Six Days (50 page)

Dayan told journalists on 25 June that life was returning to normal on the West Bank, that curfews were being reduced, services were being reinstated and food and fuel supplies restored. But the same day ‘responsible witnesses' reported to the British Embassy in Amman that Israeli searches, looting, ‘facilities to leave' and other ‘selective' pressures, particularly in the Old City of Jerusalem, were forcing out well-established middle-class Palestinians. Any hopes the Palestinians had of ‘a reasonable life there' were being destroyed. By mid-June many Arabs were leaving Jerusalem every day from Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Old City from newly captured Jordanian Jerusalem. A British diplomat's ‘houseboy' was among them, because life in his home village of Issawiya, close to Mount Scopus, was difficult, ‘with Israelis shooting off guns in the middle of the night', and also because he was worried that he would not be able to get his Jordanian army pension any more.

The way that the process worked was witnessed by Jesse Lewis, a reporter from the
Washington Post.
Just inside Damascus Gate, Israeli soldiers set up a table, taking names and giving numbers to people who wanted to go to Jordan. A queue had formed, which Lewis joined. When he said he lived in the Old City and wanted to get out, the soldiers gave him a refugee number too. Nearly half the refugees were children. Men were outnumbered by women, who were wearing traditional Palestinian embroidered dresses. Many of them were becoming refugees for the second time. In 1948 a woman called Rashidah Raghib Saadeddin had left her home in Lifta, a village at the western entrance to Jerusalem. (It still stands, as a ruin, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.) Now, with her frail and wrinkled mother and her fifteen-year-old son, she was moving again. She said the Israelis did not want them to live in peace. Another passenger, a man called Abdul Latif Husseini, had come to Jerusalem from Jaffa, which had been the main Palestinian town on the coast, in 1948, when he was eleven. He had planned to get married at the end of June. But the bank where he worked had closed, the house he had rented had been damaged and nearly $1000 worth of furnishings had been stolen or ruined by looters. He told Lewis, ‘I can forget you slapping my face but I will pass this on to my children.'

Just after half-past two in the afternoon trucks and four buses pulled up in front of Damascus Gate. The adults scrambled for places. Babies were passed up afterwards like ‘sacks of rice or sand'. Lewis found a space in the back of one of the trucks. ‘As the convoy left Jerusalem, no one in the truck had much to say except the babies, who were crying. It was after 3 o'clock and there were no Arabs on the street and there wouldn't be until 9 the next morning when the 18-hour curfew ended.' When the Israeli soldiers who were driving the buses and trucks missed the turning to Jericho and went on towards the Dead Sea, one of the women said, ‘See, this is not the way. They are going to kill us.' But, eventually, they made it to the Allenby bridge, which formed a ‘grotesque V in the middle of the river', broken-backed since it was blown up by retreating Jordanian troops. ‘The incline of the bridge was so steep that improvised ladders had been placed along its slanting floor and a rope was strung taut to prevent refugees from falling.'

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 insistence 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'.