It is a tragedy of both our people. How can I
explain in my poor English? I think the Arabs
have the same rights as the Jews and I think it
is a tragedy of history that a people who are
refugees make new refugees. I have nothing
against the Arabs ... They are the same as us. I
don’t know that we Jews did this tragedy — but
it happened.
Shlomo Green, Jewish refugee from the
Nazis, on learning that his home in Israel
was taken from a Palestinian family in 1948.
Editor’s note: In 1990, Robert
Fisk, the British foreign correspondent in Beirut, published
PITY THE NATION, an enormous narrative of
the war in Lebanon during the 1970s and
1980s, based on his dispatches for the
London Times, for whom then wrote; he is now with the
Independent. The book has just been re-issued. The chapter
printed here offers, as the book does, a view from the ground of
how terrible, deep-rooted, and complex is the unended conflict
in the Middle East. Reading it, we are also moved to ask, What
then is the journalist’s obligation? In the preface, Fisk gives
his answer:
I think I was in Lebanon because I believed, in a somewhat
undefined way, that I was witnessing history — that I would
see with my own eyes a small part of the epic events that have
shaped the Middle East since the Second World War. At best,
journalists sit at the edge of history as vulcanologists might
clamber to the lip of a smoking crater, trying to see over the
rim, craning their necks to peer over the crumbling edge
through the smoke and ash at what happens within. Governments
make sure it stays that way. I suspect that is what journalism
is about — or at least what it should be about: watching and
witnessing history and then, despite the dangers and
constraints and our human imperfections, recording it as
honestly as we can.
However, in recent speeches and articles, Fisk has refined
his definition of the journalist’s task, by quoting, and
agreeing with, his colleague Amira Hass, of Ha’aretz. He
writes: “‘There is a misconception that journalists can be
objective,’ she tells me…. ‘Palestinians tell me I’m objective.
I think this is important because I’m an Israeli. But being fair
and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is
really about – it’s to monitor power and the centres of power.’”
—KM
When David Roberts toured the Holy Land, he was an explorer as
well as an artist, a romantic who filtered the hot and crude
realities of the Middle East through a special screen. As he
journeyed on horseback through Palestine and then up the coast of
southern Lebanon in the 1830s, he was an
adventurer, staying overnight with the governor of Tyre, crossing
the snows of the Chouf mountain chain to the gentleness of the Bekaa
Valley where he sketched the great temples of the Roman city of
Heliopolis.
In the world that he created, there were no wars, no political
disputes, no dangers. His lithographs of Palestinian villages and of
Lebanon, of Tyre and the peninsula of Ras Naqourra, of the temples
of Baalbek, are bathed only in the peace of antiquity, a
nineteenth-century dream machine that would become more seductive as
the decades saw the collapse of the Turkish and then of the British
Empire.
For today, Roberts’ delicate sketches and water-colours of
Ottoman Palestine can be found in the hallways, bedrooms and living
rooms of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon. In the dust
of the great Elin Helweh Palestinian camp just east of Sidon, cheap
copies of Roberts’ prints — of Nablus, of Hebron, of Jericho and
Jerusalem — are hung on the cement walls of refugee shacks, behind
uncleaned glass, sometimes held in place by Scotch tape and glue.
His pictures of Lebanon’s forgotten tranquillity hang in Lebanese
homes too. Volumes of Roberts’ prints of Lebanon and Palestine can
be bought in stores all over Beirut. They can be purchased in almost
every tourist hotel in Israel. They are a balm in which anyone can
believe.
In Roberts’ drawing of Jaffa, the old city seems to bend outwards
with domes and minarets and dusty tracks, watched from a distance by
a pastoral couple with a donkey. At Acre, the ramparts of Richard
Coeur de Lion’s massive fortress stretch down to a tideless
Mediterranean while tiny Arab figures promenade in the dusk past the
serail. From time to time, the dun-coloured hills are washed
with a light green, faint proof for the Palestinians perhaps that
the desert bloomed before the Israelis created their state. In his
epic landscape of Jerusalem executed in April of 1830,
Roberts draws the Holy City in silhouette, its church towers and
minarets, the Dome of the Rock, mere grey outlines against a soft
evening sky. Six Arabs — their headdress and robes suggest they are
Bedouin — rest beside an ancient well of translucent blue water. A
broken Roman column lies beside the pool, its mammoth pedestal a
reminder of the immensity of history. Roberts’ prints have become
almost a cliché, corrupted by overuse, representative of both a
cause and a dream. If it was like that once, why cannot it be so
again, a land of peace and tranquillity?
On the wall of my Beirut home, I have one of Roberts’ lithographs
of Tyre in southern Lebanon. There in the distance is the great
peninsula upon which Alexander built his city, there are the
familiar standing Arab figures, the broken Roman masonry in the
foreground. One afternoon in 1978, I returned
from Tyre after spending 12 hours in the city
under Israeli shellfire. The Tyre from which I had travelled was a
place of unpaved roads and overflowing sewage, of Palestinian camps
and fedayeen guerrillas, of guns and sunken ships and the
sharp clap of explosions. Could I relate this in any way to the
picture on my livingroom wall? Was this part of the Lebanon I knew?
Was it a scene which in later years I would look at with nostalgia,
even longing? For the Roman ruins of Tyre, a few of the old Ottoman
harbour warehouses, the little Christian streets near the port, are
still there. And the Mediterranean, the great pale green sea that
sloshes away at the coastline of Phoenicia, this too still shaped
our movements and our lives, provided the essential and unchanging
link between that distant, unphotographed world of Roberts and the
country in which I now lived.
Reading Roberts’ biography, one learns that the world he visited
was violent: crossing the snows of the Chouf mountains, he
was told that there were gunmen on the road to Baalbek — just as
there are today. But this picture hung there on my wall with the
depth and serenity of a new world. And if I could enjoy the dream,
how much easier for those who were born in Israel or Lebanon or
Palestine — or for those who wished to live in the land that was
Palestine — to believe in it.
Certainly, the Palestinian Arabs can reflect that when Roberts
drew Jerusalem, the Jewish population of the land can have numbered
scarcely 10 per cent of the total. There had
always been a continued physical Jewish presence there over the
centuries; it was for the Jews too an ancient homeland. But eight
years before Roberts sat on that hilltop above the city, there were
only 24,000 Jews living
in Palestine.1 Browse through the second-hand bookshops of Beirut
or Jerusalem, however, and the ghosts begin to appear. In
1835, for example, just five years after
Roberts had sketched the recumbent city of Jerusalem, we find the
French writer Alphonse de Lamartine returning from a visit there to
recommend to his readers in VOYAGE TO THE ORIENT
that since Palestine did not really constitute a country, it
presented remarkable opportunities for imperial or colonial
projects.
Within 60 years, the nineteenth-century
fascination with the Middle East begins to lose its romantic edge,
even for the most mundane travellers. In a broken-backed
1892 edition of John Murray’s
HANDBOOK FOR TRAVELLERS IN SYRIA AND PALESTINE which I bought in an antiquarian bookshop in west Beirut, a
volume with a faded title in gold on its pale red cover, I
discovered an item entitled ‘Muslim Arabs’. These people are, we are
told, ‘proud, fanatical and illiterate ... generally noble in
bearing, polite in address, and profuse in hospitality; but they are
regardless of truth, dishonest in their dealings and secretly
immoral in their conduct.’ The Jews, on the other hand, were in the
guidebook’s opinion ‘the most interesting people in the land ... The
Jews of Palestine are foreigners. They have come from every country
on earth ... of late years there has been a remarkable influx of
Jews into Palestine, but the Turkish government are striving to
hinder their settlement by every means in their power.’
These were the authentic reactions of an imperial Britain to a
land which covered its transit routes to the Indian empire. Britain
encouraged the growth of Zionism in Palestine in the early years of
the First World War because she wanted American Jews to ally their
country in the war against Turkey. Since the Tsar was already an
ally against German, it was politically inconvenient to demand an
end to anti-semitism in Russia. The idea of settling Jews in
Palestine, the British Foreign Office cabled two of its ambassadors
in 1916, ‘might be made far more attractive to
the majority of Jews if it held out to them the prospect that when
in course of time the Jewish colonists in Palestine grew strong
enough to cope with the Arab population they may be allowed to take
the management of the internal affairs of Palestine ... into their
own hands ... Our sole object is to find an arrangement which would
be so attractive to the majority of Jews as to enable us to strike a
bargain for Jewish support.’2
This is cold-blooded business indeed, just as was the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 that gave Britain’s
support to a Jewish homeland providing that ‘nothing shall be done
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. The equally earnest
Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 promising the
Arabs of former Ottoman colonies their independence if they
supported the Allies against the Turks fell into much the same
category, although it was not a promise that was intended to be
kept. As Balfour himself said the following year, ‘in Palestine we
do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes
of the present inhabitants of the country.’ So far as Balfour was
concerned, Zionism was ‘of far profounder import than the desire and
prejudices of the 700,000
Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land [of Palestine]’3 The
slaughter on the Somme and at Passchendaele had helped to bring
about these conflicting pledges, just as a far more terrible
massacre would in the second great European war virtually guarantee
the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. Against these
historical profanities, the descendants of those colourfully dressed
figures in Roberts’ lithographs stood no hope.
The British themselves began their descent of the bloody
staircase the moment Balfour blotted his signature in
1917. As Winston Churchill was to write on a different
occasion, ‘at first the steps were wide and shallow, covered with a
carpet, but in the end the very stones crumbled under their feet.’
One of the men who had to walk down this precarious companion-way
was Malcom MacDonald, the British dominions secretary in
1938, still vainly attempting to reconcile the
desperate promises of the First World War before the outbreak of the
Second, trying to preserve order in the British mandate of Palestine
by restricting Jewish immigration.
Forty years later, I sat in the drawing-room of his home at
Sevenoaks in Kent, watching him shake his head vigorously from side
to side as he contemplated the ruins of his own efforts to resolve
the Palestine problem. The ghosts were more substantial now.
Churchill, a strong Zionist supporter, had fiercely condemned
MacDonald in the Commons in 1938 and continued
his verbal assault afterwards in the Division Lobby of the House of
Commons. ‘Churchill accused me of being pro-Arab,’ MacDonald said.
‘He said that Arabs were savages and that they ate nothing but camel
dung.’ But the British could avoid turning such disputes into
personal grievances with a generosity not available to those who
would ultimately be their victims. ‘I could see that it was no good
trying to persuade him [Churchill] to change his mind,’ MacDonald
said, ‘So I suddenly told him that I wished I had a son. He asked me
why and I said I was reading a book called My Early
Life by Winston Churchill and that I would want any son of
mine to live that life. At this point, tears appeared in Churchill’s
eyes and he put his arms around me, saying “Malcolm, Malcom.’”
MacDonald sat there in his deep armchair, savouring this story, an
old man contemplating lost opportunities. He was to die four years
later. He fussed for a while over a large teapot, pouring both of us
outsize cups of tea. He put down the pot, stared at the floor for a
few seconds and then looked up glowering, pointed his finger at me
in a way that was frightening because it was so sudden. ‘But you are
living now in Beirut,’ he said, ‘because I failed.’
