The story of the village is woven right through the story of land sales in the 1920s and 1930s in Stein’s book. In 1919, two Haifa families had owned most of Shatta, but in 1931, in anticipation of the sale, a member of one family, Raja Ra’is, had bought a large share of village land from Anis Abyad, a member of the other family, thereby planning to augment his profits. But the land was ‘encumbered’ with tenants, and this meant that the seller would be obligated to pay compensation to those whom the sale dispossessed. The sellers could avoid paying such compensation if the land was free of tenants before the sale went through, and Ra’is intended to dispossess his more than two hundred tenants in Shatta, before selling the land into Jewish ownership. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for the residents of Shatta, his timing was bad, as it coincided with the outcome of the British investigation into the 1929 Arab revolt, which left the colonial authority more sensitive to the problem of Arab peasants losing the land they farmed.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Arab organisations and powerful individuals lobbied for restrictions on the sale of Arab-owned land to Jews, and against increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, which was augmenting the demand and market for such sales. In counterpoint, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish quasi-government in Palestine, lobbied the Mandatory authorities and the British Government for increasing the Jewish immigration allowance, and against the restrictions on land sales. Those restrictions on immigration were seen, by sympathisers, as a terrible repudiation of Jewish suffering, particularly after Germany’s Jews were stripped of citizenship. But the buying up of land for Jewish settlement had the most immediate and terrible effect on the Arab fellahin: they lost their livelihoods and their homes, so that others might have them.
The planned sale of Shatta land, and the intended dispossession of its tenants, caused a row between the British Mandatory authority and the Jewish Agency. The Jewish Agency was informed that if it did not prevent the eviction of Shatta’s tenants, recent recommendations on restrictions in land transfers between Arabs and Jews would be implemented by the British authorities. Under this pressure, Chaim Weizmann, head of the Jewish Agency, had to capitulate, though he disclaimed Jewish responsibility for the intended dispossession of Shatta’s tenants, and blamed the Arab landowner, Raja Ra’is.
In the end, there was a compromise: an arrangement was made for the two hundred and fifty-five inhabitants of the village to be resettled elsewhere and Shatta, conveniently ‘disencumbered’ and transformed into the empty Arab village of Saul’s description, could be sold into Jewish ownership. The purchase went ahead in April 1931, but the British census of Palestine in that year recorded the village’s population as it was before the village was sold: two hundred and fifty Muslims, three Christians and two Jews.
The black-and-white photograph of Shatta that I had seen hanging in the entryway to the kibbutz archive does indeed depict an empty village in 1933, but the villagers did not abandon it – it was they who were abandoned. This is what Beit Hashita was founded on. The kibbutz, an idealistic community with an ideology of self-sufficiency and communist equality, of workers owning the means of production, of worker empowerment, was made possible by dispossessing more than two hundred peasant workers.
My mother, like so many members of kibbutzim that were established before 1948, always stresses that these settlements were not built on stolen land, that the land was bought and paid for. That is my mother’s story about Beit Hashita: the kibbutz was not a thief or a trespasser; its land was bought legally. But the legal argument provides no moral defence. Even if it was the wealthy Arab landowners and the Jewish Agency who colluded in the dispossession of Shatta’s tenants, and even if the sale conformed to British colonial law, for an ideological community of social and political brotherhood, it was unethical and decidedly hypocritical, and the members of the new kibbutz, my grandfather included, were complicit in a moral crime.
Thirteen years after that sale went through, in 1944, when the British authorities in Palestine revised their estimates of the population and land ownership, only four dunams of Shatta’s land were still Arab-owned, and its population of 590 was entirely Jewish, comprising the members of Kibbutz Beit Hashita. My mother was by then three years old, and her mother had already left the kibbutz and gone south to work by the Dead Sea. My grandfather, Yair, was in the army, based on the Mediterranean coast at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, near the Roman ruins of Caesarea.
