by Adam LeBor
On 5 January 1978, Said was shot dead in his London office by a gunman working for Abu Nidal. He had paid the ultimate price for his belief in co-existence. Said’s family, exiled around the world, mourned his death. ‘Said was a rarity among his siblings, the only one to go to university, while the others worked in their father’s food business or married early,’ says Hasan Hammami. ‘He was one of the earliest Palestinian leaders to conduct serious peace negotiations with the Israelis, inside and outside the government. To this day, I believe his assassination was jointly organised by the Israelis and a PLO faction. Extremists on both sides will stop at nothing to prevent a peace agreement between our people. Said’s life was important because it showed two things; that there were peace activists among Palestinians and Israelis with both a presence and a vision, and that somehow, their blood had to be shed in the path of peace.’ The Israeli diplomat quickly moved out of Berkeley Court after Said’s murder, and the flat was sold. The new purchaser discovered that the long balcony that extended around both flats had been extensively bugged.
With Egypt’s honour sufficiently satisfied by the outcome of the 1973 war, President Sadat took a drastic step for peace. In November 1977 he flew to Israel, and made an historic speech at the Knesset in Jerusalem, calling for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, and proclaiming: ‘It is no use to refrain from recognising the Palestinian people and their right to statehood.’ There were, and are, those in Israel who argue that only right-wing governments can make peace, but Sadat’s appeal for the recognition of Palestinian rights received a chilly reception from Israel’s new leader, Menachem Begin. The former Irgun commander who had directed the attack on Jaffa in April 1948 was elected prime minister in May 1977. Begin had served in the cabinet before, but during the National-Unity government that brought Labour and Likud together between 1967 and 1970. Now the right had triumphed, toppling the leftist establishment that had ruled Israel since 1948.
Unlike in most countries, in Israel the difference between right and left was not primarily to do with economic policies, the role of the market or welfare provision. It was rooted in a schism that dated back to the very first years of political Zionism, and in essence it was about the borders of the future Jewish state and its policies towards the Arabs. Broadly speaking, the early Socialist Zionists believed that large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine would help build a classless society, where Jews would be liberated from both the oppression of capitalism and anti-Semitism. The precise nature of the new state’s relationship with the indigenous Palestinians was never clearly defined, but until 1948 there was a general sense, or hope, that somehow, with goodwill and moderation, an accommodation would be reached. The biggest grouping was Mapai (the Workers’ Party), led by David Ben-Gurion. After 1948 Mapai governed in left-wing coalitions, until it merged with two other parties to form the Labour Party in 1968.
Begin’s Likud Party was rooted in Revisionist Zionism, which called for a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan. The Revisionists were interested not in an accommodation with the Palestinians, but in appropriating their lands (indeed just as the leftist Israeli governments had done after 1948). Begin formed the Herut Party in 1948, when it won just fourteen seats in the 120-member Knesset. In 1965 Herut merged with the Liberals to form Gahal, which in 1973 merged with several other right-wing groups to form Likud. Whatever the name of the grouping he led, Menachem Begin was the unrivalled leader of the Israeli right. Short, belligerent, his world view profoundly shaped by the Holocaust, Begin understood best the new Zeitgeist and the reasons why Labour had lost power. There were the legacies of both 1967 and 1973: the capture of the West Bank and Sinai naturally boosted the maximalist Zionists, who called for the annexation of the new territories, while the initial debacle of the 1973 war was proof of the incompetence of the old guard, who had simply been in power too long. Just as important was Likud’s ability to exploit the deep grievances of the Jews from Arab countries, who had been treated with such patronising indifference on their arrival in Israel. When the Sephardim finally found their voice, they turned to Likud, the natural opposition to the paternalistic Labour Party.
