for Jews on Palestinian Arab Muslim land. But Zucker has few illusions about the desire of Israeli governments to continue building colonies in the occupied territories, and no doubt at all about what the colonists represent.
“They are a new type of Israeli,” he says. “They have about them the element of victim—of people who think of themselves as victims—despite the fact that these ‘victims’ have potential nuclear weapons. There is an element of the Israeli macho. And another origin is that of reviving the old archetype of the Israeli pioneer who goes to new lands and tries to conquer them by blood, by educ
ation, by bringing children to them. This fits some of the American ethos of going West surrounded by wild enemies . . . In a very narrow way, you can see a settler who lives—and whose kids live—in daily danger. But this narrow perspective does not recognise the fact that the settlers were injected there by the state as fingers of occupation. The fourth element is religious fundamentalism. We are talking about a ‘clan’ whose orientation is the holy books—they are isolated from modernism, in arrogant opposition to Western philosophies and Western achievements.” For Zucker, there is no alternative but re-partition, with two countries achieving part of their nationalist ambitions. “Settlers,” he says sternly, “will have to decide between their Zionism—their ambition to live in the Jewish state—and their desire to live in a place that is religiously important. Most would prefer to live among Israelis.”
Rare indeed are the Israelis who regard the colonists as a threat to the existence of Israel, although Yeshayahu Leibowitz has been warning since Israel’s 1967 victory that permanent occupation of the West Bank would contaminate his country. The ninety-year-old former editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica was once head of the Department of Biological Chemistry and Professor of Neurophysiology at Hebrew University. He is a guest professor in the philosophy department, a role he carries into the logic with which he argues in his small library in East Jerusalem.