How could he have succeeded? More ghosts, more photographs
intervene. The Yad Vashem memorial on the hills west of Jerusalem is
supposed to commemorate the Holocaust. That word ‘supposed’ may
anger Jewish readers, but Yad Vashem is not so much a memorial as a
political statement. Its documents, its photographs, dictate its
theme: that the Holocaust produced the state of Israel and that
anyone who opposed the creation of that state is on the level of the
Nazis. Thus in the same building as the photographs of
SS officers selecting the Jews on the ramps of
Birkenau are news pictures of British paratroopers ordering the
concentration camp survivors away from postwar Palestine. The
British, it says in effect, were like the Nazis; they too were war
criminals. When I first visited Yad Vashem in 1978,
I found it a place of unanswerable accusation. When I went there in
1987, after my journey to Auschwitz, it seemed
somehow facile, an instrument of propaganda that used the horror of
what happened in Auschwitz and Treblinka and all the other camps to
justify not just the existence of Israel but all that Israel had
done since.
It is also a place of accusation against the Arabs of Palestine.
For there are pictures at Yad Vashem of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
being greeted in Nazi Germany by Heinrich Himmler. The photographs
are perfectly clear. Here we can see Sheikh Haj Amin al-Husseini
shaking hands with the leader of the SS, there
he proudly inspects a volunteer Muslim contingent of the
Wehrmacht. On the wall are his words — an accurate translation —
exhorting the German government to prevent the Jews of Europe going
to Palestine. The inference is clear: the Muslim religious leader of
the Palestinian Arabs is also a war criminal. So why should not his
political successors be war criminals? If the Arab Palestinians who
saw in the Nazis some hope of preventing Jewish immigration into
Palestine were on the same level as the SS,
were not those Palestinians who oppose Israel today equally guilty?
The civil war in Palestine that followed the end of hostilities
in Europe inevitably embraced the tired holders of the imperial
mandate. From the desert of political opposition at Westminster, the
old Zionist Churchill contemplated the murder of British troops by
Jewish gunmen and pronounced Palestine a ‘hell-disaster’. It was far
worse for the Arabs whose homes lay in that part of Palestine in
which the United Nations had decided to locate the new state of
Israel. Those whom Balfour had described as ‘the existing non-Jewish
communities of Palestine’ were about to undergo their first
catastrophe.
The Arab armies that invaded the new Israel were driven out,
together with between 500,000
and 700,000 Arab
Palestinians whose homes had been in that part of Palestine that was
now Israel or in those areas of Arab Palestine that the Israelis
captured. For decades after their War of Independence, the Israelis
claimed that most of the Arab Palestinians had left of their own
free will after-being urged by Arab radio stations to leave their
homes and take sanctuary in neighbouring states until the Arab
armies had conquered the upstart new Israeli nation. Israeli
scholars now agree that these radio appeals were never broadcast and
that the allegations were fraudulent. The Palestinian Arabs left
their homes because they were frightened, often because they had
heard stories — accounts which were perfectly true — of the massacre
of Arab civilians by Jewish gangs.
The result was inevitable. While the Jews of Israel exulted in
their renaissance, the Arabs of Palestine left in despair. From the
camps of Europe, those who had avoided the execution pits and the
gas chambers had at last reached the Promised Land about which their
cantors had sung at Auschwitz. Here, for example, is how the
American journalist I. F. Stone describes the last hours of his
voyage to Haifa, aboard a Turkish refugee ship called the Akbel,
a listing hulk carrying hundreds of concentration camp survivors on
their journey to Palestine. The vessel approached the coastline at
dawn, somewhere to the north of Mount Carmel.
Shortly before dawn I slept for a while on top of the
wheelhouse. I woke to see the dim outlines of a mountain towards
the southeast.
As the light increased and the sun rose, a cry ran over the
ship.
‘It’s Eretz Israel.’
We saw Mount Carmel ahead of us and the town of Haifa
sleeping in the morning sun below us ... The refugees cheered
and began to sing Hatikvah, the Jewish national anthem
... People jumped for joy, kissed and hugged each other on the
deck.4
And here is the militant Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani
recalling an Arab family’s departure from that same country just a
few months later:
At Al-Nakura, our truck parked, along with numerous other
ones. The men began to hand in their weapons to their officers,
stationed there for that specific purpose. When our turn came, I
could see the rifles and guns lying on the table and the long
queue of lorries, leaving the land of oranges far behind and
spreading out over the winding roads of Lebanon. Then I began to
weep, howling with tears. As for your mother, she eyed the
oranges silently.5
The feelings of joy and despair in these two passages are almost
equally balanced, and the Jewish cry of delight on seeing the
shore-line of Palestine in the first and the image of Arab guns and
hopelessness on leaving Palestine in the second are even more
relevant now than they were then. The idea that Israel is the final
and true refuge of all Jews — ‘the first and last line of defence of
the Jewish people’, as Szymon Datner called it — is as credible to
Israelis today as it was in 1948. And amid the
hovels of Sabra and Chatila in Beirut, in Ein Helweh, in the Nahr
el-Bared camp in Tripoli, in Bourj el-Shemali in Tyre or in
Rashidiyeh further south, the guns and the bitterness and tears that
Kanafani witnessed have congealed in hatred.
Henceforth, the many thousands of Arabs who fled — like the few
thousand who stayed and like the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the
West Bank that would shortly be annexed by Jordan — would call
themselves Palestinians. The Jews of Palestine were now Israelis.
And from the ‘land of oranges’, the new exiles arrived in the West
Bank and in Lebanon and in the Kingdom of Transjordan with an
identity — as ‘Palestinians’ — that applied to a country that no
longer existed, that indeed never did exist as an independent
nation. This irony was only accentuated by the refugees’ initial
belief that their exile was to be brief, a few days perhaps, at most
a month, after which — in the manner of other civilians who had
abandoned their homes in the midst of battle — they would return to
their houses and fields to resume the life which had been
interrupted by war.
It was for this reason that many of them carefully locked their
front doors when they left their homes. Those who had time also
diligently collected their most important legal documents — the
deeds of ownership to property, the maps of their orange groves and
fields, their tax returns and their identity papers going back to
Ottoman times — and packed them into bags and tins along with family
heirlooms and jewellery and their front door keys. With luck, their
homes would not be burgled and any disputes that might subsequently
arise over their property would be swiftly resolved on production of
those impressive-looking deeds, some of them so old that they bore
the colophon of the Sublime Porte.
By one of the more subtle cruelties of Middle East history, the
papers and the keys were to prove the most symbolic and most
worthless of possessions to the Palestinians. They acquired a
significance that grew ever more painful as weeks and then months
away from home turned into years. Younger Palestinians —
Palestinians who were born in Lebanon, for example — can remember
how their parents angrily threw the keys away in the early
1950s, how the documents that were guarded
with such care in the initial days of exile were mislaid or
destroyed as their true meaning became clear; because they proved
ownership of a world that had disappeared. For the keys — often made
of thick grey iron, sometimes with decorated handles — were in a
sense a promise of return, a promise that history inevitable broke.
The new owners of those homes forbade any return and then changed
the locks.
Yet among the half million Palestinians now living in Lebanon,
many stubbornly went on cherishing these keys and their titles of
ownership in Palestine. When a Palestinian political identity began
to emerge after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war —
when the West Bank and Gaza Strip were occupied by the Israeli army
— the promise contained in these mundane implements and pieces of
paper was somehow renewed. Reminders of humiliation once again
became priceless possessions, as emotionally valuable as they had
once been legally essential. In Lebanon, where the Palestinian war
against Israel was focused once the PLO’s
guerilla movement was evicted from Jordan in 1970,
they were squirrelled away beneath floors or carpets, sometimes
stored in rusting biscuit tins, broken suitcases and ancient trunks,
often the way containers in which the refugees carried their most
valuable belongings from Palestine in 1948.
Each document is signed by a British mandate official and gives
in detail the figures of sale and settlement in the name of the
Palestinian who inherited or bought the land. Some of the papers are
now torn and others have been heavily creased because they have been
re-read and re-folded so many times over the past 41
years. But each of them, surmounted by the royal coat of arms and
the monogram of King George VI, carries the authority of the British
Crown. Laid across a map of Israel, these documents form a patchwork
of disputed ownership, a matrix of lands from northern Galilee to
Ashqelon for which there are now in existence two perfectly legal
deeds: one, in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Beersheba, proving
irrefutably that the land is now owned by an Israeli, the other — in
Beirut or Amman — showing that the rightful owner is a Palestinian
Arab. Placed next to each other, the documents are both a
territorial and a political contradiction; one is proof of the
existence of Israel, the other carries with it the dream of
Palestine.
The first time I ever saw one of the keys was in the Chatila camp
in Beirut in 1977. I had been interviewing a
family — four young brothers, two sisters, their parents, the
children’s paternal grandmother — about their lives in a city that
was now dominated by the Syrian army. Were they watched by the
Syrian intelligence service? Probably. Had any of the family been
arrested? Perhaps. Did Yassir Arafat truly represent them? Of
course. And then — because the deepest questions curiously acquire
the least importance in such interviews — did they ever really think
they would return to ‘Palestine’? At this, the grandmother stood up
and shuffled into a little hut-like concrete alcove, her bedroom,
and emerged carrying something in a handkerchief. ‘It is from our
home in Haifa,’ she said, unwrapping the cloth. And there was her
key, its gun-metal grey shaft rusted brown but the handle still
gleaming. How many families kept these keys? They did not know. Only
the grandmother was old enough to have lived in Palestine. Her son
and his family regarded the instrument as the key to ‘their’ home,
just as they regarded Haifa as ‘their’ town although they had never
been there.
Over the following three years, I was to see the keys again and,
more often, the deeds of ownership to lost land. In many cases, they
were kept in a container with ageing brown British Palestinian
passports, the last used page of which registered their owner’s
final departure into exile. Before the fighting started in
1948, some Palestinians had even arranged to
take a holiday in case of hostilities and had called at the Lebanese
consulate in Palestine to pick up a visa for Beirut. An agreeable
sort of departure, a legal exit to which no legal re-entry was ever
to be forthcoming. But if it was so easy for me to see this evidence
and to talk to those who had substantial proof of their ownership of
homes in mandate Palestine, surely it would be no more difficult to
go to Israel, find those same homes and — the idea had a special
excitement about it — to knock on those same front doors. Who would
open them?
What I did not realise then — but what I would discover the
moment I embarked on my journey to those front doors — was that I
had touched upon the essence of the Arab-Israeli war; that while the
existence of the Palestinians and their demand for a nation lay at
the heart of the Middle East crisis, it was the contradiction
inherent in the claims to ownership of the land of Palestine
— the ‘homeland’ of the Jews in Balfour’s declaration — which
generated the anger and fear of both Palestinians and Israelis. The
evidence of history, not to mention the physical evidence of those
land deeds, suggested a subject of legitimate journalistic inquiry:
who legally as well as morally had the right to ownership of the
property? To the Palestinians, the question appeared naive, almost
insulting. In their eyes, they were not refugees but legal
inhabitants of Palestine who were illegally exiled. Their homes had
belonged to them, had been taken away from them and were now in the
hands of others. Merely to ask the question was to imply that the
justice of their cause was in doubt. To the Israelis, however, and
to their supporters in the Jewish diaspora, the same question struck
at the very morality of Zionism. To knock on those front doors, it
transpired, was to cast doubt upon the very legitimacy of the state
of Israel.
It mattered not that after weeks of interviews with
35 Palestinian families in Lebanon, I chose to
write about the experiences only of those who had no immediate
connection with the Palestinian guerrilla movement. It proved of no
consequence that I then chose only those four families who still
possessed their original Palestine passports, complete land deeds
and mandate tax returns. The fact that three of these families had
been moderately wealthy in Palestine and had managed to acquire the
same social status in their exile — that they behaved and looked
like millions of middle-class couples in Europe, or indeed in Israel
— only compounded my error. I set off from Beirut for Jerusalem in
the late autumn of 1980; and the moment I
entered Rafi Horowitz’s office in Jerusalem, I realised that I had
set myself no easy assignment. Horowitz was an Israeli government
spokesman, a middle-aged man with an angry, almost bitter way of
explaining what happened to the Arabs of the old Palestine mandate.
