Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Miki Cohen fought in the war, in the campaign in the Negev desert. He recalls what happened:

  After Ben-Gurion declared Independence on May 14, the next day six armies invaded Palestine, and we were at war. They rejected Partition, and they wanted Palestine to become an Arab state.

  What would have happened to the Yishuv? I asked him.

  There were different voices: some said, “We should throw the Jews into the sea,” others said, “Those who were born here can stay, those who came recently should go back to where they came from.”

  We had no army, only the Haganah, which consisted of forty to forty-five thousand people. The Haganah had a small unit, the Palmach, which was the Yishuv’s only so-called standing army: young men and women who trained more than the others did; say, half a month of training, half a month on our own business. We had very basic equipment, only small rifles and guns. I was already in the Palmach, and was fully mobilized in February 1948. My unit became part of the Negev Brigade, because by then it was already clear that Egypt would move into Palestine from the south, and would try to cut the Negev off from the rest of the country. And on May 15, that is exactly what they did.

  There were about twenty small Jewish settlements in the desert, which had been established during the previous twenty years in different locations. Supplies could not get through. We came in to defend them. We were in a besieged area, surrounded by the Egyptian army, a regular army, which had been armed by the British.

  The totality and raw immediacy of the experience of being under fire is hard to recount:

  In the early days, we were stationed near Kibbutz Dorot. Every morning at 7 a.m., we could set our watches by it, five or six Spitfires would come down and throw bombs, fire at us. We were sitting ducks — we didn’t have the weapons to chase them away. This is not something I can tell you as a story. This is morning, day, and night.

  Things were not looking good for the Israelis when a four-week ceasefire brokered by the U.N. began in early June. The invading forces, which had penetrated deep into the territories earmarked by the U.N. for an Arab state, were within twenty kilometres of Tel Aviv. New armaments were arriving, however, as were reinforcements; the end of Britain’s Mandate marked the end of any restriction on Jewish immigration. From the beginning of the ceasefire to the middle of July, the Haganah’s forces increased by over 50 percent. Overall, half the men and women who fought in the war for a Jewish state were survivors of the Holocaust.

  In mid-July, the Palmach attacked the Arab towns of Lydda and Ramle. Although both were part of the Palestinian-Arab state under the Partition plan, the Israelis wanted to secure the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, as well as the prime farming land of the region. After fierce fighting, the Palmach entered Lydda and accepted its surrender. Not wishing to leave a hostile town in their rear, they expelled the population. Spiro Munayyer, who lived in Lydda, wrote later of:

  [Nu]merous bodies lying in the streets and alleys as well as a growing stream of the evicted population, weeping and moaning, carrying only a few light belongings as they crawled along like swarms of ants. At twelve noon, there was a crescendo of bullets and explosions.... The expelled population started running helter-skelter, screaming with fear…. Many were separated from their families.[18] ,‡

  Ramle’s inhabitants too were evicted. The two cities’ populations had swelled in recent weeks with refugees — altogether, over fifty thousand people were expelled. Spiro and his family were some of the very few people who stayed in Lydda after the expulsions. He writes, “… silence descended on the city. We no longer could hear shooting nor the crying of children nor the lamentations of women. It was as though the city itself had died.”[19]

  By the summer of 1948, the tide had turned. Consolidating the territory of their new state, in October the Negev Brigade focused its attention on the invading Egyptian army’s headquarters in the Negev, Bir al-Seba. The Arab town was the administrative hub of the Negev, governed under the British Mandate predominantly by Muslim administrative officers. It had served as a meeting place for the Negev’s many Bedouin peoples and was a centre for trade and manufacturing. Bir al-Seba was not part of the new State of Israel under the U.N.’s partition plan. However, it was deemed strategically valuable, and on October 18, 1948, three Israeli planes began an aerial bombardment of the town.