Begin and Likud regarded the West Bank as an inalienable part of the land of Israel, as Jewish as Tel Aviv or Haifa, despite its overwhelmingly Arab population. But while Begin had no interest in giving the Palestinians a homeland, he did want peace with Egypt. Begin travelled to Romania and met with President Ceauçescu, asking him to set up a meeting with President Sadat: Romania was the only member of the Soviet bloc which had not broken off diplomatic relations with Israel after 1967. Moshe Dayan flew to Morocco, disguised as a hippy, to ask King Hassan, who had long maintained clandestine relations with Israel, to do the same.4 Despite their disagreements over the Palestinians, Israel and Egypt continued negotiating through 1978 and 1979. Economics were a major factor: Egypt simply could not afford another war. Following the Camp David Accord of 1978 the two countries signed a full peace agreement in 1979, the first between Israel and an Arab country. The treaty was greeted with fury in the Arab world, Sadat was denounced as a traitor and Egypt was expelled from the Arab League. But the buses were soon running from Tel Aviv to Cairo and the borders were open.
The peace with Egypt was greeted with joy across Israel. But not at 65 Yefet Street, where the pharmacist Fakhri Geday took a very different view. Sadat was a traitor to the Arab cause, says Fakhri. ‘We thought that the Arabs might win the 1973 war. But Sadat made a real mess of it. It was a disgraceful gesture for him to come to Jerusalem. Sadat was an agent of the CIA. I always call him the donkey, the ass. I said so to an Egyptian diplomat, that Sadat is a hamar [donkey], and he will always be a hamar.’ Fakhri often talked politics with a French diplomat. ‘When Sadat was on television he said he knew I was very sad. He took my hand, and told me not to worry, that Sadat will not last long. I told him that it would be a most graceful, glorious day when Sadat is killed. There was another customer in the shop, an Arab man. He said the Israelis were like squatters who have taken the land, and now Sadat has given them permission. I said to the diplomat, look, this man is illiterate, and this is what he thinks. The diplomat agreed.’
Fakhri’s grim wish was granted. In October 1981, Sadat was assassinated by Muslim extremists. When Fakhri visited Cairo he went to the cemetery where Sadat was buried. ‘There was an Egyptian army officer nearby who asked me if I wanted to see Sadat’s tomb. I told him I will go there when I take a laxative, and then I will visit Sadat.’
Mary Chelouche also travelled to Egypt with her husband Shlomo. It was a poignant journey. The Alexandria and Cairo of her youth no longer existed. The Jews and Greeks, White Russians and Italians had all gone. Everything seemed sad and empty, run down, dilapidated. There was no more babel of languages – only Arabic was spoken. Mary and Shlomo made a sentimental journey to Heliopolis, in Cairo. Mary’s father’s Anglo-American Pharmacy still stood on Ibrahim Street. The owner was very friendly and welcoming. ‘Shlomo was very excited about it, but I am not as sentimental as he is,’ says Mary. ‘We bought something and I asked to go into the laboratory. I looked around and it was exactly the same, forty years after my parents had left. Nothing had changed. The owner was very nice. Maybe he thought I wanted to buy it.’ While Mary was looking around the shop she suddenly heard a familiar voice, one she had not heard in four decades. ‘Someone asked, “Mary, what are you doing here?” It was a neighbour of ours. She was very happy to see us. She rang her maid and told her to prepare four coffees. She told me, “Ever since you left life is miserable here, because there are no Jews.”’
On 3 June 1982, four years after the murder of Said Hammami, Abu Nidal struck again in London. Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador, was critically wounded after being shot in the head outside the Dorchester Hotel.5 For Prime Minister Begin this was reason enough to invade Lebanon, to ‘stabilise’ the country. Lebanon had been wracked by civil war since 1975. It was a brutal and vicious conflict, marked by massacres, cruelty and hatr
ed, most of all between the Lebanese Maronite Christians – who were intermittently supported by Israel – and the Palestinians. Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Druse and Maronite Christians, all had their own militias which controlled patchworks of territories. The PLO ran a state-within-a-state in the south and around southern Beirut, with its own army, tax and education system, school and hospitals. For years PLO fighters launched raids against Israel, and fought artillery duels with the Israeli army. Israel bombed and strafed the refugee camps after each terrorist attack.
