Is This Your First War?

by Michael Petrou

  Several days earlier, I had visited the Cave of the Patriarchs in an Israeli car. The drive through the narrow and winding streets in the city’s Muslim neighbourhoods to get to the Jewish one was tense. My Israeli fixer was visibly nervous and cursed herself for not posting some sort of sign on the car indicating that she was a journalist rather than a settler. But it was also a straightforward affair. We descended into a sort of basin in the centre of the city where the settler enclave is located and parked outside the tomb, watched over by Israeli soldiers. Inside, we wandered at will. Several American tourists were there as well. One looked like a college student. She wore a long flowing skirt and a bandana holding brown curls back from her forehead. She nodded and smiled as a rabbi inside explained the tomb’s Jewish history. “This place is part of who we are,” he said.

  Getting to the Cave of the Patriarchs with Mohammad was more difficult. We approached on foot and were turned away at an Israeli army checkpoint. We tried from a different direction and were stopped again. The soldiers here were Bedouin Arabs. Mohammad cajoled and joked with them but was rebuffed. We circled around the enclave, getting hotter and sweatier all the time, and tried to reach the tomb through a covered market in Hebron’s old city. Most of the shops were shuttered and locked. All the checkpoints meant it wasn’t worth the hassle required of vendors and potential customers to simply get to the stalls, so they went elsewhere. An historic and once thriving section of the city was eerily quiet.

  There was a barrier of revolving gates at the far end of the market, closest to the tomb. We were permitted to cross. The street on the other side of the barrier was reserved exclusively for settlers, and three or four Palestinian shop owners with special permits. Because Hebron is such a flashpoint, pro-Palestinian activists occasionally visit and patronize the few Palestinian shops in the Jewish quarter. But merchant Manas Kefishey, whose shop was full of glassware and painted ceramics, said he hadn’t sold anything in five days.

  I asked him whether he thought a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine was possible. He wasn’t interested. “I want all of Palestine to be an Islamic state,” he said. “The two-state solution is a dream. It will never happen.” Kefishey said Jews living in Palestine would be dhimmi. The word literally means protected subjects, but in historical practice has required religious minorities to acknowledge Muslim supremacy.

  “It will be like the Jewish state today, but in reverse. Jews have never had an independent state in history. Why should they have one now?

  “You want to know why I think this?” Kefishey continued. “I sit on my chair right there at the front of the shop, my neighbour beside me. Every day the settlers walk up in front of me and draw their fingers across their throats. Every day. We try to explain this to the soldiers, and they shrug. If they can’t do anything for me, what can they do for Abu Mazen [the Palestinian president, also known as Mahmoud Abbas]?”

  Much of Hebron’s downtown core has already been emptied of Palestinians. Some have lost their homes to security buffer zones. Others are forced out by settler attacks. Kefishey lived two kilometres from his shop. Sometimes negotiating the various checkpoints to get home or get back to work in the morning took him hours. He said he was tired of settler children throwing rocks at him and was thinking about closing the place for good.

  Mohammad and I left Hebron’s old and contested city and had lunch in the Arab section of town. Mohammad knew a place that served a typical Hebron dish of lamb’s neck stuffed with rice and raisins. The restaurant had white paper tablecloths and a fountain in the middle of the dining area. A photograph of the recently executed Saddam Hussein hung on the wall. I asked Mohammad about it. He looked embarrassed.

  “Saddam did a lot of bad things,” he said. “But despite all that, he always supported the Palestinians against Israel. Some people still like him for that.”

  We were pulled over at an Israeli checkpoint on the highway leaving Hebron. Mohammad understood Hebrew fine but refused to speak it when conversing with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. “What do you want?” he said in Arabic to the young man who motioned for him to get out of the car. The soldier again waved him out of the car. Mohammad repeated his question in Arabic.

  It hardly mattered in the end. The soldier who stopped us was a recent immigrant from Ethiopia and barely spoke Hebrew himself. He glanced in our trunk while his partner stepped around the car to get a clear view into the passenger seat and aimed his rifle around my shins.