On the second floor of the kibbutz archive, the walls are lined with rows and rows of dark wooden drawers, like a massive columbarium. There is a drawer for each kibbutz member who has died, containing a file of papers, photographs, and their yiskor or memorial book. To one side there is a memorial to the members who were killed in the many years of conflict since the founding of the kibbutz – the Lebanon War in 1982, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Six Day War in 1967, the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the War of Independence in 1948. Prominent in the memorial are the eleven who ‘fell’ in 1973. This was the largest number of deaths, as a proportion of the population, of any village or town during that conflict, a conflict the country almost lost, and which left a terrible scar of insecurity after the giddy success of the Six Day War.
When I visited, it was very still in the archive, and cool after the heat outside. Standing before that memorial, it struck me that it was not after all strange that as a child and teenager I had never wondered about my grandfather’s scar, about his having been attacked by Arabs. It had been not only part of my accepted childhood landscape, but part of everyone’s landscape there too: a history of conflict and fear, of attack and defence. With all those years of accumulated trauma, it was not very surprising that no one talked about it unless asked: the violence was normalised, unremarkable.
In his own accounts, published in his yiskor book, my grandfather Yair is humorous and self-deprecating about his experiences of danger and conflict. He describes his antics in the Palmach, the strike-force created by the Haganah, the Jewish army, during the Second World War, and labouring at the salt works in Atlit and Sdom, on the Dead Sea. He recounts walking all the way back from Jerusalem to the kibbutz, nearly getting lost, and nearly getting shot, and tells a story of guarding the railway line in 1948 at Beit Yosef, a nearby kibbutz, where he dug in as instructed. Dedicated and committed, he waited and watched for several days only to discover, when his commander eventually remembered he was there, that the war in that area had ended on the first day.
Before joining the Palmach he’d been a member of the Palestine Police Auxiliaries, originally employed by the British to guard the Jewish settlements, the kibbutzim and the co-operative farms against Arab attack. Under the tutelage of the controversial Colonel Orde Wingate, a British maverick, the Police Auxiliaries had been developed during the Arab uprising of 1936 into a strike force against bandits and insurgents: they mounted attacks, first on Arab settlements, and then across the northern border into Syria and Lebanon. They were not merely a defence organisation – they went on the offensive, too. When, during the Second World War, the Palmach was formed, only a limited number of kibbutzniks could join, and my grandfather had been one of them: he was in the sea cadets division, the Palyam.
Secretly the Palyam helped land illegal immigrants and refugees, smuggling them through the naval blockade when the British had placed limits on Jewish immigration. Later they helped to illicitly disembark camp survivors. My grandfather was in his twenties at the time. Mid-war, it must have had a fevered intensity, their risk-taking – but they were young, tough idealists, setting out from the tumbled ruins of Caesarea in small boats to lay mines or beach immigrant ships, wading the refugees ashore in the warm purple evenings, the lights from the young town of Tel Aviv perhaps visible to the south, of Acre and Haifa to the north. Closer yet lay Atlit, where the refugees who were caught were held in British detention camps. At the end of the war the Palmach was officially disbanded by the British authorities, but it was incorporated into the Haganah, the Jewish army that sometimes worked with
and sometimes against the British, and would become the Israel Defence Force of the Jewish state.
Oral histories of the Palyam have been published on the website palyam.org, and it gives a vibrant picture of their activities in the mid-1940s, but it was in my grandfather’s yiskor book, which I brought home with me from the archive, that I found an answer to the question that had first sparked my search: he’d written an account of being attacked and hospitalised in 1944.
He had travelled back from the coast to Beit Hashita that week to be at home for my mother’s third birthday, on the 5th of July. That Saturday morning the commander of the kibbutz guards arrived with the urgent news that villagers from Yubla were attacking kibbutzniks out in the ‘Yubla fields’. That’s how, many decades after the event, my grandfather still described the place – as the ‘Yubla fields’. The guards commander gathered together seven or eight men to fight them off, and my grandfather, with the others, grabbed some clubs, clambered into a van and drove out of the kibbutz and up to the fields. The kibbutzniks were outnumbered by villagers, and more men from the village were arriving. My grandfather was the first to reach them, and he hit a man with a club. He was surrounded and was himself clubbed over the head and lost consciousness, though he continued to be beaten after he fell. In that fight another kibbutznik, Shabo, was stabbed in the back, and they were both taken to the hospital in Afula.