Every few minutes, he would break off to apologise for his own
cynicism. ‘You’ve got to realise that the state of Palestine never
existed,’ he said. ‘The Arabs went to war with us in
1948 to destroy our Jewish state. Please excuse us for
winning.’
Outside, in the rainy winter evening, the rush-hour traffic still
clogged Jaffa Road. It had taken almost half an hour to reach his
office along streets jammed with tourist coaches, the Americans
inside staring through the windows at the neon Tel Aviv highway sign
that glowed through the drizzle. The advertisement hoardings, the
posters on the buses, the names above the shops — all were in
Hebrew. A pretty Israeli girl had been selling magazines in the
little paper-shop on the corner. ‘That’ll be two dollars,’ she said.
‘Have a nice day.’ She sounded like a clerk at a Manhattan
bookstore. Could this really once have been Palestine?
It is a question that immediately caused irritation in the office
of Israel’s official spokesman. Ask just who legally owns the land
in Israel — who owns the deeds to the houses and orchards and blocks
of property parcelled out under the British mandate — and the
irritation turns to open annoyance. Horowitz left the room for a
moment and returned with a slim red volume entitled
Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948. It was written by
Moshe Aumann of the Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East and
its 24 pages are sprinkled with quotations
stretching back a hundred years — from Mark Twain and Lamartine to
Lord Milner and the 1937 Palestine Royal
Commission — all of which assert that Palestine was a land of
brigandage, destitution and desert before the mass immigration of
Jews in the late 1930s.
Aumann, for example, quoted Mark Twain’s account of his visit to
the Holy Land in 1867 in which the American
writer spoke of ‘desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is
given over wholly to weeds — a silent mournful expanse ... We never
saw a human being on the whole route.’ Twain is quoted as recording
that ‘one may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human
beings’ and that ‘the hills are barren ... the valleys are unsightly
deserts ... it is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land ... Palestine
is desolate and unlovely.’ The quotations were accurate but one
sensed within Aumann’s text an underlying idea: not just that
Palestine was empty of people — which it assuredly was not — but
that perhaps those people who did live there somehow did not deserve
to do so; that they were too slovenly to use modern irrigation
methods or to plant trees or to build brick houses. That Palestinian
Arabs did cultivate the land in the nineteenth century — as a glance
at Roberts’ lithographs clearly proves — went unnoticed by Aumann,
who concluded his thesis by stating that the contention that
95 per cent of the land of the state of Israel
had belonged to Arabs ‘has absolutely no foundation in fact.’6
To Horowitz, the Palestinians were now refugees, pure and simple.
‘When the entity of the mandate ended,’ he said, ‘two other states —
Jews and Arab — were to have come into existence but the Arab state
did not. It was annexed by Jordan. Of course, Arabs owned land here
legally in what is now Israel. There are Arabs who owned land and
can prove it without any doubt. But these people are now citizens of
Arab states that are at war with Israel and they cannot claim
possession of this land. As a result of losing the war in
1948 — excuse us for winning — the Arabs
became partly a community of refugees. That is part of the Middle
East problem.’
There was a pause in Horowitz’s peroration. Then he leant forward
across his desk. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you people have a habit
sometimes of coming here to Israel with some specific details and
thinking that from them you can deduce some universal truth. Forgive
me for being a little cynical of that.’ There was in reality no need
for his self-proclaimed cynicism. Up in Lebanon, where so many of
the 1948 Palestinian refugees are
concentrated, there is sometimes precious little detail to be had
about the land they once owned.
Even memories have been sealed up. One elderly Palestinian in
Beirut wanted to draw a map of his olive grove for me and spent ten
minutes sketching and re-sketching the roads south of Jaffa. But
after a while, the roads on his map began to criss-cross each other
in a crazy fashion and it became clear that he had forgotten the
geography of his land. ‘I am very sorry,’ he said, ‘but you must
understand it has been a very long time ...’ There is indeed an
opaque quality to the memories that Palestinians like to tell of
Palestine. Many now recall how happily Jews and Arabs lived together
before 1948, although it is a fact that in
some parts of Palestine near civil war existed between the two
communities long before that date. Elegiac recollections are
buttressed by the Roberts lithographs, pictures which have become
part of a deep and dreamlike sleep through which the Palestinians
have passed since 1948.
They bear little enough relation to the land that now lies west
of Jerusalem. In many places, the Arab villages have disappeared,
their names erased from the map. Even the township of Deir Yassin —
notorious in Palestinian history as the village in which Jewish
gangs massacred 250 Arabs, half of them women
and children, in April of 1948 — has vanished.
It is now called Givat Shaul and is a mere suburb of Jerusalem, its
main street a line of petrol stations, garages and highrise
apartment blocks, more like the Edgware Road or Brooklyn than the
scene of a mass murder. Only occasionally can you glimpse the old
Palestine. Near the Latroun monastery, for example, and along the
back road to Ashqelon, you can briefly catch sight of Arab women
picking fruit in the dark orchards, their traditional Palestinian
dresses of gold and red embroidery glimmering amid the heavy
foliage, descendants of the 170,000
Arabs who stayed behind in 1948. Down in the
old Arab quarter of Jaffa, the cosy streets of Roberts’ lithographs
are all but gone. The Arab houses are little more than shacks
separated by acres of devastation where developers have torn down
vacated Palestinian homes. While I was searching for some Arab
property in the area, I had come across three young Palestinians
standing beside a shabby food stall on the waterfront. The three —
all were Israeli citizens — were arguing fiercely among themselves
about a loan of ten Israeli shekels. One was talking in Arabic. But
the other two Palestinians were shouting at each other in Hebrew.
After the Palestinian militancy of Lebanon, it was like staring at
the wrong side of a mirror: Palestine through the looking glass.
Is this the land to which the Palestinians of the diaspora wish
to return? It was not difficult to find the answer in Lebanon. For
every Palestinian who expressed doubts about the worth of returning,
there were hundreds who would go back to what is now Israel if they
had the opportunity to do so, people like David Damiani, a Christian
whose family had been in Palestine since the time of the Crusades.
Sitting on a thin metal chair above one of west Beirut’s noisiest
streets, eyes staring intently through heavy framed spectacles, he
described his family tree with careful pride. Boutros Damiani was
born in Jerusalem in 1687 and his four sons
were consuls there for Britain, France, Holland and Tuscany. The
last consul in the Damiani family was Ferdinand, who represented
Mexico in 1932. David Damiani has an old
photograph of him, a slightly pompous-looking man in a top hat
surrounded by some Jerusalem worthies and an Englishman or two.
‘When Napoleon besieged Jaffa,’ Damiani said, ‘my ancestor Anton
Damiani interceded on behalf of the Muslim population and protected
them from French anger — we have an official certificate from the
sharia court to this effect.’ In the early nineteenth century,
Lamartine stayed with the Damiani family in Jaffa and mentioned them
in Voyage to the Orient, the same book in
which he advertised the colonial possibilities of Palestine. David
Damiani’s father Jean owned olive groves, extensive properties in
Jaffa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and a soap factory which he operated
inside the old Turkish serail on the hill above Jaffa not far
from St Peter’s church. The Damianis had bought the decrepit domed
buildings from the Jaffa municipality and for several decades after
the First World War the name of Damiani was proudly displayed in
English and Arabic over the vaulted gateway where Turkish pashas
Turkish pashas once administered the law.
David Damiani’s memories of the time were those of a schoolboy in
a safe land. He lived with his five brothers, sister and parents in
an old building near the Cliff Hotel in Jaffa and he still
remembered the day in 1935 on which Jean
Damiani bought the first family car, a magnificent light green Buick
saloon costing 350 Palestinian pounds,
equivalent then to the same amount in sterling. Damiani senior
maintained a chauffeur to take him round the family olive groves.
‘Before 1936, the harbour at Jaffa was
flourishing,’ Damiani recalled. ‘There were always 25
or 30 ships moored off the port waiting to
load. It was a prosperous place. Arabs and Jews were happy to live
in Palestine. Everything was in abundance — fruit, vegetables and
foodstuffs of all kinds. People would have lived happily if it
wasn’t for the troubles instigated by the government and the Jewish
Agency.’
It was only when he came to 1936 that
Damiani’s face grew suddenly cold and his hands, until now resting
quietly on his knees, began to move in agitation. ‘I remember the
general strike starting in 1936. It started on
April 19th, a Sunday; and the next day I
didn’t want to go to school. I was fourteen years old. A bus used to
take us to school in the Ajami area of Jaffa but there was no school
that day and I was pleased. It was an Arab strike but we were in a
safe area. It was middle-class.’ Damiani paused here for several
seconds. ‘When the Arab revolt came in 1938,
the Arab leaders used to impose taxes on well-off people. So like
many others, my father went to Beirut to get away. In his absence,
the factory was run by honest workers. I was still at school but at
home I used to look after the accounts for the soap factory. My
father did give money to the Arabs to keep his head.’
With the outbreak of the Second World War, life in Palestine
returned to normal — ‘in a day’, according to Damiani — as old
enemies temporarily cooperated. When the Allies liberated Lebanon in
1941, David Damiani went to the American
University in Beirut to study business administration. It was a
gentle enough life and it took only six and a half hours to travel
home by taxi from Beirut to Jaffa. The first hint that things were
not really changing for the better came in 1945
when, according to Damiani, two Palestinian Jews paid a visit to his
father.
‘They were both prominent Jews in the town. One was called Jad
Machness and the other’s name I can only remember as Romano. They
proposed to my father that he make a list of all our properties in
Palestine so that they could buy them. They said he would then have
to take his family to Switzerland. My father would not accept the
idea. He told them that we were a very ancient family in Palestine
and were much respected. He said that our grandfathers fought for
the Holy Land and that we must stick to the Holy Land. Then Romano
took me to one side — my father was sitting at his desk — and told
me that I had a great future in front of me and that people would be
prepared to sell property to the Damianis. He brought out a list of
thirteen Arab properties that he wanted me to buy and then resell to
the Jews. One of the properties comprised five thousand dunums of
land owned by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem near Nablus. He
told me that if I bought this land at five pounds a dunum, he and
his friends would buy it from me at twenty-five a dunum. He told me
he also wanted me to buy land from an Arab magistrate called Aziz
Daoudi who had an orange grove near Tel Aviv. “You will make two
million pounds,” he told me. “Then you can go and live in
Switzerland with your family.” I told my father and mother about
this and my father said: “Is there anything that you lack? Do you
lack clothes, food or a home? Why should we do such a dirty business
and stain our name, we who for centuries had an excellent
reputation?” I turned Romano down.’
When the United Nations resolved upon the partition of Palestine
in 1947, the Damianis were in Jerusalem,
buying property near Talesanta in the Jewish part of the city. ‘We
thought that if we didn’t like the Arab sector of Jerusalem after
partition,’ Damiani said, ‘we would also have property in the Jewish
sector. We thought that Jerusalem sooner or later would be an
international city. We wanted to put our money in various places so
that if one was not safe, the other would be. We did not think of
going to live abroad or of buying property outside Palestine. We did
not think things would be as bad.’
