14

1977–1981

‘No more war, no more bloodshed.’

Anwar al-Sadat1

JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM

In November 1977 Anwar Sadat flew from Cairo to Tel Aviv and then travelled on by road to Jerusalem. It was an extraordinary, controversial and electrifying moment in the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. It provoked Israeli ecstasy and Palestinian agony and outrage. The first-ever visit by an Arab head of state led, in a relatively short time, to a peace treaty between the Jewish state and its most powerful and populous enemy, removing it from the circle of hostility around Israel that had existed since 1948. Agreement worked on the principle of exchanging land for peace – the return to Egypt of all the territory it had lost to Israel in 1967 except the Gaza Strip, which was historically part of Palestine. Hopes, always very slim, that the Egyptian initiative would somehow turn into a wider or even a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, proved short-lived. In the end it did nothing at all for the Palestinians, locked into a bleak status quo of occupation and dispersal a full decade since the Six Days war.

Israelis were delighted, though profound suspicions still had to be overcome. The IDF chief of staff, Mordechai Gur, marred the festive mood by warning of a ploy designed to catch Israel off guard, as it had been so disastrously on Yom Kippur four years earlier. On 19 November, a Saturday evening, excitement mingled with disbelief as the Egyptian president came down the steps of the gleaming white Boeing jet that had brought him directly to Ben-Gurion airport, and stood solemnly to attention as the two countries’ national anthems were played by a military band. Menachem Begin, looking stiff and nervous, waited on the red carpet with other ministers, judges and religious leaders. Sadat kissed the former prime minister, Golda Meir, the ‘old lady’ he had vilified in 1973 and during the war of attrition and long-range Israeli bombing raids over the Nile Valley. He even joshed with Ariel Sharon, who had mounted a daring counter-offensive back across the Suez Canal and trapped the Egyptian Third Army. He went on to visit the grim Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as well as the al-Aqsa mosque. The psychological and emotional impact on Israel was enormous. Sadat, went the lyrics of a poignant and popular Hebrew song, had ‘pyramids in his eyes and peace in his pipe’. In his speech to the Knesset the next day, broadcast live around the world, Sadat declared that he was not seeking a separate Egyptian peace with Israel. At the request of the Israelis, he omitted a planned reference to the PLO in order, as Moshe Dayan put it, not to ‘infect the atmosphere’,2 but he did urge Israel to recognize the Palestinian people and their ‘legitimate rights’. Begin’s reply expressed appreciation for Sadat’s courage and invited the rulers of Syria and Jordan and what he called ‘genuine spokesmen of the Palestinian Arabs’ (‘Arabs of Eretz-Yisrael’ in the Hebrew phrase) to take part in peace talks. He also ranged back into Jewish history, including the horrors of the Nazi era, referenced the fundamental tenets of Zionism and, above all, gave no sign of making any concessions. Despite the theatrics, the gap between the two leaders yawned so visibly that Israeli ministers quietly expressed alarm. ‘Nothing I write about the yearning with which Sadat was received … can be exaggerated’, noted the Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir, the speaker of parliament, ‘nor about the subsequent apprehension and growing chill with which I listened to him.’³ Still, the ringing pledge of ‘no more war, no more bloodshed’ enunciated by Begin and echoed by Sadat, resonated throughout the forty-four-hour visit and for long afterwards.

Sadat’s unilateral move was a crushing blow for the PLO, especially since, in the autumn of 1977, Yasser Arafat had felt that things were starting to go his way internationally: Jimmy Carter, the new US president, had declared his support for a ‘homeland’ for the Palestinians. In August the US joined the USSR in announcing plans to reconvene the Geneva peace conference with Palestinian participation, although in the end Arafat proved unable to meet the conditions by accepting UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which implied recognition of Israel. Arafat was also taken completely by surprise – and at uncomfortably close quarters: he had been invited to the Egyptian parliament in Cairo on 9 November where he heard Sadat announce his readiness to go to ‘the ends of the earth’, even to the Knesset, to pursue peace with Israel. He faced angry criticism afterwards for joining in the applause. ‘I was on the mountaintop,’ the PLO leader told Palestinian students, ‘but Sadat threw me into the valley.’ Eleven days later he wept in ‘grief and fury’ as he watched Sadat’s Knesset speech on TV from his Beirut headquarters,4 horrified that the Arab country he always held in the highest affection had suddenly taken this astonishing course. Shortly afterwards he signed a statement condemning the Egyptian leader for ‘grand treason’ and urging a boycott of Arab League meetings in Cairo. Privately, however, Arafat refused to join the radical Arab bloc – Syria, Algeria, South Yemen and Libya – who formed a ‘steadfastness and confrontation front’ and severed all links with Egypt.⁵ He quietly stayed in touch with Sadat, never slamming the door, but played no part as the peace initiative developed.