  We were on our way a few minutes later. “If they’re going to occupy me, the least they can do is learn my language,” Mohammad said. We were following a road that skirted the Israeli security barrier that divides much of the West Bank from Israel. Palestinians criticize it because sections of the barrier runs inside their territory, essentially attaching land captured in 1967 to the rest of Israel. But the wall has also been credited with halting the influx of suicide bombers into Israel. Here it consisted of massive slabs of concrete. It looked impregnable.

  “It’s not about security,” Mohammad said. “I can cross it whenever I want.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Wait a minute. Watch.”

  Mohammad pointed out the car window to ladders that had been thrown up against the wall. “We use them to climb over as soon as it gets dark,” he said. “I was caught once. The soldier was angry, but nothing bad happened to me.”

  We later parked near a large drainpipe about five feet in diameter that ran beneath the barrier. Within the space of two or three minutes, a woman emerged from the Israeli side, and an old man and boy crossed in the opposite direction.

  The West Bank and Gaza are divided between Fatah, a mostly secular nationalist movement that favours negotiating a two-state solution with Israel, and Hamas, an Islamist group that does not. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, Fatah the West Bank. Political actors in Hamas and Fatah say they will eventually have to reconcile. They signed such a deal in May 2011, but as of this writing it remains unimplemented. Many Israelis fear that any peace deal signed with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a member of Fatah, would be meaningless because he doesn’t speak for all Palestinians and would be too weak to deliver on promises opposed by Hamas. An Israeli government spokesman told me Israel was trying to bolster Fatah to marginalize Hamas — a process he compared to creating a West Germany in the West Bank as an example to Palestinians living in the East Germany of Gaza. But the odds of sidelining Hamas completely are long.

  Mohammad and I drove to the West Bank village of Zatara to visit Khaled Tafesh, one of the few senior Hamas members in the West Bank who were not then in Israeli or Fatah jails. Israel described Tafesh in 2002 as “one of the architects of the policy of terrorist attacks adopted by Hamas in Bethlehem.” He spent the next five years in prison and was released shortly before we met him. He has since been detained again and as of this writing in an Israeli jail. Tafesh was living in a large and well-built house with few buildings nearby. A green Hamas flag flew from the roof, and a tile plaque above the door read: “There is no god but God, and Mohammad is the prophet of God.”

  Tafesh was a thin and austere-looking man with a polite and serious disposition and a quiet voice. He had a typical Islamic beard and wore a long, loose-fitting shirt and baggy pants of the style that is more common in the Arabian peninsula and South Asia than the Levant. Tafesh ushered me into his living room, where we sat around a low table. He reiterated Hamas’s position that it was prepared to offer Israel a long-term truce if it would pull out of the territories it occupied in 1967. I asked him if this wasn’t simply a ploy to buy time until Israel might be completely destroyed.

  “There is nothing in this world that is permanent,” he said. “Whether this agreement would last or not depends on what both sides do. It could last thirty years, fifty years, then God will create something we cannot predict. And if Israel is afraid that Hamas will use this time to acquire more arms, well, Israel has nuclear weapons.”

  T
afesh confirmed that Hamas had held indirect talks with Israel, although these were mostly regarding the fate of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier Hamas abducted in 2006 and released as part of a prisoner exchange five years later, after I met with Tafesh. He also said Hamas members had met unofficially with members of the U.S. State Department in Egypt. He admitted Hamas receives financial help from Iran.

  “Iran is an Islamic state, and helping Hamas is its duty,” he said. “If this is so wrong, where is the criticism of the unlimited American support for Israel?”

  I asked Tafesh about reports that Hamas members were being trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps in Syria and Iran.

  “This is an Israeli report.”

  “Is it true?”

  Tafesh shrugged. I repeated the question.

  “I said they are Israeli reports. This means they are not true.”

  Khaled Tafesh.

  Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist organization. Many of its members have the ultimate goal of restoring a unified caliphate, or Islamic empire. Tafesh said Hamas’s primary concern was ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine but spoke favourably of the Muslim Brotherhood’s larger agenda.

  “Why are people so afraid of this?” he asked. “We already have the United States and the European Union. Now there are many Muslims in Europe, the United States, Canada. Maybe in twenty or thirty years, Muslims will be a majority in Canada. Then, if they want to join the caliphate, they would be welcome. The world has never known more merciful conquerors than the Arabs. Under a caliphate, Jews and Christians and Muslims would be equal.

  “We don’t hate anyone because of their religion,” Tafesh continued. “We hold Islam as our message and we hold it as a peaceful one for the whole world. There are Christians and Jews in Islamic countries that we treat like brothers. Look at the West. It’s different there. Muslims have many restrictions. In France, they can’t wear the hijab. Look at Denmark, where Islam and the prophet Mohammad are insulted.”

  “Jesus is insulted all the time in the West. The difference is that Christians don’t riot and burn buildings whenever it happens,” I said.

  If Tafesh was angry, he didn’t show it. He replied in the same subdued voice. “We don’t distinguish between prophets. If they insult Jesus or Mohammad, it’s the same for us. We have respect for all of them.”

  I wanted to challenge Tafesh about Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. It was a difficult conversation to have — partly because of Tafesh’s circumloquacious manner of speaking, and partly because it seemed Mohammad, my translator, was taking the edge off my questions. Several time I heard him use the Arabic word shahid, or martyr, when translating what I asked him about suicide bombers. The word has a more respectful meaning than what I intended.

  “For every action there is a reaction,” Tafesh said. “What makes the Palestinian people suffer with their life? What makes a person prefer death to living? When death and life become equal, sometimes we have to choose. When death and life are equal, what is the difference?”

  “You say ‘we have to choose death,’” I countered. “But it’s not Hamas leaders who are blowing themselves up. It’s young men.”

  “Who told you that? During the past six years, thousands of people of different ages were ready to do suicide bombings. They were ready to go if someone would train them.”

  “But why send them against civilians?”

  “It is not ethical to kill civilians. It is not ethical to kill old people, children. It’s a reaction to what the Israelis do, when they kill our people and bomb our land. Under these conditions it is normal that there would be a reaction.”

  Throughout the interview, one of Tafesh’s sons brought in trays of baklava, tea, and coffee. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of Firas Salahat, a Bethlehem man who was killed in October 2001, reportedly while trying to fire a mortar or rocket that exploded. Tafesh’s son looked to be about nine years old.

  Back in Ramallah, I met with Ali Jarbawi, a professor at Birzeit University, and a man who understood that Israel’s settlement of the West Bank threatened its future. Jarbawi personally favoured the creation of two independent states — Israel and Palestine — “based on the 1967 borders, with minor adjustments that go both ways.” But he thought Israel’s continued settlement of the West Bank was part of a policy of squeezing Palestinians into increasingly smaller enclaves with the ultimate goal of leaving them with “state of leftovers.” This, he said, will backfire, tying Israel so closely to Palestine that it will never be able to extract itself.

  “Do you think that the settlement policy is one-way?” he asked. “It’s an entanglement. Do you think you can put all these settlements and not be entangled with us? How can you imagine having all these enclaves and not be entangled with the Palestinians? Now, you divide the roads and you can have enclaves. But for how long can you continue with this if the end result is not a leftover state? We should tell Israel this: ‘Do whatever you want. Put as many settlements as you want, wherever you want. And we’re not going to talk to you, from now until twenty years. But after twenty years we will go to the table. We will have a model of South Africa. What are you going to do?’ They should understand that unless they give in to a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, they risk becoming a bi-national state.”