Despite a ceasefire between the two sides, Begin and his defence minister Ariel Sharon aimed to destroy the PLO and expel it from Lebanon. And so, soon after Abu Nidal shot Shlomo Argov, Ofer Aharoni once again found himself at war. By 1982 Ofer was a family man, married to a Jewish woman from South Africa. They had one daughter, Ella, and lived in Tel Aviv. Ofer had been released from the army in 1974, although like all Israeli soldiers, he was called up for reserve duty for sometimes as much as four months a year. But going to war as a husband and father, at the age of thirty-one, was very different to fighting in 1973 when he was a young man in his early twenties. And this was a very different war: ‘I had a family, and I had another point of view. This was not the same as 1973 because there was no danger to Israel’s survival, but still Lebanon was a mess. If Sharon had said before it started, “We will go right to Beirut and we will save Lebanon from the Palestinians,” I would have said that may be a good idea. But the war turned into chaos and divided Israel in two.’
Operation ‘Peace for Galilee’ began on 6 June. The Israelis reached the southern outskirts of Beirut within a week, pounding the city with artillery and bombing it from the air, causing high civilian casualties. Ariel Sharon pushed for a full-scale assault, and Begin agreed. But when the cabinet voted only nine to eight in favour, he dropped the idea. The war was exacting a high price. Television coverage of the siege of Beirut was eroding diplomatic support, especially in the United States. For the first time, Israel’s domestic consensus on defence collapsed. The country split in two as the ever more vocal peace camp voiced its opposition to the onslaught against Beirut. The fissure was rooted in the days of the Yishuv, between Socialist Zionists and the Haganah on one side, and the Revisionists and the Irgun (and Lehi) on the other. Now it was tearing Israel apart.
A group of army refuseniks formed the Yesh Gvul (‘There is a limit’) protest group and refused to cross into Lebanon. In 1967 or 1973 it would have been unimaginable for soldiers to refuse to serve. Military courts sentenced 168 soldiers to prison, and many more escaped punishment because of its damaging effect on morale. Begin press-ganged the Holocaust into service, further angering many Israelis. He compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler, describing them both as ‘two-legged beasts’ and told his cabinet that the alternative to invading Lebanon was ‘Treblinka’, one of the worst Nazi extermination camps. The writer Amos Oz responded: ‘But Mr Begin, Adolf Hitler died thirty-seven years ago. Unfortunately or not, it is a fact: Hitler is not in hiding in Nabatea, in Sidon or in Beirut. He is dead and gone.’6
Together with his reserve paratroop battalion, Ofer Aharoni was sent to Ein el-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, home to over fifty thousand refugees. By 1982, Ein el-Hilweh was a small city of narrow lanes, winding alleys and jerry-built houses. Like Manshiyyeh, Ein el-Hilweh should have been difficult territory for any invading army to conquer. But the PLO fighters fared poorly against the experienced and better-armed Israelis. Ofer saw combat, but it was nothing like the battle for the Chinese Farm in Sinai in 1973. Ein el-Hilweh was taken, the PLO fighters killed or disarmed. ‘It was not a big battle. We did what we had to do there. In my experience the Palestinians did not fight that well, although people said they did in other places. There were small fire-fights all the time. They shot at us, we shot back at them, until we forced them to stop.’
In the thick of the fighting Ofer had no doubts about his mission to pacify Lebanon. It was only when he was demobilised, and safely back at home in Tel Aviv, that he mulled over what he had seen. ‘When the war was finishing, we went back to Ein el-Hilweh. I watched all the children, how they were playing in the streets and already training themselves to be fighters. They were only five or ten years old but they came up to us, and pretended to shoot us, like they were in a play. I said to the others that, in ten or twenty years’ time, they will be doing this for real.’ In August 1982 the PLO finally left Beirut, and Yasser Arafat set up a new headquarters in Tunis. The prospect of peace seemed more distant than ever.
Aharon Chelouche, the former military governor of Jaffa and the Triangle, did not fight in Lebanon. At sixty-one he was long past military age and after a distinguished career in the police, he had retired. Now it was time, he decided, to do something more uplifting. Aharon decided to become an educator, in the Chelouche tradition of public service. He recalls: ‘I asked myself what was wrong with our education system, and why we had these problems between the Jews from north Africa and the Jews from Germany? We had to focus more on the disadvantaged, and help them improve themselves.’ The answer, he decided, was that too much money was being spent on higher education, and not enough on the formative pre-school years.
