On the ground it didn’t take long for all the sweetness and light to unravel. While France had an easy-ish ride with the Syrians and the Lebanese, the British were overseeing two worlds colliding. The Jews - not yet Israelis - were under the impression that the League of Nations Mandate’s main aim was to implement the Balfour Declaration; it wasn’t but, as ever, nations believe what they want to believe. Jewish immigrants were arriving in vastly increasing numbers to form their own country so that by 1930 there would be 200,000 Jews in the Holy Land. Interestingly enough Jewish immigration was matched by Arab immigration, the latter attracted into the Holy Land by the new prosperity that the former had engineered.
The Arabs, for their part, did not harbor the secular Western concept of country. Islam did not separate politics from religion and had never paid any attention to separate nations - only the idea of the nation of Islam, the umma. Now faced with an influx of foreigners, foreigners of a different race and definitely of a different religion, Arab consciousness stirred and for the first time formed around the idea of “Palestine” - not at this stage as a separate country but as a part of a Greater Syria.
Sensing trouble ahead with the French, the British - in traditional divide- and-rule tactics - divided up and ruled what was then Palestine into what we know think of as Israel and the West Bank on one side and Jordan on the other. The former were given twenty per cent of the land, the latter eighty per cent. Into Jordan the British put another puppet king, Faisal’s brother Abdullah, and one whose descendants are still ruling there today.
Throughout the 1930s the British found their Mandate territory to be increasingly ungovernable. They saw a large group of people, the Arabs, who were relatively easy to govern, had vast amounts of oil and who, if left alone to pray in peace, were unlikely to be too troublesome. Furthermore, although they were poorly educated they were immensely charming and hospitable; a bit of a shambles but it didn’t seem to bother them. Then the British saw a much smaller group of people, the Zionists, who were motivated by a single agenda, a nation state, and an agenda that they would push and push and push. They were highly educated and no fun, on any level, at all. It was as if a tribe of single-issue lawyers had descended on the British lawn and were rudely interrupting the croquet - and at tea-time. Furthermore the large group was concerned that the small group was taking its land and - as importantly - practicing a heretic religion and not practicing it discreetly in the umma. Culturally too, the Arabs saw their traditional society and its Islam-based values threatened by these new people with new ideas. For the Zionists the Arabs were a primeval and backward people, uneducated, uninquiring, ineffi- cient, dishonest individually, duplicitous collectively with a desert culture and a primitive theology. Then as now the Arabs and the Jews were on different planets.
Time by time the British sympathy moved towards the indigenous people whom they saw as being dispossessed and disadvantaged by the waves of immigration. By the mid-1930s the British lost sight of the Balfour Declaration and its aims and started to side with the oil-rich Arabs and the easy life. Jewish immigration was severely restricted after 1935 and Arab immigration encouraged. Arab riots were ignored, if not actually sanctioned, and Jewish defenses dismantled.
In 1936 the British concluded that the Mandate was unworkable as the Jews and Arabs were so completely incompatible. For the first time a form of two states within Palestine was proposed: one Jewish and one Arab. Unfortunately it wasn’t simple to put into place. The land was predominantly Arab with various Jewish settlements scattered within it; in others words neither side had contiguous land that could be neatly divided. Both sides attacked the plan ferociously and predictably: the Jews because it gave them too little and the Arabs because by now they just wanted the Jews out and certainly weren’t prepared to give them any of their land.
Events now began to turn even uglier in the form of Israeli terrorists and Nazi exterminators. Sam, you won’t have heard too much of terrorists or anything about Nazis - or even fascists. These were to come later. The first recognized act of terrorism happened in Russia two years after you left the Holy Land when a revolutionary used a detonation to cause terror to the civilians as a means of achieving the political ends he wanted. His ends, in other words, justified his means.