A year earlier, David Damiani had married Blanche, an
18-year old Nazareth girl, and set up a home
of his own in the Arektenje district of Jaffa. He bought a
two-storey house at the end of a narrow street just off the Tel Aviv
road and furnished it with new tables, chairs and beds. There was a
handsome portico outside and four mock Grecian columns at the back
of the front hall that gave the house a museum-like effect. There
was no street number but in Beirut years later, David Damiani could
remember that his postal address had been Post Office Box No.
582. It was to be the only home he ever owned
in Palestine.
‘You have to realise,’ he said, ‘that we didn’t think in terms of
a Jewish state and an Arab state. We thought the worst that would
happen would be a national partition with Jews and Arabs still
living in their own homes. But from the beginning of December
1947 until April 1948
there was continuous fighting around Jaffa. In early
1948, people started sending their families outside Jaffa to
Nablus, Gaza and Lydda. Some Arabs went to Amman, Egypt, Lebanon or
Syria. In Jaffa, life was rendered very difficult. Water pumping by
the municipality stopped. The electric wires were cut. The British
cooperated with the Jews against the Arabs. Dogs and donkeys were
killed and left in the streets to create a health hazard. The city
was in chaos and we were afraid that armed men would attack us. I
once went to the Ajami police station to ask for protection but the
British constable wouldn’t open the door to me.’
Palestinians find it almost impossible to recall their final
departure from Palestine without considerable emotion, for it was
not only a tragedy for individual families but has become a critical
moment in modern Palestinian history. The Damiani family made their
decision to leave in the third week of April after snipers in Tel
Aviv began shooting into the centre of Jaffa, sending at least one
bullet into David Damiani’s home. They left for Beirut by sea on
25 April.
‘My father originally refused to leave Jaffa,’ Damiani said, ‘But
the rest of our family insisted because we did not want him to be
endangered. We were peaceful people. We did not care very much for
politics. We are still not interested in politics. We locked the
front door of our home just before lunchtime. We carried only
suitcases and clothes and we had a case with our jewellery and the
registry deeds to our lands inside. We never thought we would not be
able to go back. If we had thought that, we would never have left.
We thought we were going for a month or so, until the fighting died
down. We took our front door keys with us but we threw them away
some years ago. They are worthless now ...’
In Jaffa harbour, the Damianis boarded the Italian passenger
cruise ship Argentina, a comfortable vessel which would take
the family on the 16-hour journey to Beirut
port. Damiani still has the tickets for the journey. ‘When we pulled
out of Jaffa, I stood on the stern and looked out over the old
city,’ he said. ‘I could see our soap factory in the serail
on top of the hill and St Peter’s church next to it. Then I did ask
myself if we would see this place again; and when Jaffa started to
disappear to our starboard, I remember I said to myself: “If this
ship could turn round now, I would return to Jaffa.” We were
foolish. It was too late.’
David Damiani said nothing for several seconds after finishing
his narrative but he opened up a battered suitcase and produced from
it his old pale brown British Palestine passport and opened the
document on page six. There, in the top left-hand corner, is an exit
visa. ‘Jaffa Port,’ it says. ‘25-4-48’. It
still retained the same dark blue colour that it had when it was
stamped into the passport by a British policeman 32
years earlier; last exist from Palestine.
David Damiani’s life since 1948 was a
mixture of family bereavement, hardship and moderate business
success. The family spent the summer of 1948
in the Lebanese hill resort of Aley, living on 7,000
pounds they had taken with them from Palestine. By the standards of
other refugees, they were well off. ‘We heard the radio and saw
photographs of the damage in the papers,’ Damiani said. ‘We wondered
who would take care of our orange groves. After about a month, we
realised that a catastrophe had taken place. My father was very sad
all the time; he was an old man without home, property or money. He
died in 1952, a broken man.’ Damiani and his
wife went to Jordan in 1950 while his brothers
looked for work in Beirut. In Amman, he worked for
UNRWA — the newly established United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine refugees — and started a small soap factory,
but the project was not successful. He became a civil servant in
Jordan and then part-owner in a Beirut hotel. In 1949,
he had become a Jordanian citizen and in 1954
secured some family money that had been locked in Jaffa bank
accounts, making him ‘not a rich man, but living’.
Yet he still kept all the family deeds and files. On a clean
parchment headed by the British crest were the deeds to his home in
Jaffa, bought from his father for 3,493
Palestinian pounds and dated 27 October
1947. He was even able to produce the fragile
Turkish deeds to the serail in Jaffa and British documents
proving family ownership of orange groves in Yazour on the main
Jaffa—Jerusalem road (32 dunums), near Holon (76
dunums) and at Beit Dajan (240 dunums) and to
property in Jerusalem, part of which was rented to a British
assistant district commissioner.
‘I once had an opportunity to visit Jaffa again,’ Damiani said.
‘My wife went but I refused to go there. I would see my house
occupied by other people. I am not allowed to dispose of my property
or live in it. If you were not allowed to go back and live in your
country, how would you feel? And if you could go back, would you
stay in Beirut just because you had a nice home there?’
There is something insulting about the way in which a stranger
can visit a place which is forbidden to people with infinitely more
interest in such a journey. If Damiani could go to Jaffa, most of
his fellow exiles are prevented forever from walking in the streets
outside their old houses — or knocking on those front doors. The
nearest a Palestinian in Lebanon can go to his former family home in
what is now Israel is likely to be the orange orchards south of Tyre
or the east bank of the Jordan river. A key or a lifeless deed or a
cheap Roberts reproduction, perhaps a family snapshot or a tourist
postcard of the 1930s, is the nearest that
many Palestinian exiles can move in spirit towards the place they
regard as their homeland. Blessed be the foreign correspondent who
can fly from Beirut to Athens, therefore, and in the same day pick
up an El Al flight from Athens to Tel Aviv and land at Ben Gurion
airport and travel — faster even than the old direct taxi route from
prewar Beirut — to Jerusalem. Doubly fortunate is the journalist who
can within 24 hours leave Beirut and look upon
what is left of the world Damiani lost on that April day when the
Argentina sailed out of Jaffa harbour for Beirut, carrying his
family from Palestine for the last time. It was not difficult to
find the ghosts of that world. The Israelis had turned the Damiani
soap factory into a municipal museum but you could still see the
family’s name in fading Arabic letters on the archway at one end of
the building. The wind and rain on the little hill above Jaffa had
ripped away at the paint but it was just possible to make out the
words ‘David Damiani’ to the left of the broken wooden gate.
The rest of the wall was stained with damp and flaking brown
paint; the winters had cut deeply into the fabric of the old
serail. The museum had taken over the northern end of the
building but the main hall of what had been Damiani’s factory, with
its vaulted roof and tunnels, was in semi-derelict condition, leased
on occasion to a firm of Iranian-born Jews who dealt in Persian art.
The outer windows had been smashed and the cut stone had been
severely fissured. Dust lay thickly over the cracked flagstone floor
and only when I ascended a dangerous staircase did I find a solitary
reminder of the business that helped to make the Damianis one of the
richest Arab families in Jaffa. Against a wall was a corroded iron
trolley that was once used for carrying oil in the factory. It was
perhaps as well that David Damiani had not come back.
The first-floor museum for the Ancient History of Tel Aviv-Jaffa
just round the corner was well cared for, although it recorded not
the Arab history of Jaffa but the Biblical history of the land;
there was an exhibition to illustrate the Israelite Royal Period (930
BC) with references to King David. A large Biblical map of Solomon’s
life lay beneath a quotation from the Book of Chronicles chapter
2 verse 16: ‘And we will
cut wood out of Lebanon, as much as thou shalt need: and we will
bring it to thee in flotes by sea to Joppa; and thou shalt carry it
up to Jerusalem.’ The museum staff knew the name of Damiani,
although it was not recalled with much enthusiasm. ‘Do I know the
history of this building?’ asked the Israeli Jew in the museum
curator’s office. He was a cheerful, tubby-faced man, born in
Australia and still using the broad, flat accents of the Antipodes.
‘This place used to be the Turkish administrative headquarters in
Jaffa. It was one of the most important places in the city. Then
much later it was bought by a very rich Arab Christian family called
Damiani and they turned this building’ — the man paused in humorous
reflection for a moment — ‘into a soap factory. In
1948, this became a Jewish town and we took over the
building.’ The whole structure was now owned by the municipality of
Jaffa and the museum hoped to extend it galleries into the rest of
the building when money was made available.
When I told the museum official that I had met David Damiani, his
eyes opened wider with interest. ‘Does he know this is a museum
now?’ he asked, and then walked over to a glass-fronted bookcase. He
withdrew from it a rare bound second volume of
Palestine Illustrated by Francois Schotten, published in
Paris in 1929. The Israeli flicked through the
pages of photographs, sepia prints of Arab peasants and donkey-drawn
carts clattering through the streets of a forgotten Palestine, until
his thumb came to rest on a picture of workers inside a cavernous
hall. And there, sure enough, was the interior of old Jean Damiani’s
soap factory with a row of moustachioed Palestinians piling up bar
after bar of soap around the walls. Each man in the picture was
staring blankly at the photographer, a bar of soap in each hand as
if caught in the act of some doubtful ritual. ‘When you get back to
Beirut,’ the Israeli said, ‘you must ask Damiani if he’s got that
picture.’
Beneath the hill on which the serail huddles, the great
iron gates of Jaffa port still stand next to a row of small stone
shops, their Arab architecture belied by the Hebrew names above the
windows. David Damiani set off from here with his family in April
1948, and it was not difficult to see how
clearly the old factory and the church above the city must have
stood out on the horizon as the Argentina slipped past the
tide bar and steamed for Beirut.
Finding Damiani’s old home, however, was not quite as easy. The
Israelis had turned the old Arab buildings south of the serail
into a shopping and restaurant precinct, a tastefully laid out
tourist attraction in which the best architectural features have
been preserved. But no one there had ever heard of the Arektenje
area of Jaffa where the newly married Damiani had bought his home.
Nor did the Israelis in the market by the Jaffa clock-tower have any
idea where it was. It was only when I entered the Arab quarter, a
network of dusty roads and wastelands of rubble interspersed with a
few small houses just south of the city, that a Palestinian
remembered the name. He directed me to a main road on the edge of
Jaffa and to a small lane that ran off it to the north. I followed
his directions and down a narrow street came to a cul-de-sac
dominated by a large white house with a portico over the front door.
Jews and Arabs lived together in the street, speaking each
other’s language with some fluency, and it was an Israeli Jew who
first pointed to the white house. An Arab woman, a Palestinian, was
peering from the upper balcony. ‘Was this Damiani’s house?’ he
shouted up to her in Arabic and she replied, in Hebrew, that it was.
A small Palestinian boy led me up some steps to the side of the
building and the woman ushered me inside. It was a light, airy room
with some rural paintings on the wall and two small clean bedrooms
leading off on each side. Very shyly, the woman introduced herself
as Georgette Aboud. She and her husband Louis, a garage owner, had
bought the upper floor from a Jewish family and were bringing up
their four children there. The little boy, Zohair, was sent to make
coffee.
Mrs Aboud led me to the balcony from where it was evident that
many of the surrounding buildings — like those elsewhere in the Arab
quarter — had been devastated, their roofs smashed in and their
windows punched out of their frames. ‘The landlords do that,’ she
said, and pointed to three small cottages that had been vacated and
destroyed within the past 24 hours. ‘Two Arab
families and a Jewish family lived there and the moment they moved
out, the landlords broke the houses. They want to build on the
land.’ Mrs Aboud — she and her husband were both Israeli citizens —
seemed resigned to this gradual destruction of the little mixed
society around their home. But her family owned only the upper floor
of Damiani’s old house. ‘There is an old man living downstairs,’ she
said. ‘We do not usually see him but he is a kind man. He is a Jew.’
