The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  HERE THE MORAL COMPASS begins to spin at ever-increasing speed. Why did the Palestinians have to bear the fate of Britain’s First World War promise to a people whose ancestors lived on their land two thousand years before? Why did this new flood of Muslim refugees have to pay this price, then—like the Armenians—be told that they were the aggressors, and those who dispossessed them the victims? For in the decades to come, the Palestinians would be the “terrorists” and those who took their lands would be the innocent, the representatives of a Phoenix nation rising from the ashes of Auschwitz. In the eyes of the world—especially in 1948, in a world grown weary of war and familiar with the millions of refugees who had washed across Europe—what was the lot of 750,000 Palestinian refugees when measured against the murder of 6 million Jews?

  It is April 2002, a bright spring morning in west Jerusalem, and I am in the small, neat apartment where Josef Kleinman and his wife, Haya, live in what might seem—if we did not know its historical significance—to be just another tree-stroked suburb. Kleinman is excited, an instantly generous man who, asked to tell about the blackest days of his life, leaps from his chair like a tiger. “I will show you my museum,” he says, and scampers into a back room.

  He returns with a faded old khaki knapsack. “This is the shirt the Americans gave me after I was freed from Landsberg on April twenty-seventh, 1945.” It is a crumpled, cheap chequered shirt whose label is now illegible. Then he takes out a smock of blue-and-white stripes and a hat with the same stripes running from front to back. “This is my uniform as a prisoner of Dachau,” he says. Familiar from every 1945 newsreel, from Schindler’s List and from a hundred other Holocaust movies, it is a shock to touch—to hold—this symbol of a people’s destruction. Josef Kleinman watches me as I hold the smock. He understands the shock. I am thinking: this was in Dachau. This was produced by the Nazis. This is part of the real, dysentery-soaked, cyanide-gassed history of extermination, every bit as much a witness to inhumanity as those Armenian bones that Isabel Ellsen and I had keyed out of the Syrian mud ten years ago. In the newsreels, the concentration-camp smocks are black and white, but the actual mass murder of the Jews of Europe was performed in colour. Blue and white. The same colours as the Israeli flag. On the front of the smock is the number 114986.

  Down in the entrance to Kleinman’s block of flats, there are flyers reminding tenants of the forthcoming Holocaust Day. Givat Shaul is a friendly, bright neighbourhood of retired couples, small shops, flats, trees and some elegant old houses of yellow stone. Some of the latter are in a state of dilapidation, a few are homes. But one or two bear the scars of bullets fired long ago, on 9 April 1948, when another people faced their own catastrophe. For Givat Shaul used to be Deir Yassin. And here it was, fifty-four years ago, that up to 130 Palestinians were massacred by two Jewish militias, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, as the Jews of Palestine fought for the independence of a state called Israel. The slaughter so terrified tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs that they fled their homes en masse—just a few of the 750,000—to create the refugee population whose vale of sorrow lies at the heart of the Israeli–Palestinian war.

  Back in 1948, around the old houses that still exist close to the Kleinmans’ home, Palestinian women were torn to pieces by grenades thrown by Jewish fighters. Two truckloads of Arab prisoners were taken from the village and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem. Later, many of them would be taken back to Deir Yassin and executed. Their mass grave is believed to lie beneath a fuel-storage depot that now stands at one end of the Jerusalem suburb. So a visit to the Kleinman home raises an unusual moral question. Can one listen to his personal testimony of the greatest crime in modern history and then ask about the slaughter that cut down the Palestinians at this very spot, when the eviction of the Arabs of Palestine, terrible though it was, comes nowhere near, statistically or morally, the murder of 6 million Jews? Does Josef Kleinman even know that this year, by another of those awful ironies of history, Holocaust Day and Deir Yassin Day fall on the same date?