The Nazis? I’m going to have to write you another letter about the Second World War or we’ll run out of pages. It started only twenty-one years after the last one finished and finished six years after that. You’ll be pleased, but not surprised, to hear that the Americans and their allies won again and the Germans and their quislings lost again. For now you need to know the Nazis were state-sanctioned political fundamentalists who believed that the Germans were an Aryan master-race and that lesser races should be exterminated. They viewed the Jews as a lesser race and established a plan on a multi- national industrial scale to exterminate the Jews from the planet. There were nine million Jews in Europe at the start of the pogroms; they murdered six million of them. As you can imagine, the effect was devastating for the survivors and for the people as a whole - and tangentially for the world as a whole. The Nazis called this The Final Solution; the Jews called it the Holocaust. It effects on the Holy Land were profound and we will refer to it often from now on.
The first Jewish terrorist attacks were against Arabs, bombs exploding in crowded markets, the sort of outrage I’m afraid to which we have become softened by time - but at the time considered truly outrageous. The British reacted by abandoning any pretence at equanimity; they just wanted out of the whole mess they had created. They offered the Arabs an independent state of Palestine. The Arabs rejected this out of hand; they didn’t want a state of Palestine, they still wanted to be part of Greater Syria and, more to the point, they still wanted all the Jews out of Greater Syria - and right now.
Jewish terrorism now turned on the British. It couldn’t have come at a more tragic time. The Nazis were sweeping through Eastern Europe with devastating consequences for the Jewish population. The Holy Land was the only obvious escape route, and now that was being blocked by the British in an effort to appease the Arabs and punish the Jews. It was a disaster from every angle, and the more the British tried to restrict the Jews the worse the terrorist attacks became and the tighter the British response to the attacks became. Matters came to a head in 1944: relations between the British and the Jews were so bad that the British refused to bomb German railway tracks to extermination camps in Eastern Europe because the request had come via a Jewish agency thought to be associated with terrorism in the Holy Land. The Zionists responded by assassinating the British Minister in Cairo. The British responded by shutting down all cooperation with the Holy Land Jews, including allowing in fleeing European Jews.
Hopes that peace in Europe would bring peace in Palestine were short- lived. The British assumed their positions as if nothing had happened. The Jews had by now built up a territory that they believed could be self-supporting. The Arabs again took fright at the Jewish success and petitioned the world for their expulsion. The British built up their armed presence to keep the two sides apart. The Jews responded with increased terrorism, targeting British officers and their families. The Arabs rioted on a massive scale. In July 1946 Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the British presence. Ninety-one people, including fifteen Jews, were murdered. By now the world was watching. The British, citing the Mandate’s provisions, denied Holocaust survivors immigration to the Holy Land, even diverting some to Mauritius50. More Jewish terror; more Arab riots. The British military and public, exhausted by war in Europe and Empire, just wanted out and in 1947 asked the newly formed United Nations to take the whole mess off their hands.
The UN proposed two solutions, solutions we will refer to again: the One-State solution and the Two-State solution. Under the former all of what is now Israel and the West Bank would be one country. The Arabs would be in the clear majority and the constitution wou
ld protect Jewish interests. The Arabs made it clear that although they wouldn’t expel any Jews already in situ they weren’t prepared to accept any more. After the Holocaust the Jews demanded as an absolutely minimum condition unlimited Jewish access to the Jewish homeland. The One-State solution was clearly unworkable and was dropped forthwith.
The Two-State solution, however, clearly showed a way forward. The UN called this the Partition Plan and drew up a map of the Holy Land to determine where would be Israel and where would be Palestine. It wasn’t possible to assign particular areas to Jews and Arabs because so many Arabs had moved into the newly prosperous Jewish areas; any state of Israel there- fore was bound to contain a large Arab population. Jerusalem was to be a UN-administered international zone. When finally drawn the map showed that Israel was granted sixty per cent of the land but over half of that was the Negev Desert. Moreover, most of the land in the new Israel would still be Arab-owned. The population of Israel would be 850,000: 500,000 Jews and 350,000 Arabs.