Aharon decided to open three kindergartens. ‘I arranged the money, the places, the teachers, but I still wasn’t sure. I asked a friend of mine at Tel Aviv University, in the School of Education, to send some of his people over to check how we were managing, and to suggest any changes that might be needed.’ Aharon’s friend had other ideas. ‘He told me not to bother with kindergartens. He asked me to be the university’s academic secretary. He told me I could take anyone I wanted as a student. I told him that I didn’t know how a university worked. But I read many books, and soon I was so busy with that that I abandoned the idea of opening the kindergartens.’ Aharon accepted the post, and bloomed in his new metier, so much so that he was soon promoted to dean of students.
The thousands of students at Tel Aviv University included many Israeli Arabs. Some sought dialogue, others confrontation. When the clashes between the Arab and Jewish students became too frequent, and academic life was disrupted, one particular gang of four were sent to Aharon Chelouche to be disciplined. ‘They were troublemakers, extreme nationalists. They were bad students, and always having arguments with the other students. Three men, and a woman with curly red hair. We decided that they would not be accepted into the second year. I told her she had to leave, and she began to curse me, cursing the Jews and the Zionists, saying that her family had been in Tirah since the time of Muhammad until today. I could not calm her.’
But at the mention of Tirah, Aharon’s interest perked up. Tirah was a village in the area known as the Triangle. It was there, soon after Israel’s establishment in 1948, that Aharon had bent the rules to allow some of the Samarra family to stay on. Aharon looked at the young woman’s file. Her family name was indeed Samarra, and she was the granddaughter of the Samarra to whom Aharon had granted residence inside Israel. That made her the great-great-granddaughter of Hajj Ibrahim Samarra. Aharon bade her sit down. ‘I told her that her story, that her family had been here since the time of Muhammad, was all lies. I told her the truth, that her family was not from Tirah and had only been there since after the establishment of Israel. She began to cry and begged me to let her stay at the university.’
So turned the wheel of history. Here then, in the century-long relationship between the Chelouche and the Samarra families, was a metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It had begun a century earlier, with an act of kindness by the great patriarch Aharon Chelouche to a lost young Arab boy called Ibrahim Samarra. The state of Israel did not exist. Political Zionism and Arab nationalism had not yet been born. The Arab boy had grown to become a person of substance himself. The code of hospitality ensured that, when the Chelouches’ world was turned upside down in 1917, Hajj Ibrahim Samarra came to their rescue. For almost twenty years thereafter, Hajj Ibrahim had sent an annual camel train to the Ch
elouche house. With mutual respect and understanding, perhaps Jews and Arabs could live together in Palestine. But after the Arab Revolt in 1936, the camel trains stopped. The families lost touch and the long-standing connection was broken. Until one day in the late 1940s, when Aharon Chelouche was posted to the Triangle, and the Samarras came as supplicants. Aharon had shown generosity then, and in his office at Tel Aviv University he did so again. ‘I allowed her to remain for another year, but she was anyway a very bad student, so at the end of it she was out.’
The symbolism of the Chelouche–Samarra association was one part of the Israeli-Palestinian narrative. But new currents were swirling among Israel’s Arab minority, especially the young and educated. This was not the Nakba generation, but its successor, increasingly confident and articulate. These were full Israeli citizens who spoke fluent Hebrew as well as Arabic, and they did not share their parents’ fear of the authorities. Raised in an open society, they were taught to think critically. Israel’s universities, and its liberal education policies, were the breeding ground for a new generation of Arab activists who used Israel’s freedoms to articulate the Palestinian cause. The first step was no longer to be identified as ‘Israeli Arabs’, but as ‘Palestinian citizens of Israel’, or ‘Palestinians within Israel’. The small semantic alteration had powerful implications, about their complex identity and loyalties, and about their relationship with their brethren outside the border.