  A small number of Israeli Jews — the author Sami Michael is one — welcome the idea of a bi-national state. But most reject such an outcome. They recognize that it would dilute the Jewish nature of their country. Some fear the mass emigration of Jews — voluntary or forced — would follow, effectively ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

  A two-state solution avoids this. It may result in Jews and Muslims in the Middle East living more integrated lives in the future, but not before a nation-to-nation peace is established. “Who cares today where the border is between Holland and Germany?” the photographer David Rubinger asked. His question was rhetorical. Nobody cares, because the border is meaningless and is crossed at will. But such a state of affairs is the result of peace and sovereignty for both nations.

  Achieving something similar for Israel and Palestine is the official position of Fatah, the Israeli government, and all the international actors who have tried to negotiate a peace deal. I personally think it’s the only workable strategy for peace in the region. But among Palestinians in the West Bank, as Jewish settlements multiply and spread, and the chances of establishing a viable Palestinian state fade, the idea of a unified bi-national state gains traction.

  Some no doubt see such an outcome as a step toward expelling Jews from the Holy Land, or at least subjugating those who remain. Others, despite decades of war and resentment, seem to believe reconciliation is possible.

  Abdul al-Fatah Hassan was seventy-five years old when I met him at his home in the Kalandia refugee camp near Ramallah. He wore a sports jacket and a white headdress tied to his head with a black band. After sixty years, Kalandia cannot really accurately be described as a camp. Although poverty is pervasive there, most shelters are made of concrete and brick, and have running water. Hassan’s house — spacious, scrubbed, and immaculate — was nicer than most.

  “You keep it,” he said. “I want to go home.”

  Hassan grew up in Khirbat al-Lawz, an Arab village near Jerusalem. During the civil war that preceded Israel’s May 14, 1948, declaration of independence, Jewish paramilitaries attacked the nearby Arab village of Deir Yassin and massacred more than one hundred of its inhabitants. Hassan’s family heard about the slaughter and moved to Ras Abu ’Ammar, another village. One of his relatives wanted to go back to Khirbat al-Lawz to see if he could recover some food. “Everyone said don’t go alone, but he did. There was a forest nearby, and we found him after looking for about a week. He had been shot in the hands and eyes.”

  Ras Abu ’Ammar was attacked in July. Hassan’s family fled to Bethlehem, then part of Jordan. For a while he used to sneak across
the border into Israel to see the ruins of his old village.

  “We’d go back tomorrow if we could.”

  I looked again at Hassan’s house as I sat in his living room and drank tea. It was full of glass and dark-stained wood. His granddaughter, beautiful and well-dressed, lived with him. It seemed like a comfortable life. He seemed too old to even contemplate starting again. Surely your old house is gone, I said.

  “We’d build a new one. Our land was full of olives. It used to give us fifty tanks of oil a year. That’s a fortune.”

  Hassan said that before 1947, the wars and the expulsions, his family had good relations with Jews who lived nearby. “My brother used to know a Jewish guy in the fruit market. Back then we had a lot of problems with animals wrecking our crops. So this Jewish man gave my brother his gun. In the end, we were never able to shoot the animals that were doing the damage, so we gave the gun back. We trusted each other. Maybe it’s possible to have those days again.”

  Israeli historian Benny Morris has described Zionism as a colonizing and expansionist movement. It was. And Israel’s creation was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of much of the indigenous Palestinian population. This process was less brutal than other mass expulsions of the era. Morris estimates about 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war were deliberately murdered during the 1948 war, with an unknown number of civilians also raped. By comparison, in 1922, the Greek and Armenian population of Smyrna and its environs were driven into the sea by Turkish nationalists in an orgy of rape and murder that left tens of thousands dead and ended a Christian presence on the Aegean coast of Anatolia that had persisted for centuries. That comparatively few are aware of this event speaks to the unique scrutiny to which Israel is subjected. That some insist on comparing the plight of the Palestinians to that of Jews during the Holocaust is obscene. It is nevertheless a dishonest manipulation of history to deny that Palestinians were murdered and driven from their homes during Israel’s creation. For the Palestinians, Nabka, or catastrophe, is an apt description of what happened to them in 1948.