It was growing dark and a sharp wind was coming in off the
Mediterranean, blowing up the dust around the house. But downstairs
I rang the bell next to the black steel gates and after a while I
heard someone coming to the front door. The gate opened to reveal an
old man, slightly stooped and staring quizzically at us. We told him
why we had come. ‘If you know the man who owned this house, you had
better come inside,’ he said. And so we followed the old man up the
stone steps beneath the portico and into the long hall.
At the far end it was possible to see four mock Grecian columns,
painted white and glowing in the light of a single bulb. ‘I live
here with my two daughters,’ the man said and sat down carefully in
an armchair beside the columns. There was a little table between us,
piled with books upon which lay an old photograph of a man in
British army uniform standing next to a beautiful young Jewish girl.
‘That was my wife,’ the old man said. ‘I was in the British army
during the war. I have been here eight and a half years now. I
bought this floor of the house from an Arab family. I never knew Mr
Damiani.’
The man spoke in short sentences, as if trying to strain out of
his monologue all but the most essential facts. There was a long
silence and then he said with just a trace of a smile: ‘I am a
sculptor, I am an old man and I am a Jew.’ He wanted to talk. His
name, he said, was Shlomo Green and he had been a refugee from
Romania. He had left his village of Clug on the Romanian-Hungarian
border in 1939 and boarded a ship for
Palestine just before the outbreak of the Second World War. ‘The
British navy caught our ship but we were lucky,’ he said. ‘It was
the last ship from which the passengers were permitted to stay
legally in Palestine. I spent a year and a half in a kibbutz then
joined the English army for five years. I went from Alamein to
Tobruk then to Syria. All my family were sent to Auschwitz. Only my
mother survived. They made her a slave labourer. She told me my
father died in the camp in 1944. I lost about
a hundred relatives in Auschwitz.’
Shlomo Green stopped speaking for a moment. It was a natural coda
in his story. He joined the Israeli army in 1948,
fought at Latroun and in Galilee and joined up again in
1956 and 1967. His wife
had died just over a year earlier; one of his daughters was a
teacher in Tel Aviv, the other a painter, and Shlomo Green was
himself a sculptor of some distinction. He had had 11
exhibitions in Jerusalem and some of his creations lined the walls
of his little home, of David Damiani’s home. Shlomo Green was only
62 but he looked much older.
He walked quickly around the room to show off his sculptures and
then said: ‘Tell me about Mr Damiani. I know nothing about him.’ So
he sat down again and listened to the story of the Damianis, of
their life in Jaffa and of how they fled in 1948,
how David Damiani stood on the stern of the ship off Jaffa port and
wished he could have turned round then and gone back to his home. If
human death is a measure of suffering, then David Damiani would
surely have agreed that he had suffered less than Shlomo Green.
But the old Jew sat for a long time in silence as the wind and
rain in the darkness outside lashed at the windows of Damiani’s old
home. Then he looked up quite suddenly with tears in his eyes. ‘I am
very moved by what you have told me,’ he said. ‘What can I say? I
would like to meet these people. If you can say for me ...’ Here he
paused, but he wanted to go on. ‘It is a tragedy of both our people.
How can I explain in my poor English? I think the Arabs had the same
rights as the Jews and I think it is a tragedy of history that a
people who are refugees make new refugees. I have nothing against
the Arabs. I am living here with Arab people in peace and I have
some friends among them. They are nice people. They were the same as
us. I don’t know that we Jews did this tragedy — but it happened. I
want only one thing: peace for the new generation and progress. How
can I say more than this? I feel at home here.’
In Beirut, I told Damiani of what Shlomo Green had said, of the
warm old house with the mock Grecian pillars still standing in the
front hall. I repeated the details of how so many of Green’s family
had been murdered at Auschwitz. Damiani showed no bitterness. ‘I
wish him happiness,’ he said. ‘Can you tell him that? Can you tell
him please that I wish him happiness?’
It would, however, be an historical untruth to suggest that all
Palestinians felt as generously as Damiani towards those who now own
the lands that belonged to them. Kanaan Abu Khadra was a case in
point, a journalist in mandate Palestine — by all accounts a good
one in a crusading and courageous if rather partisan sort of way —
who founded and edited a newspaper called Al Shaab. In
1946, in the top front page article in the
very first edition of his newspaper, whose title in Arabic means
‘The People’, he urged Arabs to struggle harder to maintain their
land in Arab ownership in Palestine. The page carried a map covered
in dark smudges. ‘These shaded land areas have become the property
of the Jews,’ the caption said. ‘This will become the national
homeland of the Jews.’ It was a prophetic piece of journalism.
Leafing through bound volumes of those old editions in Beirut,
Abu Khadra could still experience the odd moment of journalistic
triumph as old newspapermen tend to do, long after their papers have
died. ‘We had a great paper,’ he said. ‘By 1948,
we had a circulation of 12,000
— the highest in Palestine. I bought a second-hand English flatbed
press and issued shares. We were less than self-supporting but we
were an independent, neutral paper. We were independent of the
Husseinis and the Nashishibis, the big Arab families. It was a
national paper. The Jews hated it but we were not against the Jews.’
Abu Khadra’s heavily boned face and strong rectangular glasses
gave him a slightly fearsome appearance. He was also the kind of
editor who would ask you to check the spelling of a place name or
the age of a politician (he was born in 1920).
He was as exacting in his own business affairs. The old blue
suitcase which he carried out of Palestine in 1948
was still stuffed with his files and documents, all neatly labelled
and dated — land deeds, deeds of sale, taxes, rents and maps of
allotments — together with correspondence with the United Nations
about the ownership of his family’s land. There was a lot of it.
Indeed, the Abu Khadras were one of the largest families in
Palestine, their orchards and property scattered between Jaffa,
Jerusalem and Gaza. There were two Abu Khadra Streets in Jaffa and
there still is an Abu Khadra Mosque in Gaza. The family jointly
owned 12,000 dunums of
agricultural land and about 20 properties in
Jaffa. One of Abu Khadra’s first memories — and one that he went
back to again and again — was of walking with his brothers Rabah and
Anwar through his father’s olive grove in Jaffa to visit the house
of his uncles. The family grew oranges, corn, barley and sugar cane.
‘I used to go there every day when I was a boy. My uncles Fawzi
and Tawfiq lived in two houses joined together, one of which had
been built by my grandfather Ismail. It had three big windows with
iron doors and white walls and you used to go into the house up a
flight of steps because there were shops underneath. My cousin
Ibrahim lived in a two-storey house a few hundred metres away, just
beyond the Tel Aviv-Jaffa port railway line. He had Jewish tenants
in the house.’ In 1937, Abu Khadra went to
study science in Beirut and attended the American University — as
David Damiani was to do four years later — but he did not like the
course and returned to Jaffa, eventually settling for a degree in
journalism at the American University in Cairo.
He started Al Shaab in 1946, with
four full-time staff in Jaffa. He was at his desk at the paper when
the UN passed its resolution to partition
Palestine. He kept working when the war started between the Arabs
and the Jews but his last edition came suddenly on 9
March 1948. ‘We wanted to print a banner
headline above the capture of a Jewish settlement by Lebanese
soldiers,’ he recalled. ‘The British mandate censor, a Jewish man
called Arieh Siev — a nice fellow although we never saw eye-to-eye —
refused to let us print. On the next day, the district commissioner
suspended our paper. My father and mother had died some years before
and I lived with my brother Rabah, my sister Rabiha, my wife Sulafa
and my baby son. It was originally my father’s home; there was a big
hall inside the entrance which was also used as a dining-room. Most
of the house was white. My father had been a great admirer of Kemal
Ataturk — he fought in the Turkish army against the British in Gaza
— and Ataturk’s picture hung in the living-room.
‘About April 15th, my house was mortared.
It was in the middle of Jaffa. Two shells hit the roof and one
exploded in the corridor during the night. By five in the morning,
it was impossible to stay there. We had a car, an English Rover, so
we drove to the southern part of the city. We locked the house up
but we thought we were going back. People say that the Arabs were
told to leave their homes by Arab countries. But in Jaffa it was
panic. The city was being destroyed. Some people left babies behind.
We were being murdered.’ The shelling, according to Abu Khadra, came
from Tel Aviv. The family stayed with relatives for ten days, then
drove to Ramleh where Abu Khadra’s second brother Anwar lived. Abu
Khadra remembered stopping at a gas station and finding three bullet
holes in his car from snipers. Then he went on to Gaza. By this
time, the Egyptian army had entered southern Palestine but Abu
Khadra was to watch them, only a few days later, retreating along
the beach towards Sinai. The family Rover also became bogged down on
the beach road and his brother Anwar suffered a heart attack after
spending a night on the open beach. He died of a second attack a few
months later.
For days, the Abu Khadras lived in a house in Gaza under nightly
air attack. ‘We could not move further,’ he said. ‘We could not move
back home and we had reached the end of Palestine.’ Abu Khadra
became a refugee camp official for the UN in
Gaza, leaving in 1951 to become an
UNRWA officer in Lebanon. He was later to
become owner of a Beirut company that dubbed educational films and
translated technical books into Arabic. Yet he took with him to
Beirut his old suitcase of deeds and taxes, proof that the Abu
Khadras owned their land in Palestine. The documents amounted to a
small archive; they even included his Palestine mandate press cards,
entitling him ‘to pass freely anywhere in Palestine, including areas
in which a curfew has been imposed’. There were 1948
tax receipts from the Municipal Corporation of Jaffa and rental
agreements for the lease of land to the Royal Air Force. There were
deeds for the family home in Jaffa, in the name of his father and
dated 1 August 1930, and
a map of the Abu Khadras’ mortgaged orange orchards at Barqa around
the Wadi al Gharbi on the road from Jaffa to Ashqelon.
‘The groves were just above the sea,’ he said. ‘They were
magnificent oranges, the best in Palestine. These were the original
Jaffa oranges; they were grown in Palestine long before the Israelis
came. From my orchard, I could see the steam trains running down the
coast to Gaza. I used to hear the locomotive’s whistle.’ Abu Khadra
showed little physical emotion when he talked about the past, but
his words were carefully chosen and sometimes very angry. ‘It is
miserable for us to look back on these things. The West says the
Palestinians are better off now and this could be true in some
cases. But it is not the point. Palestine is our home. My
sister-in-law was allowed to visit Palestine a few years ago. She
brought me some oranges from my orchard but I couldn’t eat them. I
threw them away. I don’t realise even now that we will not go back.
My kids want to go for a visit and my daughter wants a picture of
our home ... I was asked if I wanted to go. But I could not stand
the humiliation of crossing the Allenby Bridge — at my age, being
stripped and searched by a Zionist, Jew, a Pole, a Russian or a
Romanian who is living in my country, in my home, asking me
questions and searching me. And it is my country. I think about my
land every day. I remember every stone in my house and every tree in
my orchards. I am not willing to sign any paper that would release
that land to anybody.’
Abu Khadra’s faith in legal niceties was only a gesture. He knows
what has happened to his land. The trains still run along the
coastline south of Jaffa where the family’s old orange groves stand.
It is no longer a steam locomotive but a fast diesel pulling a trail
of red, white and blue carriages, an express that rumbles down to
Ashqelon between the orchards and the sea. I could see it from where
Abu Khadra used to stand at the edge of his fields in Barqa,
although few people knew where Barqa was. ‘Was’ is the correct word;
for Barqa, like hundreds of Palestinian Arab villages, disappeared
after 1948.