Furious statements were issued by the governments in Damascus, Tripoli and Baghdad and there were attacks on Egyptian embassies as well as angry protests in Palestinian refugee camps across the Middle East. The mood in the West Bank and Gaza was a mixture of anxiety, disbelief and shock. Still, Karim Khalaf, the nationalist mayor of Ramallah, insisted that anyone who wanted to discuss the fate of the Palestinians would have to deal with Arafat. Elias Freij, his pro-Jordanian counterpart in Bethlehem, refrained from joining the welcoming party for Sadat at Tel Aviv airport, although along with Anwar al-Khatib, the former governor of Jerusalem, and Rashad al-Shawwa, the mayor of Gaza, he did quietly meet the Egyptian leader two days later. Freij then received death threats from PLO supporters.⁶ President Carter complained in December that by condemning Sadat the PLO had excluded itself from the peace process. Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, put it more bluntly: ‘Bye bye PLO’ – a phrase that was to be gleefully quoted back for years to come at anyone who had dared to believe it was true. But Brzezinski, quizzing Begin about his plans, also warned that a Palestinian ‘Basutoland’ (later Lesotho, the autonomous Black ‘homeland’ in apartheid South Africa) would not be an acceptable outcome.7

AUTONOMY AND DIVERSIONS

On 25 December 1977 Begin reciprocated by visiting Ismailiya on the Suez Canal where he was given a low-key welcome (Cairo was deemed too hostile an environment). It was there that he unveiled the idea of granting ‘autonomy’ to the West Bank and Gaza. Ezer Weizman, his defence minister, recognized immediately that Begin saw this as a way of perpetuating Israeli rule.⁸ The atmosphere clouded in January 1978 when Israel announced the construction of four new settlements in north-eastern Sinai, despatching bulldozers and TV crews to film them at work. Sharon had felt under pressure since Sadat’s visit to establish new outposts, but this time he backed down in the face of uproar over this demonstration of duplicity and bad faith in relations with Egypt.⁹ Carter, on a visit to Aswan, had called on Israel to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and resolve the Palestinian issue ‘in all its aspects’. Begin countered by insisting that Israel would retain complete and indefinite control of the West Bank and Gaza and complained that Egyptian media had called him a ‘Shylock’. Egypt’s foreign minister then withdrew from follow-up talks in Jerusalem, which continued in Cairo between defence ministers. No progress was made.¹⁰

Shortly afterwards there came a bloody and headline-grabbing diversion from the small print of peace negotiations. On 11 March 1978 a thirteen-strong Fatah squad, led by an eighteen-year-old Palestinian woman named Dalal al-Mughrabi – the Beirut-born daughter of a 1948 refugee from Jaffa – landed in rubber boats on a deserted beach south of Haifa and murdered an American woman tourist who was photographing wildlife. They then hijacked a bus on the coastal road and en route to Tel Aviv took over a second bus. At the end of a lengthy chase and shootout, thirty-eight Israeli civilians, including thirteen children, were dead and seventy-six wounded. The raid was masterminded by Khalil al-Wazir, known to all as Abu Jihad, with Arafat’s approval. It had, the PLO leader said, shown ‘the ability of the revolution to reach wherever it wishes’.11 And it too was named after the Deir Yassin massacre.¹² Three days later Israel sent 25,000 troops into south Lebanon and occupied it up as far as the Litani river, except for the coastal city of Tyre. The aim was to push Palestinian groups away from the border and bolster Israel’s local proxy, the South Lebanon Army (SLA). Seven days of fighting ended with a ceasefire (notably the first with Israel that was endorsed by all official PLO bodies), the creation of a new UN peacekeeping force, and an Israeli withdrawal that left the SLA in the front line of the confrontation with Fatah. ‘Operation Litani’ served as a bloody reminder that the Palestinians could not be ignored – and that Israel’s military might could be unleashed to devastating effect. An estimated 1,100 people were killed, mostly Palestinian and Lebanese. Israel said that at least half the fatalities were Palestinian fighters. Estimates for the numbers displaced by the offensive range from 100,000 to 250,000. Begin condemned a ‘Nazi atrocity’ that reinforced his long-standing view of the Palestinians. ‘It is inconceivable that in Judaea and Samaria and in Gaza a state should be established that would be ruled by Yasser Arafat and his murderers,’ he said. Not surprisingly, this shook, though it did not derail, the nascent Israeli–Egyptian peace process. And it was not the last time Lebanon would be the hapless setting for an Israeli–Palestinian war.