  Miki and his fellow soldiers moved in after three days. He remembers driving into Bir al-Seba past the steady stream of refugees leaving the town. Some had carts laden down with possessions, others were fleeing on foot. Most local residents had gone; those who had not were rounded up and detained. The women, children, and old men were taken to the border at Gaza and left there. The men were held as POWs in the mosque, from where they were later deported to Gaza and to other POW camps. “The house I stayed in for two weeks had the tablecloth on the table, food still on the stove. I mean, they just left.” Some of the civilians who tried to flee past the roadblocks that the Negev Brigade had set up around the town were shot at and killed, as were some of the detainees in the mosque.[20] The soldiers looted the town, which became a military outpost for the duration of the campaign. Bir al-Seba was renamed after the town’s Biblical antecedent, Be’er Sheva, and a month later, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein came to perform for the troops.

  A week after the taking of Be’er Sheva, Israeli troops from the Golani Brigade surrounded Suhmata, an Arab village in the northern Galilee, not far from the Lebanese border. Some twelve hundred people lived in Suhmata, but this number was swelled by the many hundreds of fleeing Galileans who had taken shelter there in the past months, moving in with relatives or friends, or camping out in the olive groves. The encirclement of the village was incomplete — escape to the south, east, and west was blocked, but the road to the north was left open, the road toward Lebanon.

  Hazneh Sama’an, a young woman at the time, vividly recalls what happened:

  We were fellahin [peasants]. We would sow tobacco, wheat, lentils, barley, broad beans, chickpeas, sesame, figs, sabras [cactus], and grapes. Our neighbour would come and help us work the land, and take a bit for her children. The women and men would work the land together and we would eat our noon meal outside, as we worked. Relations were very good. The neighbours would come and help my father grow tobacco. There was no difference between Christians and Muslims. We had beehives, and my mother would send honey to her neighbours: to Ayisha, and Amneh, and Heshma, and Umm Hussein. I am still in touch with them, and they remember us until today; some of them even call us from America.

  In April, a few months before the occupation of Suhmata, people started to become afraid. We had heard about the massacre at Deir Yassin and about the killings in many other places.

  We did not rely on the [Arab] rescue army. They didn’t have tanks or planes, nothing. They only came and ate at the people’s homes. In Suhmata there were a few young people who resisted, but there was nothing organized. The residents of Suhmata would go on patrols every night to defend the village. They had no arms. I mean, there were very few weapons — old, broken weapons.

  People worried more and more. The Haganah took the villages of Kabri and Jeddin and nothing remained but Maliya. Although they worried, people continued to work. Once when my mother was drawing water from our well near the granary, a man came on a horse and asked her for water for his horses and a bit of straw. He told her, “Auntie, you won’t eat from this grain. You work but others will eat.” And that is what came to be.

  In October, we departed from Suhmata. Before us, the residents of Safurriya and Lubiya and Hittin had already left, everyone would pass by our village. We were in the village, life as usual, but very afraid. I had a small baby and I sat at home. It was during the olive season, my husband and mother went to pick olives. I was at home, cooking, and suddenly I heard a plane, and bombing beside the house. Our neighbour’s granary caught fire and the barn burned down and all his cows died. Halil Aboud was eating breakfast. He got up a
nd ran to see to his wife and children who were working in the garden. The plane was flying very low. It fired on him and he died. The plane circled over the village. People started to run to the gardens and the olive orchards. My uncle Yosef Abu Awad, my father’s brother, was injured. My mother’s uncle was killed.

  When we saw all of this, we gathered our clothes and people started to run.

  They arrested the young people who were with us and told us to go off. All of the residents of the village went. There was one woman, Mohammed’s mother, who was killed by the pool of Deir-Al-Qasi. They caught her before she crossed the road and shot her. We went to the village of Fassuta.

  About forty people remained in Suhmata; elderly people and also young people. They worked in the olive harvest, received 12 grush a day for picking their own olives. They stayed until Christmas. That night the army surrounded the village, it was raining heavily. The Jews brought two open trucks and drove them away. Among the expelled was Zakhiya Hamada, who was sick. On the way she was thirsty and asked for water. My mother gathered the rainwater in her hands and let her drink. After a few minutes she asked them to light a candle because she could not see anything. My mother put her hand on her face, which was cold as ice, because she died. The trucks reached Bir’im. They took the people off and shot at them, and they ran to Lebanon.