My grandfather, along with Shabo, was charged – their hospitalisation was evidence that they had participated in the attack. The man from Yubla whom my grandfather had attacked had made a claim for compensation. My grand-father and Shabo stood trial before an English magistrate, who asked both defendants and accuser to show the evidence of their injuries. The man from Yubla rolled up his sleeve to show his broken arm; my grandfather took off his hat to show his head injury, and Shabo pulled up his shirt to show his knife wound. The magistrate, unable to clearly attribute blame, ruled that the injuries were equal, that it was tit for tat, and ordered them all to leave his courtroom.
Despite its terrible details, my grandfather’s telling of the story is light-hearted and matter of fact. What first struck me about his account was not his violence. Instead, what sang out like a melancholy minor chord was the unstated fact of my mother alone on her third birthday. Behind it lay the incomparable loneliness of all those children, at three years old, at two, as babies, going to bed and waking up without their parents, brusquely seen to by inexperienced, tough young women who had numerous children under their care, women who were often reluctantly separated from their own children, and couldn’t help but resent those for whom they were responsible. For my mother it was even worse: her own mother had left, her father was stationed away at the coast, and she was painfully shy among the other frightened children in that harsh, dangerous world of extreme poverty, violence, hard labour and strict ideology.
I had reconstituted my mother and my grandfather as some kind of noble Jewish peasants – but that, in its entirety, was a myth. As I found out from his yiskor book and the other archive papers, my grandfather had no peasant roots: he’d rebelled against his parents, who were well-educated members of the petit bourgeoisie, small-time capitalists, and he’d joined the kibbutz movement, committing himself through Labour Zionist ideology to its egalitarian hardships. And that’s what the kibbutz movement was: an invented way of life, an invented tradition of working the land, driven, at its best, by idealism, and at its worst by a harsh ideology that could not admit its wrongs. Nor was there anything particularly gentle or noble about my grandfather – he had been assaulted, yes, and seriously injured, but he had initiated the attack. He had done so in defence of land he believed his community had a right to own, but I was not sure it had any right to it at all.
It was difficult to accept that the kibbutz movement was no peasant movement and never had been, and a shock to discover that my personal story, my family story, was a concoction, another lie. The kibbutz movement had at its heart a hypocrisy and contradiction, and all my hazy notions of its noble endeavour, and of my grandfather’s noble peasant endeavour, burned away. The true peasants in Palestine were not the kibbutzniks like my grandfather, but the Arab fellahin, those tenant farmers whom the kibbutzniks had so casually and so easily displaced by capital in the 1920s and 1930s, and then by war in 1948.
Nevertheless, even then, after reading about Shatta in Stein’s blue-covered, fact-stuffed book in that musty, humid bookshop in New York’s East Village, even after the last romantic vestiges of my story of Israel and what it meant to me were torn up like that, I still could not quite let the story go, not entirely. The knowledge of where you come from holds you, like a parent. Grappling with it is part of the process of individuation. You might reinvent it, but you still circle back to it; you might reject it, cut yourself off from it, repudiate it – but that very rejection is part of what forms you. Even if identity is an elective story about the past and about place rather than an immutable, essentialist biological fact, on a day-to-day basis we still order one another and ourselves in relation to those stories of past and place as though they are not tenuous and contingent. ‘Where are you from?’ we ask, and, if we don’t get a clear answer, or if we don’t get one that answers the real question we’re asking, we add: ‘Where are your parents from? Where is your family from?’ I know where my family is from, but now I am ashamed of that place, ashamed of the crime and the destruction on which it was built.
5 – Surveillance
As if to reinforce my doubts, the next time I went back, a year and a half later, Israel started to express doubts about me.
At the El Al check-in line at Heathrow I failed to navigate the security agent’s usual questions – Did you pack your bags yourself? Did anyone give you anything to carry? – and the more specific, personal ones I’ve come to expect: Where is this name from? This isn’t a Jewish name... Although my sense of identity is internally coherent, on approaching and on leaving Israel it looks stitched together, and I never quite feel able to establish legitimacy.