The Israeli Jews in the little kibbutz a mile or so away had
never heard of it, but an old Arab woman in a long dark dress
picking fruit pointed up a hill when she heard the name and shrugged
her shoulders. The orchards, now part of a large farming combine,
stretched across a little hill. The Wadi El Gharbi — mentioned in
Abu Khadra’s land maps — elicited a faint response in the woman. It
is buried today, like the village beneath the trees, their branches
heavy with fruit.
The Abu Khadra inheritance in Jaffa was almost equally hard to
find. The house which Kanaan Abu Khadra fled in April
1948 had lain in semi-derelict condition for years, its
windows partly boarded up. The olive grove through which he used to
walk as a boy was submerged beneath a main road and a cluster of
lean-to engineering sheds even before 1948.
But I found the home which his cousin Ibrahim owned next to the Tel
Aviv-Jaffa port railway line. The railway track had been torn up
years earlier — a cutting lined with ivy-covered telegraph poles
marked it now — but the house, in need of a few coats of paint, was
just next to the old railway bridge. One of Ibrahim’s former Jewish
tenants still lived on the second floor.
David, a small, thin, smiling man with a long, sensitive
features, welcomed me to his little home. He and his wife were
Turkish-born Jews who came to Palestine before the Second World War.
They had never left their home, even when the Arab-Jewish front line
ran behind the house in 1948. He well
remembered Ibrahim Abu Khadra. ‘He was a nice enough man,’ David
said. ‘But we saw little of him in 1948. This
house was part of the Jewish front line and although Mr Abu Khadra
never knew it, we had guns and ammunition stored downstairs.
Menachem Begin used to come here during the 1948
battles to this house, and he came up to see us three or four times
during the fighting to have coffee and biscuits with us. He was a
good man, an agreeable man.’
The war had left its mark, too, on the home of the two uncles
whom Abu Khadra so often recalled visiting. Abu Khadra Street had
now become Gerulot Street, but the white-stone house was still
there, with its three fine, tall windows of delicate iron tracery.
The embossed iron doors were rusting and one of them had fallen off
its hinges. On the south wall, there were some faint shrapnel marks;
several deep bullet holes could be seen beside a window. The ground
floor consisted of a key-cutter’s stall and some small shops, just
as it did when Abu Khadra knew it. Up the flight of steps was a very
old door, covered in flaking green paint.
I knocked on it but it was so dilapidated that I could see right
through the door frame and into a large room where a man was sitting
in a kitchen chair, dressed in trousers and vest. He was suspicious
but courteous. ‘Yes, this was Abu Khadra’s house,’ he said. ‘It is
not his house now.’ He was joined at the door by his wife and
daughter. He wanted no publicity and he did not want to talk about
himself. ‘I own this house now,’ he said. So I left, and as I walked
back to my car, the man watched me from the little steel balcony
upon which Kanaan Abu Khadra had played as a boy. His hands were
thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched in the
breeze, a man looking after his home.
At least in Jaffa there had been doors to knock upon. The same
cannot be said for many thousands of Palestinian houses in what is
now Israel. Fatima Zamzam, for example, knew just what had happened
to her home and lands. But from her two-room concrete refugee shack,
she could now just see Palestine. She still called it that; and
indeed, beyond the line of evergreen trees beside the main road
south of the Lebanese city of Tyre, I could see above the coastline
a faint, thin grey line of hills inside Galilee on the other side of
the Israeli frontier. Mrs Zamzam had left her home on the other side
of those hills more than three decades earlier and she had never
been back.
She lived in the Palestinian camp at Rashidiyeh, a wretched four
square miles of breeze-block huts and cabins relieved only by the
occasional tree, a straggling plant hanging from a poorly made brick
wall and an open sewer that snaked uneasily down the centre of the
mud roads. Mrs Zamzam had a tiny garden; a few feet of clay with a
stunted flowering cherry tree that shaded the sandbagged air-raid
shelter. For Rashidiyeh was coming under shellfire or Israeli air
attack almost every day.
She was at first sight a cheerful figure, a plump woman of
65 who wore a brightly patterned dress and
whose curly hair showed around the front of her white scarf. She had
a heavily lined face, a prominent, almost hawk-like nose, but she
had kindly eyes and every so often she would display a vein of sharp
humour that suggested her family had to keep their shoes clean when
they approached her little parlour. When she told me how she came to
be a refugee, she paused reflectively before each statement,
conscious that as a foreigner I might not know the history of
Palestine before 1948.
‘I come from a village called Um Al-Farajh,’ she said. ‘It was in
northern Galilee. My family had three houses in the village. We used
to make olive oil to sell to the other villages around. We grew
wheat and made flour. My husband was Mustafa Zamzam and we had three
orchards — two with olives and one with citrus. We even grew grapes
on the side of our houses. We had all kinds of fruit — we had
everything. In 1944, we had a new house built
just outside the village for my husband and myself. Mustafa got Arab
engineers up from Tel Aviv to build it and it cost about
700 Palestinian pounds. Some English tourists
even came to take pictures of our home. It was a stone house — white
stone — with four rooms upstairs and four rooms downstairs. It was
built in an orchard opposite a place where we used to have our old
house. It was known in the village as the Island Area. We had seven
children — five boys and two girls.’
Mrs Zamzam spoke slowly, a village woman speaking to a stranger,
and without warning she stood up and went to her other room,
returning a minute or so later with a rusting tin. I could still
read the name of the English toffee manufacturer on the lid which
she prised off with a knife. From inside, she took a piece of pale
mauve, floppy parchment. It was the 1915
Turkish deed to her family land, heavily stained by damp, the
corners torn but the wording and the ornate flowered crest still
clearly visible. A Turkish stamp was still affixed to the bottom
left-hand corner. ‘This shows that my family owned the land,’ she
said with a simplicity that might have left even a lawyer silent.
Then she took a cleaner but still crumpled paper from the tin.
Government of Palestine Certificate of Registration, it said at
the top. ‘Land Registry Office of Gelo, Sub-District: Acre. Village:
Um Al-Farajh. No. of Land 18151. No. of Doc
52. Block: Al-Habara Kanel. 19
dunums ...’ The date is 22 October
1947. The document was in the name of Mustafa
Ibn Assaad Shihada Zamzam, Mrs Zamzam’s husband, and when she said
that I recognised this type of British mandate deed Mrs. Zamzam’s
face lit up as if a great discovery had been made. Mr Zamzam was
dead but his widow regarded the land — not without reason under
Islamic law — as rightfully hers.
She said that it never occurred to her or her husband that her
village would be harmed or its people endangered. ‘We used to visit
Jewish people,’ she said. ‘There was never any problem. We took our
sick people to a Jewish doctor. There was a Doctor Kayewe and a
Doctor Natani and there was also a lady doctor called Miriam. They
were good to us. Sometimes we took our goods to sell in Jewish
villages. But one day in 1948, Jewish gangs
stopped a truck from our village. They ambushed the truck and killed
the driver. Jewish women then shot all the men on board the truck.
This happened on the road between Um Al-Farajh and Acre, near the
Al-Insherah orchard opposite Nahariya. So no one went to Acre any
more.’
According to Mrs Zamzam, Jews then began to shell her village.
‘We were surrounded. Other Arabs told us we were surrounded and
should move to another village. We tried to use the date palm trees
to close the roads — we had only eight English .303
rifles in Um Al-Farajh. The Jewish gangs were just outside. I met a
brother-in-law who told me to leave but I stayed another night in
our new house just outside the village. The men stayed behind but we
left next day. I held my son Hassan who was 40
days old and the small children carried the other babies. We took
the keys to the house with us — we lost them here in Rashidiyeh.’
Mrs Zamzam listed the villages through which she travelled — Al
Naher, Al Kabil, Al Nahalie, Tashiha and Al Dear — and then she fell
into a kind of swoon, wailing as if she was mourning a husband or
son and holding her hands to her face. The young Palestinian who had
gathered in the room to hear her story sat quietly, knowing that she
would finish her grief and that this was a ritual even if it was a
deeply felt one. Mrs Zamzam looked up to the wall of the room where
there hung a framed portrait of a young man and woman. The girl was
dark-haired with an attractive but serious face; the man was
painfully innocent, his handlebar mustache and sleeked-down hair
with its sharp parting at odds with his handsome features. It was a
photograph of Mrs Zamzam and her husband taken in
1939, six years after their wedding.
Outside Um Al-Farajh as she fled, she had met her brother-in-law
Mohamed, who had a car, and he returned briefly to her home to get
blankets and clothes for the children. ‘We thought we would only be
away from our village for a few days,’ she said. ‘But the Jews
entered the village. My husband was in the fields and he saw them
blow up our new house. They discovered the olive oil we had left
behind and they took all our olive oil machines. The Jews destroyed
all the village. Even the cemetery was destroyed — my father had
been buried there.’
In May of 1948, the Zamzams crossed the
Palestine border into Lebanon at Naqqoura — where the Palestinian
writer Kalafani was to describe the misery of the refugees — and
rented a house in Tyre for 12 Palestinian
pounds a month. ‘We moved to Baas camp from there,’ she said, ‘We
had only tents for shelter and we tried to make concrete blocks.
Then we cam to Rashidiyeh. I thought I would go home when I left but
it has been a long time. I have been twenty-nine years in camps
now.’
Just as Mrs Zamzam was finishing, there was a shriek from a
home-made air-raid siren in the street and a general movement
towards the door of the little hut. High up in the deep blue midday
sky were the contrails of three Israeli jets. They soared above us
up towards Tyre and then turned southwards over the Mediterranean,
back towards Galilee. Mrs Zamzam watched all this with equanimity. A
year and a half earlier, she had lost her previous camp home when a
shell fired from the Israeli-armed Lebanese Christian enclave to the
south hit the roof. She had lived almost half her life amid
violence.
Throughout our conversation, a loaded Kalashnikov automatic rifle
had lain propped against a wall of her living room, left there by a
youth who had gone off to drink tea. When I asked Mrs Zamzam what
her sons did for a living, a young man interrupted to say that they
all worked ‘for the revolution.’
When I asked Mrs Zamzam whether she would really go back to
Palestine if the frontier was opened, she did not hesitate. ‘We are
waiting to go back. I hope I am still alive to go back to Palestine
again. I would like to die there.’ Mrs Zamzam agreed to let me
photograph her and she sat a little unsteadily beside the wall of
her home just in front of the cherry tree. She stared into the
camera as if she was talking to it. But when I suggested that she
smile, another young man interrupted to answer for her. ‘She cannot
smile,’ he said bleakly, ‘because she has lost her land.’
Mrs Zamzam’s land should have been only 25
minutes’ drive across the international frontier. It was actually
only 15 miles away. But true to the political
contours of Lebanon and what is now Israel, I had to fly to Greece,
then to Tel Aviv and then take a four-hour car journey to see it, a
round-trip of almost a thousand miles. On the way to Mrs Zamzam’s
land, I looked across the same Lebanese border from the Israeli side
and could actually make out in the far distance Mrs. Zamzam’s camp
at Rashidiyeh inside Lebanon. It was a journey that would not have
made Mrs Zamzam happy had she been able to make it herself.
For her land now lay underneath a plantation of banana trees a
few hundred yards down the road from a bricked-up mosque. Her
two-storey white-stone house long ago disappeared. It had vanished
as surely as the name of her village had been erased from the map of
Israel. The Palestinian Arab hamlet of Um Al-Farajh simply no longer
existed.
