Six Days (51 page)

The occupation's capacity to create violence was there for everyone who chose to see it. An editorial in the
Washington Post
on 22 October 1967 said it was a ‘bitter pill' for Israel to swallow to ‘to have taken territory to assure security, and then to learn that the security menace has merely been shifted from outside to inside one's borders … [N]o more than any other nation which harbors an alien people and denies them the right of self-determination, Israel cannot expect to avoid the embarrassment and harassment of local Arab resistance.'

There were forty-eight attacks that were considered to be serious terrorist incidents from July to the end of the year along with many more minor ones, as well as eighty-four serious incidents involving Jordanian, Egyptian or Syrian troops. A typical night was spent by paratroopers from Battalion 202 racing round the town of Khan Younis in Gaza on 7–8 July. Earlier in the day they had captured a Palestinian ‘informer' who was with them. At 8:15 p.m. they saw a group of men moving towards the beach. Seven were arrested. One was shot ‘while charging' at one of the soldiers. At 11:30 the informer took them to a house where they found a cache of weapons. At 4:44 a.m. they caught an Egyptian second lieutenant who had been in hiding. At 5:00 the informer tried to take them to an Egyptian captain, but when his house was raided he was gone. From 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. the paratroopers searched an orchard where the informer said fedayeen were hiding. One man escaped, one was captured. At 8:00 a.m. the informer took them to another Egyptian, who they found hiding in a stable. Fifteen minutes later, as they were on their way back to their camp at Gaza City, the informer pointed out another ‘Egyptian', who was arrested.

There were many more serious incidents. September 1967 was much worse for Israelis than many of the months before the war. On the 8th a mine killed an Israeli officer and wounded four soldiers. On the 15th an Israeli train was derailed by sabotage close to the border of the West Bank near Tulkarem. On the 19th a bomb in West Jerusalem wounded seven civilians. There was more sabotage on 21, 22 and 23 of September. On 24 September, the day Eshkol announced the start of settlement in the Occupied Territories, thirteen guerrillas from Fatah, Yasser Arafat's faction, were captured after a gunfight near Nablus. The next day Fatah blew up a house at a farming cooperative in Israel, killing a child and wounding the parents. On 27 September, the day that settlers returned to Kfar Etzion, two border policemen were killed and one wounded in a shoot-out with Fatah, a train was derailed near Gaza by sabotage and three unprimed hand grenades were found outside the prime minister's house.

Casualty figures show clearly how the dangers to Israelis increased after the occupation began. Between June 1965 and February 1967 twelve Israelis were killed and sixty-one wounded in what Israel classified as terrorist attacks. From February until the outbreak of war, when tension was very high, four Israelis were killed and six wounded. But Israeli casualties rose sharply after the occupation began. Between the end of the war and February 1968 twenty-eight Israelis were killed and eighty-five wounded by terrorists. During the same period Israel said it killed forty-five Palestinian gunmen, wounded thirty and detained more than a thousand. By November more than a thousand Palestinian homes had been bulldozed in reprisals. In some refugee camps, all males between the ages of sixteen and seventy were lined up and paraded past men whose heads were disguised by sacks with only their eyes visible through slits. Every time one of them nodded towards a refugee, he was taken away for questioning. The result, according to a British diplomat, was ‘to persuade more families to pack up and trek off to the east'. The spokesman for Brigadier-General Narkiss told a
Sunday Times
reporter, ‘If you know the Arab mentality, you know this toughness is probably good. I don't think they really understand any other language.'

Israel went back to attacking Jordan in reprisals for attacks by Palestinians. The huge and miserable refugee camps in Jordan were the best recruiting and training grounds Yasser Arafat and the other guerrilla leaders ever had. With the West Bank gone a weakened King Hussein had no inclination to rein the Palestinians in. Israel responded by shelling the refugee camps. On 20 November, for example, the Karameh camp in the Jordan valley was attacked by 120 mm mortars and field artillery. The bombardment happened in mid-afternoon on a fine day, when the streets of the camp were crowded and children were returning from school. The casualties were taken to a hospital nearby. Twelve people were dead, including three children, one woman, two Jordanian policemen and six other men. The defence attaché from the British Embassy in Amman, a professional soldier, inspected the corpses and concluded they had been killed by the fragmentation of shells. The wounded included seven children (two of whom were unlikely to live), three women, three policemen and sixteen men, one of whom had both legs amputated while another lost an arm. Israel finally sent tanks and infantry into Karameh, which had become a major base for Fatah, on 21 March 1968. They ran into much heavier opposition than they expected from Arafat's guerrillas and the Jordanian army which had learnt from its traumatic experience of the previous summer. After a day of fierce fighting, 28 Israelis, 61 Jordanians and around 100 Palestinians were killed. For Palestinians the most important legacy of the battle was that it established the legend of Yasser Arafat. Even though most of his men were killed, wounded or taken prisoner, they had stood up to the Israelis in a way that Arab regulars had singularly failed to do nine months earlier.

Some Israelis predicted the shape of the violence to come. In March 1968 an Israeli who had been transported by the British to a Kenyan jail between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one for resisting their occupation told the British ambassador, ‘It would be all too easy to run a truck into the middle of Dizengoff Circle in Tel Aviv in the rush hour and explode a heavy charge causing some 200–300 Jewish casualties.' He thought it was unlikely to happen because the Palestinians were not up to it. In 1968 suicide bombers were still twenty-five years away.

Many Israelis believed that Palestinians would never be capable of organised resistance. A year after the 1967 war, the British journalist Winston Churchill had lunch with an Israeli who had been part of the group that bombed the King David hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. When asked whether Palestinians could ever do something similar to Israelis, he replied, ‘Not a chance.' Unfortunately for Israel's own future, one of the by-products of their crushing victory in 1967 was overconfidence and complacency, and not just about their ability to stop Palestinian terror. Hubris almost led to disaster in 1973 when they ignored warnings that Egypt and Syria were going to attack. It took nearly three weeks of hard fighting and many casualties before the superpowers ended the war. The 1973 war led to the return of the Sinai and peace with Egypt. Israel's relations with Egypt ever since have been cold but correct. Israel stayed in the Golan Heights, Syria is still an implacable enemy, but the 1973 war was followed by a disengagement of forces agreement that has kept the border quiet ever since. When they needed a battlefield in the 1980s, they used Lebanon.

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.