  Josef Kleinman is no ordinary Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the youngest survivor of Auschwitz and he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, head of the special “Jewish Section” of the SS, who ran the Nazi programme to murder the Jews of Europe. Josef Kleinman even saw Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” who chose children, women, the old and the sick for the gas chambers. At the age of just fourteen, he watched one day as Mengele arrived on a bicycle and ordered a boy to hammer a plank of wood to a post. Here is part of Kleinman’s testimony at the Eichmann trial:

  We weren’t told what was to happen. We knew. The boys who couldn’t pass under the plank would be spared. Those boys whose heads did not reach the plank would be sent to the gas chambers. We all tried to stretch ourselves upwards, to make ourselves taller. But I gave up. I saw that taller boys than me failed to touch the plank with their heads. My brother asked me: “Do you want to live? Yes? Then do something.” My head began to work. I saw some stones. I put them in my shoes, and this made me taller. But I couldn’t stand at attention on the stones. They were killing me.

  Josef Kleinman’s brother, Shlomo, tore his hat in half and Josef stuffed part of it into his shoes. He was still too short. But he managed to infiltrate the group who had passed the test. The remainder of the boys—a thousand in all—were gassed. Mengele, Josef Kleinman remembers, chose Jewish holidays for the mass killing of Jewish children. Kleinman’s parents, Meir and Rachel, and his sister had been sent directly to the gas chambers when they arrived at Auschwitz from the Carpathian mountains, in what is now the Ukraine. He survived, along with his brother—who today, a carpenter like Josef, lives a few hundred metres away in the same suburb of Givat Shaul/Deir Yassin. Josef Kleinman also survived Dachau and the gruelling labour of building a massive bunker for Hitler’s secret factory, constructed for the production of Germany’s new Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter aircraft.

  After his liberation by the Americans, Kleinman made his way to Italy and then to a small boat that put him aboard a ship for Palestine, carrying illegal Jewish immigrants who were to try to enter the territory of the dying British Mandate. He could carry only a few possessions. He chose to put his Dachau uniform in his bag—he would not forget what had happened to him. Turned back by the British, he spent six months in the Famagusta camp on Cyprus, eventually ending up in an immigrants’ camp at Atlit in Palestine. He arrived in Jerusalem on 15 March 1947, and was there when Israel’s war of independence broke out. He fought in that war—but not at Deir Yassin. I mention the name, almost in passing. But both Josef Kleinman and Haya nod at once.

  “There are things which have been written that were wrong about Deir Yassin,” he said. “I was in Jerusalem and I saw the two truckloads of prisoners that came from here. Some reports say Arabs were killed, others that they were not. Not all the people were killed. There is much propaganda. I do not know. The Arabs killed their Jewish prisoners. There didn’t have to be much fighting for the Arabs to leave.”

  But when he saw those Arabs leaving, did they not, for Josef Kleinman, provide any kind of parallel—however faint, given the numerically far greater and infinitely bloodier disaster that overtook the Jews—of his own life? He thinks about this for a while. He did not see many Arab refugees, he said. It was his wife, Haya, who replied. “I think that after what happened to him—which was so dreadful—that everything else in the world seemed less important. You have to understand that Josef lives in that time, in the time of the Shoah. Of the twenty-nine thousand Jews brought to Dachau from other camps, most of them from Auschwitz, fifteen thousand died.”

  But is it just about the enormity of one crime and its statistical comparison to the exodus of Palestinians in 1948? A group of Jews, Muslims and Christians have long been campaigning for Deir Yassin to be remembered—even now, at the height of the latest Palestine war. As one of the organisers put it, “Many Jews may not want to look at this, fearing that the magnitude of their tragedy may be
diminished. For Palestinians there is always the fear that, as often before, the Holocaust may be used to justify their own suffering.” The Kleinmans do not know of this commemoration—nor of the organisation’s plans for a memorial to the Palestinian dead not far from their home in the suburb of Givat Shaul. Josef Kleinman won’t talk about the bloodbath in Israel and Palestine that continues while we are talking. But he admits he’s “on the right” in politics and voted for Ariel Sharon at the last Israeli election. “Is there any other man?” he asks.