Sadat and Begin both visited Washington during the summer of 1978 but relations between them worsened. In early September, Carter took a high-risk gamble, against the recommendation of his advisers, and brought the two together at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, amid rustic log cabins, tennis courts, bicycle tracks, a golden-brown carpet of autumn leaves – and strict instructions to dress casually in special wind-cheaters. Begin called it a ‘concentration camp de luxe’.¹³ Carter hoped that the enforced seclusion would avoid performances for domestic consumption but both Begin and Sadat had direct phone lines and leaked whatever suited them.¹⁴ Over thirteen famously ‘intense and discouraging’ days – which later inspired a Broadway play – Carter shuttled between leaders who were ‘totally incompatible’,15 sulked, shouted, barely concealed their mutual dislike and even had to be physically separated. In the end, despite repeated threats to walk away – Carter physically blocking the door to stop Sadat leaving – they resolved all outstanding bilateral issues. Those included the evacuation of Israel’s military bases and settlements in Sinai, and so it was agreed to conclude a peace treaty and launch normal relations within three months. Sadat backed down on one vital point, dropping his initial strong insistence on a link between bilateral issues and a full withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Mohammed Ibrahim Kamel, the Egyptian foreign minister, resigned in fury. Sadat’s reward was $1.3 billion in annual US aid to the Egyptian armed forces. Carter, declared Begin, had ‘worked harder than did our forebears in Egypt building the Pyramids’.

Still, when the treaty was signed, it was the most significant breakthrough ever made in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict, though a very partial one. It broke a thirty-year taboo on Arabs dealing with Israel and satisfied narrow Egyptian national interests, but nothing more.¹⁶ A second Camp David document, dealing with the Palestinians, agreed that future negotiations would be based on UN Resolution 242 and that any solution must recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians, who were to enjoy ‘full autonomy’ during a five-year transition period. In that period a ‘self-governing authority’ would be elected by the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. Jordan was asked to join Egypt and Israel in agreeing how the body would be established. But generally this part of Camp David was far vaguer than the first, and open to different interpretations. East Jerusalem was not mentioned at all and there was no Israeli commitment to withdraw. And as in Sadat’s Knesset speech, the PLO was not mentioned either. Inevitably there was disagreement too over the length of the moratorium on settlement construction Begin had agreed to. ‘The Sinai was considered by Begin as a quid pro quo for the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria,’ said a close aide to the prime minister.¹⁷ Arafat denounced the ‘Camp David plot’.

‘POWER TO EXTERMINATE MOSQUITOES’

Palestinian opposition hardened further. Jordan declined to join talks on the self-governing authority, while Egyptian-Israeli negotiations on the powers of the autonomous entity dragged on for eighteen months without result. West Bank mayors – living the daily reality of Israeli occupation – were dismissive, insisting that autonomy meant no more than legitimizing the status quo. Palestinians were being offered the power to ‘collect garbage and exterminate mosquitoes’, complained Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah. Autonomy, in the words of the journalist Raymonda Tawil, was ‘a sham, a lie, a gigantic hoax … an attempt to bury the Palestinian cause for ever by creating the impression that the Palestinian issue has been solved – while we remain under Israel’s yoke’. Fahd Qawasmi, the mayor of Hebron, underlined what autonomy would mean in practice: ‘Ali will replace Shmuel as the head of the department of education. So what! Where’s my identity, my future?’18 Following an Arab summit in Baghdad – which allotted $150 million to the occupied territories, to be administered jointly by Jordan and the PLO – a new broad-based National Guidance Committee was formed in November 1978. Representing Palestinian trade unions and student bodies, voluntary organizations, the religious establishment and the press, it helped formulate a common position on the autonomy plan and co-ordinate opposition to settlements. Fatah was part of the twenty-three-member body but did not dominate it.¹⁹ Its leading figure was an unassuming Jerusalem engineer named Ibrahim Dakkak, who was referred to as ‘the mayor of mayors’. It soon showed its worth: the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty on the White House lawn on 26 March 1979 was accompanied by the biggest protest strike in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, with newspapers mourning ‘a black day’ – a deliberate echo of Begin’s warning of the implications of American recognition of the PLO. Autonomy never won the backing of any significant Palestinian figures: Sheikh Hashem Khuzandar, the imam of Gaza and a prominent Muslim Brotherhood leader, was one of very few who did support it, hailing a ‘new dawn’. He was stabbed to death outside his mosque in June, his assassination claimed by the DFLP. No prominent public figures attended his funeral. Other attacks on alleged collaborators followed.