It was August 2009, and swine flu had at last displaced the aftermath of the war on Gaza in the news. Israel was in a panic over swine flu, perhaps more than other countries because of its unkosher provenance, because it carried the cultural taint of living at close quarters with unclean pigs. A religious group sent a party of rabbis up in an aeroplane to blow shofars and say prayers over Israeli airspace, in an attempt to keep swine flu out.
The agent wasn’t satisfied with my answers. She asked me again for the family story, perhaps seeing if I would tell a different version. She asked me again what I meant by ‘secular’. She asked me again why my mother had left, and why I had learned Hebrew, why I kept coming back.
The rest of the line was moving fast. Almost all the passengers were Israelis returning home after the summer. The agent left me standing by the airline’s X-ray machine while she went to consult with a colleague. They glanced at me and turned away again, whispering, in a close huddle, as the queues beyond me shortened.
Waiting in a little cordoned-off isolation area, I was marked as dubious and suspect. Perhaps I had somehow violated the unstated agreement, the obedience demanded of you to pretend that you’re hearing the security questions for the first time. Now a second agent was coming over. She stared at me a long time, and then back at my British passport, and then at my face again. She asked me the same questions. She asked me the second round of questions. She asked me new questions – about whether I marked the Jewish holidays, about synagogue attendance, about membership in any Jewish groups. Every answer No... No... No... made me feel less and less a Jew, more and more suspect. ‘Since when was being a secular Jew a problem?’ I wanted to ask. ‘Israel isn’t full of secular Jews?’ People were staring. I suppressed my questions, my irritation, my rising paranoia.
‘Tell me again,’ she said, ‘why you are going to Israel,’ and when I lied, saying I was visiting family, she knew it. Though I was planning to see them, my main purpose was to go back
to the village sites – and to go on to Amman, in Jordan, to meet Malik.
Malik was the grandson of a man who’d fled from Al Murassas, one of the approximately 10,000 people from the greater Beisan area who’d headed east across the Jordan river in 1948 and could not return. Malik was thirty, plump, and going bald. He listened to Julio Iglesias, and was getting married in the autumn. ‘If you are doing some justified research, I am happy to help your good self,’ he’d written. He’d agreed to see me in Amman if I could make it there, or to talk by phone.
Someone at Zochrot had put me in touch with Malik. Sooner or later, almost everyone who is beginning to doubt the Zionist version of the past ends up making contact with Zochrot. It’s an NGO on the far left, and the people who work there are radical anti-Zionist progressives committed to social justice for Palestinians inside and outside Israel. Their funding comes from abroad, but this has not protected them from the increasingly intrusive efforts, through legislation and personal and media harassment, to restrict or stop their work. Zochrot also serves informally as a kind of clearing house for events, information and other groups to do with the Nakba, with the more general Arab history of Palestine – both that of Arab citizens of Israel, and Palestinians forced to leave – and with Israeli protests against occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Staff members at Zochrot had provided me with maps showing the sites of the destroyed villages in the area around Beit Hashita, and promised to try to make contact with people whose families had come originally from Yubla and Al Murassas. After some enquiries they’d sent me Malik’s contact details, and Malik and I had exchanged emails and become friends on Facebook in the spring of 2009, in the long aftermath of the winter war on Gaza. The ferocious brutality of the war shifted public opinion definitively in the UK, and, close to home, in particular ways in Wales. Wales, itself disenfranchised, likes to ally itself with the disenfranchised elsewhere; not so many decades before, it had sympathised strongly with the national aspirations of disenfranchised and embattled Jews. That had been the subject matter of my doctoral dissertation. After the war on Gaza, the appalled dismay at Israel’s actions and towards all Israelis became, for a period of time, intemperate, and spilled over messily into indiscriminate hostility, as would recur again and again in the years to come. Everyone was jumpy and defensive, and Israel’s representatives abroad – politicians and paid propagandists, self-styled supporters and security agents – guarded the tightly controlled perimeter of Israel’s borders, both physical and rhetorical, with extremes and absolutes.
Losing Israel Page 12