  Yet Josef Kleinman’s memory of Deir Yassin is imperfect. Red Cross records and the dispatches of foreign correspondents of the time make it quite clear that the villagers of Deir Yassin were murdered and that some of the women were disembowelled. All over that part of Mandate Palestine which was to become Israel, there were little massacres—sometimes initiated by the Arabs, more frequently by Jewish fighters who were transmogrifying into the Israeli army as the war progressed—and just one small and tragic story gives an idea of what happened during the dispossession of Palestinians.

  It is the year 2000 and I am in a rain-soaked village in southern Lebanon, a place of poverty and broken roads called Shabriqa. And eighty-five-year-old Nimr Aoun rolls up his trouser leg to show the twisted ligament and muscle where an Israeli bullet tore into him fifty-two years earlier. Aoun’s story is a tale of two betrayals, because he was a victim not only of the Israelis but of the two Mandate powers—Britain and France—who were supposed, in the aftermath of the First World War, to protect him. He comes from a village called Salha—now 2 kilometres inside Israel on the other side of the Lebanese frontier—and was the only survivor of an Israeli massacre of the male villagers.

  The story of Salha and six other villages—En-Naame, Ez-Zouk, Tarchiha, El-Khalsa, El-Kitiyeh and Lakhas—goes back to 1923, when the British ruled Palestine and the French ruled the newly formed state of Lebanon. The two imperial powers were doing a little frontier-changing for their own ends and Paris decided to cede to London a few square miles of Lebanon—the British Mandate of Palestine was moved slightly north to take in the seven villages. A grubby deal lay behind this transaction. Old records in Beirut show that the land was handed over in exchange for a contract granted to a French company to drain marshland in the region for commercial use. At the time, it was called—I preferred not to tell old Nimr Aoun this—“the Good Neighbourhood” agreement. And it doomed every villager.

  Nimr Aoun was no longer a Lebanese under the French Mandate. He was now a Palestinian under the British Mandate—although neither the Aoun family nor any of the other villagers were consulted about the matter. Anyway, Aoun remembers the British fondly. He was a farmer who married a girl of thirteen, and had nine children, living amid the cornfields of Salha. But his voice rises in pitch when he comes to 1948, the British departure and the arrival of the Jewish army outside the village. “They showered us with leaflets saying that, if we surrendered, we would be spared,” he says. “The women and children had already fled. So we believed the leaflets and surrendered. But the Israelis had lied. They cursed us and made seventy of us stand together.”

  What happens next is confirmed in Israeli archives. The historian Benny Morris writes that in an Israeli attack called “Operation Hiram,” after “light resistance” by Arabs near Salha, ninety-four of the villagers were blown up in a house on 30 October 1948. Nimr Aoun has a different version of events, but one given veracity by his scars:

  When we were all standing together, they opened fire on us. There were thirteen tanks all round the area. We had no chance. What helped me was that after I was shot in the leg, I fell under piles of bodies. They were on top of me and most of the bullets were hitting my friends. I was bleeding so much, I felt nothing. When night came, I pulled my way out and crawled past one of the tanks and then through long grass until I found a donkey.

  Nimr Aoun heaved himself onto the animal’s back and rode painfully north to the Lebanese village of Maroun, where he was given medical treatment. A government official prevented doctors from amputating his leg, which is why Nimr Aoun can still hobble around his home at Shabriqa, 40 kilometres from the site of the once-Lebanese village of Salha in which only a long low building survives today. Most of the land is now covered by Israeli apple orchards.

  Until 1998, Nimr Aoun and the other few survivors from the “seven villages” of 1948 were treated as Palestinians with Palestinian documents. Then the Lebanese government—not immune to the political advantages of such an act— awarded them all Lebanese citizenship. Aoun produced for me his new Lebanese identity card, the image of a cedar tree close to his passport picture. He started life as a citizen of the Ottoman empire, became a Lebanese under the French, turned into a Palestinian under the British, became a Palestinian refugee from Israel and, at the very end of his life, was Lebanese once more.