  I always dream that we have returned to Suhmata.[21]

  Living as refugees in the nearby village of Fassuta, the Sama’an family shared one room, all thirteen of them. Many refugees would return to their homes at night, to remove what belongings they could carry and to see what had happened to their homes. Hazneh’s cousin Lutfiya, then a sixteen-year-old girl, remembers how her elder brother was hiding close to their house one night when he saw four soldiers moving around inside, and realized they were planting explosives.[22] The house was blown up in front of him.

  Fassuta was occupied by the Israeli soldiers, but not demolished. As for Suhmata, the houses that remained standing were shortly occupied by Romanian Jews, refugees from Europe. Stones from the demolished houses were used to build them a new settlement, which they moved into within a few years, and then the village was destroyed.

  By January 1949, the war was over. Six hundred thousand Jews had carved out a state, which spilled over its Partition borders and remade the map of the Middle East. Ben-Gurion’s Declaration of Independence of May 14, and the military victory which secured it, had ensured the long-yearned-for return of the exiled Jewish people to their ancient Biblical homeland.

  While Israelis celebrate their Day of Independence, Palestinians mourn the same events as the “Nakba,” or “Catastrophe.” Between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were uprooted from their homeland during the 1948 War, a colossal population transfer.§ The Palestinian Arab state promised by the U.N. had disappeared, eaten up by the territorial ambitions not only of the Zionists, but also of Jordan and Egypt. Apart from the heavy fighting in the streets of Jerusalem, Jordanian troops never engaged the Haganah, yet by the end of the war a large territory on the west bank of the Jordan river had been occupied, and was swiftly annexed. Egypt held the Gaza Strip.

  Only 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remained within the borders of the new Israeli state, and a quarter of them were homeless. For them, 1948 means the destruction of Arab Palestine: loss of a society, a culture, and crucially, much of their land. Some 418 villages were depopulated during or shortly after the war,[23] and their empty houses systematically destroyed.

  The vast majority of Palestinian Arab refugees went into exile. Those who had the resources, financial and familial, made it out of the refugee camps in neighbouring countries and began new lives elsewhere in the Arab world, or further afield in Chile, Europe, or North America. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the U.N. body specifically created to deal with the massive exodus of Palestinian Arabs from the new State of Israel, there are now 4.6 million Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Well over a million are still living in refugee camps.¶

  Some 93 percent of Suhmatans crossed into Lebanon and into exile. But the Sama’an family stayed on in Fassuta, the village close to their demolished home. Hazneh and many of her relatives live there today. Lutfiya, together with her two younger brothers, now lives in Haifa. They became “internally displaced” refugees; the bitterness of exile both alleviated and reinforced by the physical remains of their ruined village just an hour’s drive away.

  The new Israel was a country of refugees. Even as the Palestinian Arabs were being displaced, Jewish migrants were finding a new home: 350,000 Jews arrived in Israel in its first eighteen months.

  In March 1949, Time correspondent John Luter travelled through the new state. He noted how “Jews — most of them refugees from Europe themselves — have taken over the Arabs’ communities, where they now work Arab land, live in Arab houses and even use Arab cooking utensils.” The article he wrote from the village of Akir, on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, is a fascinating glimpse into the attitudes of these “new Israelis.” It also gives a foretaste of the social tensions to come: between the new arrivals and the Yishuv; and the foundational fracture between Israeli Arabs and Jews.

  Until last May, Akir’s baked-mud huts were inhabited by some 500 Arab families who worked the nearby vineyards and orange groves, occasionally sniped at a passing Jewish convoy. As the Jewish troops approached, most Arab families fled, the rest were chased out. Today Akir is a community of 300 Jewish families from Bulgaria, Poland, Rumania and Yemen. These new inhabitants have moved in to stay.