Just how it came to be extinguished was something of a mystery,
and even the Israelis who live in Ben Ami — the farming settlement
that has been built on the site — had scarcely heard the name. A
young man wearing a yarmulka skullcap and sitting astride a roaring
tractor wiped his brow with his arm when I asked for the location of
Um Al-Farajh. ‘I have never heard of this village,’ he said. ‘Why do
you want to know?’
The mere question had been enough to provoke suspicion. Ben Ami
lies just five miles south of the Lebanese border, well within range
of the Katyusha rockets which were then being fired by Palestinian
guerrillas around Tyre and Rashidiyeh; there were concrete air-raid
shelters with iron doors between the bungalows. Barbed wire
zigzagged in front of the small houses and large Alsatians snarled
at strangers from behind steel fences. The people of Ben Ami were
not frightened but they were prepared for an enemy; and visitors
interested in the Arab-Jewish war of 1948 were
well advised to present convincing explanations for their questions
before they stirred memories too deeply.
‘So you are writing about those things,’ another Israeli said as
he stood in a narrow, shaded lane. ‘There was an Arab village here
but there is nothing left now, you know. All that business is over
long ago.’ His friend, a tall, bearded man in a black vest with a
pair of garden shears in his hand, stared at me without smiling.
‘Whose side are you on?’ he asked. ‘Are you on our side or their
side?’ He did not bother to explain what he meant by ‘their’ side.
In the event, it was a local veterinary surgeon, a woman with a
brisk, hospitable but no-nonsense attitude towards journalists, who
invited me into her home and confirmed that this had indeed been Um
Al-Farajh. She gave me sandwiches and coffee while I told her of Mrs
Zamzam’s flight from the village in 1948. She
listened carefully to the details of the Palestinian woman’s story,
of how Jewish gangs had murdered a truckload of Arab villagers
shortly before Um Al-Farajh was surrounded and of how the Jews then
destroyed Mrs Zamzam’s home, the village and even the little Muslim
cemetery beside it.
‘This certainly was an Arab village,’ the Israeli woman said. She
spoke charitably of what happened so long ago but her attitude was
to grow colder as the evening wore on. She suggested that I speak to
a man who had lived nearby in 1948, and after
some hours he arrived at the house, a middle-aged Israeli with a
lined face and very bloodshot eyes. He spoke only Hebrew and the
woman translated for me. I never knew his name; if I wanted to quote
him by name, I would have to get permission. Neither of them
disclosed from whom this permission would have to be obtained. The
newcomer listened in his turn to the description Mrs Zamzam had
given me of the events that led her to run away from Um Al-Farajh,
occasionally nodding agreement or interrupting to correct her
account.
Yes, he said, it was true that the houses had grapes on the
outside walls. He himself had seen them when he used to bring olives
to the village so that oil could be made from them. Yes, Jewish
doctors did indeed care for the Arab villagers then, although Mrs
Zamzam had mispronounced the names. It was Dr Kiwi not ‘Dr Kayewe’
as Mrs Zamzam remembered, and Dr Nathan not ‘Dr Natani’, but there
was indeed a woman doctor called Miriam just as Mrs Zamzam had said.
Her family name was Beer; all were now dead. But the man was clearly
unhappy about Mrs Zamzam’s memory. Did she really have a two-storey
house? he wanted to know. All the houses in the village had been
small single-storey homes, perhaps only four square metres in area.
He was to become even more disenchanted about Mrs Zamzam’s record of
events.
The first ambush was staged not by Jews but by Arabs, he said. A
bus travelling from Haifa to Nahariya in the early spring of
1948 was stopped by Arabs who took the five
Jewish passengers from the vehicle and cut their throats. Then it
was rumoured that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti, was
travelling from his postwar sanctuary in Lebanon to Acre and there
was an ambush at Insherah on the bus believed to be carrying him.
When shots were fired at two cars accompanying the bus, one of the
vehicles, which had been loaded with ammunition for the Arabs, blew
up. This, the man thought, was the ambush to which Mrs Zamzam had
referred.
‘Um Al-Farajh was not shelled,’ the man said, ‘although the
Jewish forces threw hand grenades near the village of Kubri some
kilometres from here. Mrs Zamzam had accurately remembered the way
she travelled away from Um Al-Farajh but the Jews never destroyed
her village. They never blew up the houses. The mosque is still
standing here and one of the stone-built houses of the village is
still here. You can see it. And the cemetery was not
destroyed. It is still here. Some houses fell down later. Mrs Zamzam
is correct when she says that the villagers put tree trunks on the
road but she seems to have forgotten why this was done. They were
afraid of reprisal because the Arabs had just ambushed a relief
convoy at Kubri. It had been sent to an isolated kibbutz with food
but the Arabs stopped it and killed forty-seven Jews. That is why
Mrs Zamzam left Um Al-Faraih. All she forgot to tell you about was
the killing of forty-seven Jews.’
It is quite true that the Jewish armoured convoy was ambushed
over at Kubri. What is more, the old iron trucks with their armour
plating are still lying rusting beside the old Kubri road just where
they came to a halt in 1948, the wheels
stripped of their tyres but their iron bullet shields still intact.
The rifles with which the Jews defended themselves have been welded
onto the sides of the vehicles as a memorial. A plaque erected by
the Israeli Ministry of Defence pays tribute to Ben-Ami Pachter, the
Israeli commando leader who died in the ambush; which is one reason
why the name Um Al-Farajh ceased to exist and the name of Ben Ami
took its place.
It was also perfectly true, as the Israeli said, that the village
mosque was still standing. Its windows and doors had been sealed up
with breeze-blocks but the Koranic inscription beneath the roof
remained and someone had painted it in the past ten years. The only
surviving house of Um Al-Farajh was now used as a storage shed.
It was not so easy to find the cemetery where Mrs Zamzam’s father
was buried. The same bearded man whom we had already met said that
it lay next to the mosque, behind some barbed wire which had been
put there to protect it. It was impossible to see it now, he said.
But I walked round the barbed wire and crawled inside the little
ground that lay beyond. The Muslim cemetery of Um Al-Faraih was a
field of rubble and undergrowth, distinguished over most of its area
by nothing more than small mounds of earth and scattered, broken
stones. Two cement graves had been smashed open, apparently several
decades earlier. Just as Mrs Zamzam had said — and contrary to what
the Israelis had told me — the cemetery seemed to have been
systematically destroyed.
Beside a new gymnasium not far away, an Arab Israeli was sweeping
a path. Where was Um Al-Farajh, I asked him, and he led me to a
large square of fir trees and pointed to the earth. ‘There is Um
Al-Farajh,’ he said and raised his hands quickly together in the way
you might imitate an explosion. There he left me.
So I walked beneath the trees and found just under my feet pieces
of old concrete and what might once have been bits of wall. There
was what looked like a door lintel. It was cheaply designed, the
kind that villagers would have used in their homes. All this time, I
was watched by three Israeli farmers standing next to a tractor.
It seemed as if the circular ironies of history in Ben Ami were
too strong. The dead Jewish convoy commander had given his name to
the land where Mrs Zamzam’s village once stood, an Israeli hamlet
that was now periodically threatened with rocket-fire from
Palestinian guerrillas, perhaps the same men who as children walked
with Mrs. Zamzam from Um Al-Farajh after the ambush on the Jewish
convoy.
My visit might have ended there if my car had not run short of petrol on
the road south of Nahariya. The gas station attendant was an Israeli
Arab, a young man with light brown hair who assumed I was a tourist
and wanted to know what I was doing in the cold far north of Israel
in winter. I mentioned Ben Ami and Um Al-Farajh and referred
momentarily to Mrs Zamzam, when suddenly the boy’s face lit up. ‘She
is may aunt,’ he said.
And so it was that Osman Abdelal took me from the gas station and
up to a small Arab village called Mazraa, clustered round the ruins
of an old Roman aqueduct. He lived in a small house there with his
brothers and sisters, all Israeli citizens who spoke Hebrew and
lived and worked in Israel. It was Osman’s father Mohamed who had
returned in his car for the clothes for Mrs. Zamzam’s children just
before Um Al-Farajh was finally abandoned by the Palestinian Arabs
in 1948. The family did not want to talk about
politics but they asked about Mrs Zamzam’s health. They never went
near Ben Ami, they said, and smiled at me. What happened to Mrs
Zamzam’s house? I asked. ‘It is gone,’ one of Osman’s older sisters
replied. ‘My mother went to look for it later but it had gone.’
Then what happened to Um Al-Farajh? Osman looked at his brother
and sisters. ‘They blew it up, he said. ‘My family did not see it
but they heard the noise of the explosions. They were already coming
here to Mazraa.’
And so Mrs Zamzam’s family, perhaps irrevocably split by
nationalities, was living only 15 miles apart,
divided by the Israeli—Lebanese frontier. If Osman Abdelal and his
sisters had climbed the furthest hill to the north, they might have
just been able to see Mrs Zamzam’s refugee camp at Rashidiyeh. But
they had never climbed the hill.
There are, of course, specific Israeli laws to stop Damiani and
Abu Khadra and Mrs Zamzam from crossing back in the other direction.
There is Israeli ‘absentee’ legislation and there are land
expropriation laws passed on from the British mandate. Palestinians
with relatives still inside Israel could pay two-week visits — many,
like Damiani’s wife, have gone wistfully to look from a distance at
the homes they once bought and lived in — and the same Israeli
spokesman who referred to the Palestinian Arabs as ‘a community of
refugees’ said that he had himself assisted 40,000
Palestinians to rejoin their families and become Israeli citizens.
Yet most exiled Palestinians instinctively reject the idea of taking
Israeli citizenship in order to return. The spokesman, Rafi
Horowitz, was wrong when he said that Palestinians could not claim
their lands because they were citizens of a country at war with
Israel. Whatever his or her status, a Palestinian can claim
compensation from the Israeli Special Committee for the Return of
Absentee Property. But only about 170 Arabs
had claimed such compensation in five years; making a claim in the
Israeli courts means recognising the state of Israel.
It was a point made to me with some vehemence by Mahmoud Labadi,
who was then official spokesman for the Palestine Liberation
Organisation in Lebanon, a bespectacled figure every bit as urbane
and cynical as his Israeli counterpart. ‘Do you really wonder,’ he
asked me at an embassy function in west Beirut, ‘why we won’t claim
compensation? We don’t want compensation — we want our land.’ He
sipped his champagne (Veuve Clicquot 1976) and
raised his finger in the air. ‘It’s invidious for any Palestinian to
take a cash payment from the Israelis. It undermines our demand for
the return of our homes.’
And he was right, as the Israelis themselves were well aware.
They still hoped in 1980 that the Palestinian
issue — the demands of Palestinians who lost their homes in what is
now Israel — could be dealt with as part of a general Arab—Israeli
peace settlement, that the whole two and a half million Palestinian
diaspora could be given a lump-sum, once-and-for-all payment of
compensation. They do not want the Palestinians back and a glance at
the statistics quickly shows why. Well over two million of that
diaspora regard themselves as victims of the 1948
war; the half million or so who fled Palestine in
1948 have had children — in many cases grandchildren — who
regard themselves as Palestinians. Many Arabs who lost their homes
in what became the state of Israel and settled on the West Bank in
1948 became refugees for a second time during
the Six Day War in 1967. All these people now
regard themselves as having a moral claim to land inside Israel —
which is one reason, of course, why the PLO
was for so long loath to consider a Palestinian nation outside the
boundaries of the Jewish state.
Exactly how much land the Arabs owned in the part of Palestine
that became Israel is still disputed. Moshe Aumann concluded from
original British figures that in 1948 Jews
owned 8.6 per cent of
the land and Arabs 20.2
per cent; of which, he claimed, 16.9
per cent was abandoned by Arabs when they thought the neighbouring
Arab armies were going to destroy Israel.