Begin had no intention of retreating from the West Bank. One of his favourite maxims was that he would never again countenance a situation where Israeli women and children would die in Netanya or Petah Tikvah because there were enemy guns in Qalqilya and Tulkarem – Palestinian towns very close to the 1967 border. His view of autonomy was that it was for people but not the territory they inhabited, a vague throwback to discussions about minority rights in inter-war Poland. ‘Begin wasn’t interested in Arabs’, recalled Avraham Shalom, a senior Shin Bet officer. ‘He was interested in the Christians in Lebanon, in Sadat. Did he even know where Nablus was? He never visited an Arab village, not even in Israel.’20 Years later Ariel Sharon gave a candid description of Begin’s autonomy as nothing but a

fig leaf to enable Egypt to sign our peace treaty. The Egyptians needed this document in order to demonstrate their ‘concern’ for the Palestinian cause. We for our part had the deepest interest in signing the peace treaty and precious little interest in any change of the status quo in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.²¹

The settlers, alarmed at what had happened since the arrival in Israel of the man they called ‘Hitler on the Nile’, remained suspicious; they neither trusted the prime minister nor believed he would be able to resist US and Arab pressure. Gush Emunim activists mocked up posters of Arab policemen wearing keffiyehs and checking the ID cards of kippa-wearing Jews. ‘Autonomy’, they warned, was ‘the temporary name for a Palestinian state’, while Jewish residents of the new East Jerusalem suburbs would be subject to a special pass system.²² In one incident that March armed settlers from Ofra drove into the centre of nearby Ramallah, rounded up Palestinian residents and forced them at gunpoint to clear roadblocks. Two Palestinians were then shot dead in Halhoul while throwing rocks at an Israeli car. It was suspected that the perpetrators were from Kiryat Arba, stronghold of the most fanatical settlers. The army imposed a two-week curfew on the town and prevented the delivery of supplies by outsiders.

Among its other intoxicating effects, Sadat’s initiative led to the creation of the Peace Now movement in March 1978, at a time when the Egyptian-Israeli talks looked dangerously close to collapse. Nearly 350 reserve IDF officers, motivated by ‘deep anxiety’, sent an open letter to Begin, urging him not to squander an historic opportunity for peace. ‘A government that prefers the existence of the State of Israel within the borders of “Greater Israel” to its existence in peace with good neighbourliness, will be difficult for us to accept’, they warned.

A government that prefers the existence of settlements beyond the green line to elimination of this historic conflict with [the] normalisation of relationships in our region will evoke questions regarding the wisdom of the path we are taking. A policy that will lead to a continuation of our rule over a million Arabs will harm the Jewish-democratic character of the state, and will make it difficult for us to identify with the path of the State of Israel.23

Sentiments like these saw tens of thousands of Israelis maintaining pressure on the government to sign an agreement, expressing solidarity with Palestinians, demonstrating against collective punishments and planting vines to replace those uprooted by settlers in Hebron.

Begin’s government naturally looked to its own constituency, and under pressure from the settler lobby, tried hard to suppress pro-PLO sentiment. Activists were detained or deported, and Bir Zeit and other West Bank universities shut down for weeks on end. Any restraint worried the right wing. Ezer Weizman, Begin’s defence minister, rejected a recommendation by the Shin Bet that Bassam Shakaa, the mayor of Nablus, be deported on the grounds of a leaked conversation in which he had allegedly justified the Coastal Road massacre: every other mayor in the West Bank and Gaza threatened to resign if Shakaa was banished. Following the decision, Weizman phoned his Egyptian counterpart to tell him the good news – so that the peace talks could continue. Dr Ahmed Natshe from Hebron, who had been expelled to Jordan on the eve of the 1976 municipal elections, was allowed to return. At the same time, the Israeli military began giving ‘discreet support’ to Islamist groups – mostly inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood – that had been encouraged by the Iranian revolution a few months earlier. Social welfare associations, charities and student groups in Gaza began to challenge secular nationalists. In January 1980 Islamists attacked the home and office of Hayder Abdel-Shafi of the Red Crescent Society and a leading PLO loyalist. In years to come these events would be identified as the first significant appearance of an Islamist trend in Palestinian politics.