  Where the road widens slightly to make Akir’s village square, Jewish children romped around a gnarled sycamore tree last week, playing a popular game, the local version of cowboys & Indians; it is called “Jews & Arabs.” Watching them was an elderly Bulgarian Jew who was selling small balloons from a folding table. Fifty yards away was the two-story stone building where, in old days, Arab fellahin used to sit gossiping over Turkish coffee. Part of one wall of the Arab cafe lay in rubble. The cafe had been hit by an Israeli shell. On the undamaged section of the building was a bright new sign in Hebrew: “Akir Office — General Federation of Jewish Labor.”

  “Six months ago Akir was deserted,” said an Israeli captain. “There wasn’t even a stray cat here. We didn’t consider these Arab villages fit places for our people to live, but we had to have some place to put them.” First the government sent workmen to spray Akir with DDT. Cement was poured over the earthen floors; boards or tin roofs replaced Arab thatching. Water pipes were laid between the courtyards.

  Three months ago the first settlers arrived, each equipped by the government with an iron cot, mattress, two blankets and twelve Israeli pounds ($36). A young Rumanian Jew recently uncovered two metal washpots in his yard. Other settlers heard of it and began spading up crocks of wheat, kitchen utensils and tins of gasoline.

  Life in Akir has few refinements. Moshe Ben Yaacov Libby, a lean, swarthy immigrant from Yemen, lives with his family of five in a rusty, corrugated-iron shelter. They cook Arab style over an open clay oven and eat from a rough board supported by orange crates. Moshe’s wife has found only occasional work picking oranges, and the family’s stake is going for food. But Moshe, who spent three years in a British detention camp in Aden, plans to stay. He says: “The Arabs of Yemen hated us. There we had a three-story house made of stone. But this will be our home.”

  Most of Akir’s Jews come from Bulgaria; the town is jokingly called “Little Sofia.” Nissim Shamle, a Bulgarian electrician with four children, summarized the hopes and complaints of Akir. “We are far from 100% organized, but we see a good beginning,” he said as a crowd of roughly dressed settlers in work caps nodded approval. “Of course there is still the Arab cemetery. We have left that untouched. We have a school and a small synagogue.”

  Nissim seemed to feel that he had been unfairly treated by the Zionists who had preceded him to Israel. “We have not been given the help we ne
ed. In Bulgaria we were Jews. Now here we are considered Bulgarians.” … Asked how they felt about the return of the Arabs, most of Akir’s settlers smiled at such a foolish question. But Nissim, shaking his fist, said: “They won’t come back to this place. We have this by ourselves. It belongs to us.”

  The Israeli government feels the same way about Akir and scores of other onetime Arab villages. Few of the Arab refugees want to return to their ancestral homes in a Jewish state. They have an aversion to it like the attitude of the Jews toward a Europe from which they were driven by rampant nationalism. But if many Arab refugees did want to return, they would not be allowed to do so. Israel has made it clear to the U.N. Conciliation Commission that the door is closed to mass returns of Arabs. The Israelis say they need living room for their own people, 109,000 of whom have entered Israel in the last four months.

  Said an Israeli official last week: “We don’t have room for the Arabs. We want a real peace. If we have a large Arab minority, there might be friction.”[24]

  For sixty years, that same attitude of “not enough room” has permeated the difficult relationship between Israel, which names itself both a Jewish and a democratic state, and its Israeli-Arab citizens, such as the Sama’an family and Dahoud Badr, who now make up some 20 percent of the population.

  Already in 1948 the U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 194 had demanded the return of the Palestinian Arab refugees, as did successive resolutions, supported by the five permanent members of the Security Council, for the next twenty years.**

  After the 1967 War, though, the political terrain shifted, as the United States chose Israel as its particular ally in the Middle East. Now the General Assembly’s continued affirmations of Resolution 194 pass largely unnoticed, and the concept of a “right of return” to Israel is generally understood to refer to the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship to diasporic Jews.