But there was one man to talk to in Israel who knew more than
anyone else about the land of Palestine. Jacob Manor proved to be
the very opposite of David Damiani or Fatima Zamzam. He was
academically specific and efficient, a thin ascetic man with a
degree in jurisprudence from the Hebrew University and offices in
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Manor held the title of Custodian of
Absentee Property — the word ‘Absentee’ giving the curious
impression that the absent person could not be bothered to return.
He could describe the land registration bureaucracy of the Ottoman
Empire, define the intricacies of land expropriation and run off a
photocopy of the Israeli Absentee Property Law (1950)
in the twinkling of an eye. And everything he did, as he told me
several times in his Tel Aviv office, was strictly according to the
law.
In his possession were copies of almost every British mandate
land registration document, file after file of papers recording in
detail the Arab and Jewish owners of property in pre-1948
Palestine. Ask Jacob Manor about the land that belonged to Mrs
Zamzam’s husband in the village of Um Al-Farajh and he could
immediately explain how it came into the hands of the development
authority and was then leased to the village of Ben Ami. Each
transaction — of which the original owners remained in ignorance —
had involved the transfer of money from one Israeli government
department to another. If the government expropriates land, then it
must pay compensation to the office of the custodian. The custodian
can then in theory pay compensation to the original owner — although
the land, of course, has gone.
The law is so rigorous and so thorough that it would be difficult
to misunderstand the import of the statutory legislation which
governs the property of the Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes
in 1948 and who — by the same law — cannot
return. Manor knew much of this legislation by heart. An absentee,
according to the 1950 Israeli law, includes
anyone who, between 20 November
1947 and the ending of the State of Emergency, was ‘a legal
owner of any property situated in the area of Israel ... and who, at
any time during the said period, was a national or citizen of the
Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, Iraq or the Yemen
or was in one of these countries or in any part of Palestine outside
the area of Israel ...’ An absentee also included anyone who was ‘a
Palestinian citizen and left his ordinary place of residence in
Palestine for a place outside Palestine before 1
September 1948, or for a place in Palestine
held at the time by forces which sought to prevent the establishment
of the State of Israel or which fought against it after its
establishment.’
The definition is broad. For the ‘State of Emergency’ has not yet
ended. And if a Palestinian Arab fled his or her home during the
1948 fighting for an area controlled by Arab
forces — even though the individual did not in any way participate
in the war — Israeli law effectively deprived the owners of their
homes and lands. Jacob Manor made no bones about it. ‘Let us
suppose,’ he said, ‘there is someone called Mohamed and that he was
born and lived in Acre. And let us suppose that in
1948, following the fighting, he left his ordinary place of
residence for a place of insurrection, then he is an absentee — even
if he did not join the Arab forces that were fighting against
Israel.’
There is a further clause in the 1950 law
that permitted Manor to confirm that a man or woman was not an
absentee if that person left his place of residence ‘for fear that
the enemies of Israel might cause him harm or otherwise than by
reason or for fear of military operations’. Manor said he had given
this dispensation on 40 occasions. But the law
did not take specific account of Arabs who left their homes for fear
that Israeli forces might cause them harm — the reason most
Arabs give for their sudden departure. So much, therefore, for the
Damianis, the Abu Khadras and the Zamzams.
Of those who left — well over half a million people — scarcely
any had disinherited themselves by claiming compensation under the
Israeli Absentees Property Compensation Law of 1973.
Only 170 Arabs made successful applications in
five years. The Israelis, of course, do not dispute the legality of
the old British mandate deeds. ‘There is no dispute about the
legality of the mandate papers,’ Jacob Manor said. ‘There is no
dispute about the land unless a claim is made ... compensation for
those who claim it for their land and receive it from the
authorities is calculated according to the value of the property in
1973 plus the difference in the index of
inflation together with four per cent interest.’
Manor sat back in his office chair as he rolled off these
statistics. ‘I am a very liberal man,’ he said. ‘I always take a
positive view towards any claim.’ He himself was an Iraqi Jew and
estimated that 150,000
Iraqi Jews were expelled from their country. ‘They left all their
property. They cam here penniless and made a claim to the Minister
of Justice. We have a list of all the claimants for the future when
there is peace with Iraq.’ Manor holds the figures, too, for those
Jews who lost all their property in Egypt, Yemen and Morocco after
the creation of the state of Israel. The Israelis have in fact
scrupulously recorded every dunum and block of lost Jewish property
in the Arab world so that it can be placed on the scales of
compensation payments when there is any balancing of refugee debts
at that final Middle East peace conference.
The Custodian of Absentee Property did not choose to discuss
politics. But when I asked him how much of the land of the state of
Israel might potentially have two claimants — an Arab and a Jew
holding respectively a British mandate and an Israeli deed to the
same property — he said he believed that ‘about 70
percent’ might fall into this category. If this figure was accurate
— and it should be remembered that over half of Israel in
1948 consisted of the Negev desert — then it
suggested that Arabs owned a far greater proportion of that part of
Palestine which became Israel than has previously been imagined.
Jacob Manor seemed unaffected by this fact. ‘Do you really believe
that the Palestinians want to come back?’ he asked. ‘Most of them
have died. And their children are in good positions now.’
If this extraordinary statement involved a blindness to reality,
it provided no warning of the storm of anger and abuse which my
series of articles in The Times was to
generate among Israelis and their supporters in Britain. At some
length and in careful detail I had told the story of David Damiani,
Kanaan Abut Khadra, Fatima Zamzam and of another Palestinian woman,
Rifka Boulos, who had lost land in Jerusalem. To visit their former
homes and lands had been like touching history. For I had also told
of the lives of those who now lived on or near those lands. Save for
one mention of a PLO official in Beirut — the
spokesman slugging champagne at the diplomatic reception — Yassir
Arafat’s organisation did not receive a single reference in the
thousands of words I wrote. The Times
also carried a long interview with Jacob Manor. But the reaction to
the articles — a series that dealt with Palestinians as individual
human beings rather than as some kind of refugee caste
manipulated by fanatics and ‘terrorists’ — was deeply instructive.
On the day that the last of the articles appeared, the Zionist
Federation staged a demonstration outside the London offices of
The Times, some of their supporters holding placards which
announced that the paper was ‘a new Arab secret weapon’ and that the
PLO would be the next owner of The Times.
Shlomo Argov, then Israeli ambassador in London, denounced the
series as ‘a bold apologia for what is none other than basic
PLO doctrine’. In the letters columns of
The Times, Jewish readers variously suggested that I was ‘making
a serious attempt to undermine the legal basis of Israel’s
existence’ and that the paper had become ‘a platform for the enemies
of Israel’. The general drift of critical correspondence suggested
that the mere publishing of the series was anti-semitic. Argov
himself had written an earlier letter of such hostility that it had
to be returned by the paper because its contents were regarded by
lawyers at The Times as potentially
defamatory. When this was first pointed out to the ambassador, he
said that he could not be sued for libel since he possessed
diplomatic immunity. The Zionist Federation condemned Damiani, Abu
Khadra, Mrs Zamzam and Mrs Boulos as ‘victims of their own
aggression’ who had ‘remained refugees because they are being used
as an instrument of the destruction of the State of Israel.’
Just how such lack of pity could be justified was not vouchsafed.
Eric Graus, the Federation’s honorary secretary, was involved in a
heated argument in the street outside The Times
building with Louis Heren, who was deputy editor of the
paper and a former Middle East correspondent. Heren was actually in
Palestine in 1948 and was one of the first
correspondents to enter Deir Yassin after the massacre of its Arab
residents by Menachem Begin’s Irgun gunmen. He found himself
bitterly telling Graus of the horrors which he had witnessed during
a war in which the Israelis still claim they never committed
atrocities. No comment was made by either demonstrators or critical
readers — or by the ambassador — about the kindness of Shlomo Green,
the old Israeli who showed such compassion towards the Palestinian
in whose former home he was now living.7
Generosity, however, was not an emotion that could be found in
many Palestinian hearts in Lebanon, and the hatred that burned in
1948 was eagerly taken up by a new generation.
I witnessed this phenomenon in tragically symbolic form several
months after The Times had published my
series. In early 1981, the Israelis had staged
an air raid against the Rashidiyeh Palestinian camp — where Mrs
Zamzam had her home — and I drove down to southern Lebanon from
Beirut to report on the attack. The Palestinians had been firing
Katyusha rockets into Galilee, the missiles landing not far from the
Israeli village of Ben Ami where Mrs Zamzam’s Arab village of Um
Al-Farajh had once stood. There had been little damage to Galilee or
Rashidiyeh in the exchange of fire but, not far from the entrance to
the Palestinian camp, I was briefly introduced to a man who was
described as the ‘leader of joint PLO forces’
in Rashidiyeh.
Several seconds passed before I recognised the features of the
PLO officer who was defending the Palestinian
camp and shelling the area around Ben Ami. It was Hassan Zamzam,
Fatima Zamzam’s son, the same Hassan who as a 40-day-old
baby had been carried by his mother out of Um Al-Farajh in
1948 on the family’s road to exile. So now the
children of the dispossessed were attacking the children of those
who had brought such misery to their Palestinian parents. The war
had truly gone full circle.
Notes:
1 Edward Said, Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), p. 9.
2 Among the most carefully researched works on
this period, containing many other examples of Foreign Office
pragmatism, is BRITAIN AND ZION: THE FATEFUL ENTANGLEMENT by Frank Hardie and Irwin Herrman
(Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1981).
3 Quoted in Said,
QUESTION OF PALESTINE,
p. 16.
4 I. F. Stone,
UNDERGROUND TO PALESTINE, AND REFLECTIONS THIRTY YEARS LATER (New York,
Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 205-06.
5 THE LAND OF THE SAD
ORANGES, quoted in DISPOSSED: THE ORDEAL OF THE PALESTINIANS 1917-1980 by David Gilmour
(London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981). Gilmour’s book is among the
most readable accounts of the Palestinian tragedy in Lebanon.
6 Moshe Aumann, LAND
OWNERSHIP IN PALESTINE 1880-1948 (Israel Academic Committee
on the Middle East, undated), pp. 5-8.
7 The complete series of ten articles entitled ‘The Land of
Palestine’ can be found in editions of The Times between 15
and 24 December 1980. Editorial comment, readers’ letters and a
report of the demonstration by the Zionist Federation appeared in
the paper between 23 December 1980 and 20 January 1981.
©copyright Robert Fisk, 1990,
2003
From PITY THE NATION, The Abduction of Palestine
Atheneum Books, (1990); Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books 2002 (pb)
With permission of the Author and Nation Books.
A selected list of links to sites concerning Robert Fisk (Ed.):
Robert Fisk, “Amira Hass: Life under Israeli occupation,” 26
August 2001
Robert Fisk’s articles in
The Independent
The unofficial Robert Fisk website,
maintained by Z Magazine
Robert Fisk, “Oussama
bin Laden ,” Le Monde, 18-09-01
Interview with Robert Fisk, “Four Corners,” Australian
Broadcasting System
PITY THE NATION, Nation Books
For criticism of Fisk as a Palestinian apologist, see
for example,
Andrea Levin (1994)
and “Robert
Fisk’s Orwellian Newspeak.”
A French view of death threats against journalists,
particularly Fisk, for criticizing Israel.
Fisk in Afghanistan: “UK journalist beaten by Afghanistan mob,”
BBC, 9 December 2001
Partial transcript of Robert Fisk speech, Concordia University,
Montréal, Canada, Nov. 17, 2002
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