The Partition Plan could be said to offer rough justice; everyone lost – the Arabs had to accept an alien invasion and the Jews had to accept a significant and probably troublesome Arab presence. It’s at this point we come across a phenomenon that has run consistently throughout Middle East peace negotiations from the Partition Plan to today: the Jews always say “yes”, the Arabs always say “no”. The Jewish - actually I think we can now start calling the wandering tribe Israelis - the Israeli tactic is to take whatever is on offer, lock it away, build on it and keep demanding more. The Arab tactic is simply to reject outright any proposal at all. Perhaps tactic is the wrong word for the Arab approach as it implies a course of action that has been thought through, an intellectual approach to the situation, whereas their response has always been more cultural and emotional. It is clear that this single-minded, legalistic stance has served Israel well and the more poetic Arab stance has served it poorly; these are material judgments, whether the Israelis have won and the Arabs have lost in the abstract is far less clear.
Lack of intellectual application has also led the Arabs into a series of disastrous decisions in their dealings with Israel. The first came in 1948 when the Arab League - Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – declared war on Israel the day after Israel declared its independence. Despite being outnumbered four to one the Israelis prevailed. The Arabs didn’t just lose, they were humiliated by an enemy that was literally fighting for its existence, inspired by leaders who had fought the British and manned by troops who had survived the Holocaust or who had already built new lives with new families with bare hands in the godforsaken scrubland. At the end of the war the Arabs ended up with thirty per cent less land than they had been offered under the Partition Plan and still had no state of Palestine as the Arab allies merely helped themselves to new land: Jordan grabbed the West Bank and Egypt grabbed Gaza. In addition, the Arabs had lost half of Jerusalem, had enabled Israel to become a contiguous territory and had shown the world that Arabs were better at fighting each other than fighting a common enemy.
The biggest casualty of the war was not Arab pride but Arab refugees. Some 700,000 Arabs fled from, or were pushed out of, Israel. Fled or pushed? Both sides have an interest in re-inventing the truth. The Arab League leaders told hundreds of thousands of Arabs to leave their land, told them that it would only be for a short time before the inevitable Arab victory, when they could return to a Jew-free country of their own. Eighty-five per cent of the Arabs fled, never to return. Furthermore, Arabs leaders exaggerated Israeli atrocities in the hope of stiffening indigenous Arab resolve; it had the opposite effect as the peasants in particular ran for their lives. The Israelis were undoubtedly responsible for ethnic cleansing, either by massacre or forced marches, which led to further hundreds of thousands of refugees. But the reality is probably more mundane. More Arabs fled than were forcibly pushed and when an advancing Israeli unit stumbled across an empty Arab village it moved into the empty houses; after the war if a villager returned to his house he was sent packing. Israel’s position ever since has been that responsibility for the refugees should fall on the Arab League countries that started the war in the first place.
It is often forgotten that the war also created 600,000 Jewish refugees when the defeated Arab League countries turned on their own Jewish populations in retaliation for the defeat. The difference was that the Jewish refugees were welcomed wholeheartedly by Israel whereas the Arab refugees, now nearly four million strong, are still helpless in refugee camps scattered across the Middle East, rejected by Israel and their Arab hosts. All aspects considered, the Arab League’s 1948 invasion was a disaster; the first, as it happens, of many.
Thus, in 1948, Israel became a nation. And over sixty years later, in spite of two major and several minor wars against the Arabs, in spite of endless “peace treaties”, “peace initiatives”, “peace processes”, “peace talks” and “roadmaps to peace”, Israel still exists and is still at war - albeit now with just half and not all of its neighbors. And Palestine? That still doesn’t exist, although slowly, slowly as the new guard replace the old gangsters there may be... hope. Not only does it still not exist, but its very boundaries are changing by continuing Israeli incursions into it from the north, south and west, constantly shrink- ing the size of any future state. Within that state there are over a hundred Israeli settlements, miniature colonies, with 300,000 Israelis living in what they call the West Bank, the Palestinians call the Occupied Territories and the NGOs and guidebooks call the Palestinian Territories. Only its eastern border, defined by the River Jordan, is secure.