  My files on the last years of the British Mandate are packed with letters from British army veterans, interviews with former Jewish and Arab fighters, along with hundreds of contemporary newspaper clippings. It is a story of anarchy and pain and—to use Israel’s current use of the word—“terrorist” attacks and bombings, most of them by the Jewish Haganah and Irgun and Stern gangs. A British Colonial Office pamphlet of 1946 reads like an account of the first year’s Iraqi uprising against American occupation in 2003: attacks on road and rail bridges, the kidnapping of British officers and clandestine radio stations broadcasting propaganda for the insurgents. “The action of blowing up the bridges expressed the high morale and courage of the Jewish fighters who carried out the attack,” the document reports Kol Israel as broadcasting on 18 June 1946.

  Undisciplined British army raids—against Arabs as well as Jews—provoked ruthless revenge operations. The bombing of British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun on 22 July 1946, killing ninety-one British, Jewish and Arab civil servants, was only the most infamous of the assaults carried out against the occupying power. British soldiers opened fire on civilians in the streets of Tel Aviv and when—after the British went ahead with the hanging of three Jewish Irgun fighters—the Irgun hanged two British army hostages, there were anti-Semitic attacks across Britain. Intelligence Corps Sergeants Mervyn Paice and Clifford Martin spent days hidden underground by their captors in the city of Netanya while the Irgun repeatedly threatened their execution. Paice’s father wrote a pleading letter to the Irgun leader Menachem Begin—later, the prime minister of Israel who would order the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—just as the relatives of Western hostages would appeal to Iraqi kidnappers in 2003 and 2004. I possess a photocopy of a statement from the “Court of the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Palestine” which was found pinned to the chests of the two men after they had been murdered. It says that the “court” found Paice and Martin guilty of “(a) illegal entry into our homeland. (b) Belonging to a British Terrorist Criminal Organisation known as the British Military Occupation Forces . . . the judgement was carried out on 30th July 1947. The hanging of the two spies . . . is an ordinary legal action of a court of the Underground which has sentenced and will sentence the criminals who belong to the criminal Nazi-British Army of Occupation.”

  Attached to this document is a British Palestine Police report on the finding of the bodies of the two sergeants in a eucalyptus grove:

  They were hanging from two eucalyptus trees about five yards apart. Their faces were heavily bandaged so it was impossible to distinguish their features . . . Their bodies were a dull black colour and blood had run down their chests which made it appear at first that they had been shot . . . the press were allowed to take photographs of the spectacle. When this had been done, it was decided to cut down the bodies. The RE [Royal Engineers] captain and CSM [colour sergeant major] lopped the branches off the tree which held the right hand body, and started to cut the hang rope with a saw . . . As the body fell to the ground, there was a large explosion . . . The two trees had been completely blown up and their [sic] were large craters where the roo
ts had been. One body was found horribly mangled about twenty yards away . . . The other body had disintegrated, and small pieces were picked up as much as 200 yards away.

  The Irgun published tracts in poor English, urging British soldiers that if they wished to stay in Palestine, the best way to do so would be to “risk your life every day so that the [British] Government may have ten more years to make up its mind to claar [sic] out of Palestine.” The British broke many of the rules of war. A British member of the Palestine Police was to describe how, when British soldiers travelled on the railway line from Lydda, “we usually had a gangers’ trolley preceding us with several prisoners on board—for them to enjoy the explosion of mines laid along the line.”

  There is a fierce irony in all this. Israel came into being after a classic colonial guerrilla war against an occupation army; yet within fifty years, Israel’s own army—now itself the occupation force—would be fighting an equally classic anti-colonial guerrilla war in the West Bank and Gaza. The connection, however, often seems lost on the Israeli government. On 6 November 1944, Jewish gunmen assassinated Lord Moyne, the British minister-resident in Cairo, a former colonial secretary and close friend of Churchill. Moyne, who had favoured partition in Palestine, had upset Palestinian Jews because in 1942 he had urged the Turks to turn back the Struma, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from the Holocaust;80 he had also made a number of racist remarks about Jews, although few could argue with his observation that “the Arabs, who have lived and buried their dead for fifty generations in Palestine, will not willingly surrender their land and self-government to the Jews.”