Alarm spread among the settlers at the increasingly political direction of Palestinian resistance. ‘The new Palestinian commanders no longer bedecked themselves in tiger-striped uniforms and loaded Kalashnikovs’, wrote Hagai Segal, one of the founders of Ofra.

Rather, dressed in elegant suits and half-height shoes, they clutched microphones and incited their supporters in city squares to resist the occupation. Instead of a handful of venomous terrorists lurking in underground organisations and acting only under cover of darkness, tens of thousands of local youths enlisted enthusiastically in the new campaign, which they waged (almost) without any explosives.24

But Fatah soon gave a spectacular demonstration of its enduring belief in the efficacy of armed action. It struck a deadly blow in May 1980, when a four-man squad gunned down six Israeli settlers at Bet Hadassah in the centre of Hebron – one of the most effective Palestinian attacks since 1967 and, given the city’s emotionally freighted history, one of the most sensitive possible targets to choose. Israeli public reactions suggested a lack of sympathy with the settlement enterprise, argued one influential commentator.²⁵ The government retaliated by expelling Qawasmi, the Hebron mayor, and his pro-PLO colleague from Halhoul, Mohamed Milhem, an articulate and handsome Palestinian spokesman. Weizman rejected a more drastic proposal to expel all the members of the National Guidance Committee. It was in this charged atmosphere in June 1980 that settler activists bombed the cars of Shakaa and Karim Khalaf, his colleague from Ramallah. Shakaa lost both legs, Khalaf both feet, and a police sapper was blinded trying to defuse a third device planted in the car of the mayor of El Bireh, Ibrahim al-Tawil. Israeli media dubbed it the work of the ‘Jewish underground’, a euphemistic phrase with echoes of the ‘dissidents’ of the pre-state Irgun and Stern Gang – though its activities clearly constituted terrorism by any normal definition.

Internationally the PLO made a significant gain with the European Economic Community’s Venice Declaration, which recognized the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and called for PLO involvement in negotiations – though it did not describe the group, as Arafat had hoped, as his people’s ‘sole legitimate representative’. That confirmed the scepticism of the PFLP’s George Habash about the value of ‘suave’ diplomacy compared to the achievements of armed struggle. Referring to the EEC leaders, he said: ‘Let Giscard [d’Estaing] and [Willy] Brandt and [Bruno] Kreisky understand that the Palestinian rifle will remain raised, to launch itself from Jericho to liberate Jaffa and from Nablus to liberate Haifa.’26

BEGIN, AGAIN

Menachem Begin’s second term as prime minister began in August 1981, his position bolstered by the sensational bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak near Baghdad. The election victory was also an endorsement of the Likud’s platform of keeping control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. (The Syrian territory was effectively annexed to Israel at the end of the year, but this unilateral move was not recognized internationally.) Illustrating the drift to the right, a small dovish party, Sheli (Peace for Israel), which had taken the radical step of advocating negotiations with the PLO, lost the two Knesset seats it had won in 1977, while the new far-right Tehiya (Renaissance) party won three seats with support from the settler lobby. With Ariel Sharon promoted to run the ministry of defence, changes to occupation policy reflected the new political map. The principal one was the establishment of a separate civilian administration in the West Bank and Gaza. The new body was subordinate to the military government, but the division of labour was designed to pre-empt the outcome of the autonomy talks with Egypt by implementing Israel’s interpretation of Camp David unilaterally. The head of the new administration was Menachem Milson, a Hebrew University professor whose speciality was modern Arabic literature. Milson bolstered the Israeli-backed Village Leagues, which had been established to challenge the growing strength of the PLO in the cities. The idea was that the conservative rural sector – which still accounted for 70 per cent of the West Bank population – would be easier to cultivate and influence. The scale of the ambition was demonstrated when Sharon presented the leagues’ leaders to the visiting US defence secretary, Casper Weinberger. But Israeli critics complained of outdated thinking and cited the fact that West Bank villagers were in fact just as nationalist as town dwellers – as shown by the numbers in prison for security offences.27