***
A month ago we were sitting under an acacia tree outside the Buddha Bagel café on the north side of Dizengoff Street in central Tel Aviv. (Sam, you remember those sand dunes just north of Jaffa? That’s now Miami-cum- Madrid transplanted to the Middle East. It’s the cultural capital, where you’d want to live if you had to live anywhere in Israel; as they say down there, “Jerusalem prays; Tel Aviv plays.”) At the base of the tree there’s a plaque. I leant forward and read, “And the tree of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase, and they shall be safe in their land, and shall know that I am the Lord. Ezekiel 34:27. A gift from Larry & Sylvie Aarons, Boca Raton, Fla. ‘Despite Impossible Odds’.” The religiosity and the generosity seemed to us then to sum up the worst and best in Israel today. Earlier on the way here, just two minutes window-shopping away, was another plaque, this one built into a wall of a bookshop. Under the Hebrew writing in English it read: “To commemorate the lives of 21 young Israelis who died by suicide bombing here on 1st June 2001. ‘The soul of man is the candle of God.’ Proverbs 20:27.’
Looking around the tables at the young, carefree Israelis chatting and laughing, some smoking51, some texting, some flirting, some preening, young souls driven by the light, it seemed outrageous that a suicide bomber could just sit himself down among them and destroy their young lives, so full of worth and promise. He would destroy his own young life too, but that life up to then had been so different: religiously indoctrinated to hatred, uneducated, without prospects of any kind, a soul driven by the dark and with not even a vague idea of what he would do with the seventy-two virgins he had been promised in paradise - his reward for killing all those worshipers of the same god with a different name.
Over and over again these past months in Arabic countries and in Israel we have seen how the two sides are so far apart they inhabit entirely different mental orbits. There really is no hope of reconciliation as there was, say, in Northern Ireland where the Protestants and Catholics finally got tired of blowing each other up and then had a shared base from which to re-join the world. Neither side here has any idea - and let’s face it, not much interest - in finding out how the other side lives, thinks, acts, what they believe in and why, where they want to go, how they plan to get there; nothing. Jew and Arab never socialize with each other; if there is any contact it is a
lways on a ruler/ subject, landlord/tenant, employer/employee basis. Even inside Israel where Israeli Arabs make up a fifth of the population strict caste lines apply.
Further north, east and south of here there is a very different story. If the Israelis have moved ahead of the twenty-first century, the Arabs seem stuck in a fourteenth-century religious quicksand. The latter are having a very unfortunate transition from the medieval to the modern and the faster the modern progresses the more it runs away from them. Insha’Allah, “God willing”, is not just a phrase you hear all the time but the guiding philosophy, the very stuff of life. The secular Jews - thankfully the vast majority are just that - know very well that Allah - by any name - doesn’t exist except as a man-made concept and so there’s not much point in relying on his will; better to do whatever needs doing yourself and do it with some man-made expertise. For ourselves, as Gentiles to the Jews and Infidels to the Muslims, we see the gap between the two sides best expressed through education. For the Jews education is not only all-important in itself - to learn what is already known - but as a means of finding out what is new and unknown. For the Muslim masses education means studying the Koran, and studying doesn’t mean investigating its different versions or debating hidden meanings or discovering possible insights, it means learning it by rote. Any onward learning is always looking back over its shoulder for Koranic approval.
One could say that ultraorthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam are one primitive desert nomad theology versus another but the Jewish people will always be at an advantage because only ten per cent of them take their primitive theology at face value, whereas the Muslims suffer from a ninety per cent take-up, meaning that massively more Jews are always capable of original thought rather than worrying about original sin. If one looks beyond the religious enthusiasts in each culture one can add another meaningful statistic and discount - as a generalization - the female half of the Muslim population in terms of material contribution to society.
Innocence and War Page 30