The leagues, first set up in the Hebron area, were run by mukhtars or other individuals who were granted powers to control water, electricity and other services, and received payment as well as weapons and training from the Israeli military. They were also authorized to issue some of the many permits needed for construction, exporting goods – or visiting relatives in Jordan.²⁸ The intention was to ‘storm the radical towns with the reactionary peasants’.²⁹ The reputation of many of those involved with the leagues was dubious. The figurehead was Mustafa Dudin, a former Jordanian minister. Pro-PLO figures accused him and others of being collaborators or land dealers, raising the ghosts of the ‘farmers’ parties’ of the 1920s and the ‘treacherous’ Zionist-funded opposition to the mufti in the 1930s. Israel TV’s Arabic channel broadcast clips of IDF officers handing cheques to Dudin to finance development projects. Others were illiterates or criminals.³⁰ Palestinian hostility was strong but might not have proved decisive without a decision by Jordan, now working in tandem with the PLO, to ban membership of the leagues on pain of death and confiscation of property. Within a few weeks key members had quit, while one of its leaders in the Ramallah area was assassinated by the PLO.³¹

AN EVERYDAY OCCUPATION

By the early 1980s life in the occupied territories had settled into a sort of dreary routine moulded by growing economic dependence, the patriarchal nature of Palestinian society, a deference to authority, the sophistication of Israeli control – and sheer habit. ‘The carrot’, in the words of the Palestinian-Israeli writer Anton Shammas, ‘had become the stick.’ Palestinians described their state of mind as ‘sumoud’ – ‘steadfastness’ or ‘hanging on’. The Israelis were practised at wearing people down, discouraging initiative and organization, not hesitating to intimidate and to punish. Raja Shehadeh, a perceptive chronicler of the dreary reality of Israeli rule, described how it worked on an unnamed friend:

So far the military forces of occupation have left him alone … But when they come to suspect that he is being effective … they will begin to pursue him … They will begin to keep him under surveillance. They will keep him waiting for half a day until an ‘expert’ with a frightening face interrogates him … They may even instruct their agents to spread rumours to make him lose his credibility. They won’t give him the permits he needs to get any of his projects started. And then, people won’t have anything more to do with him, because no project associated with him will get off the ground … But if he persists and is perceived as a real danger, something will be found against him, and he will be taken in. No-one will be able to prove what happened to him inside, but everyone will see how much weight he has lost and how subdued and defeated he looks when he is released. And if he revives after this and takes up where he left off, they will come one night, drive him to the border in a jeep, and the number of deportees will be increased by one.32

Deportation was only one form of pressure. Ahmed Ajwa, an East Jerusalem journalist, was detained without trial in December 1978 for possessing leaflets opposing the autonomy plan. Ajwa was held first in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem (known to Palestinians as the Muskoubiya) where a Shin Bet officer named Uzi beat him and abused him for alleged connections with the PLO. Later he was questioned by another man who spoke Arabic with an Iraqi accent and used the name Abu Nihad. Ajwa alleged that he had been throttled and chained to a pipe with his arms pinned behind his back and a hood over his head for seventy-two hours and was told by the interrogators that his wife was seeing other men.³³ Allegations about the systematic torture and mistreatment of Palestinians in detention centres achieved wide publicity. In June 1977 a detailed report on the issue by the Sunday Times in London was dismissed as a ‘slur’ by the Israeli government. (Later revelations suggested that the allegations were broadly correct.)34 Palestinians were not surprised by the newspaper’s findings. ‘Every time the PLO does something outside we suffer,’ said a member of the Aburish family from Bethany.

Israeli anger is directed at us. Israeli soldiers picked up a cousin – because they thought he was a PLO sympathiser and tortured him for three days and it took him two weeks to be able to talk again. Cousin — was picked up by an Israeli patrol after — and they kept him in jail for two days without food and water. He didn’t have any place to hide; we can’t even protect ourselves; we are helpless.³⁵

Legal challenges to the occupation, however, became increasingly common in the late 1970s. Important work was done by Israeli Jewish lawyers, notably the veteran Communist Felicia Langer, who acted for Palestinians in many cases that involved land confiscation, house demolitions and torture. It was Langer who managed to save Bassam Shakaa from deportation, though she was barred by the Communist Party from representing Palestinians who were implicated in attacks on civilians.³⁶ Many were represented by Leah Tsemel, who was associated with the anti-Zionist group Matzpen. Israeli Arab lawyers, with their mastery of Hebrew, were well equipped to work in this area. Palestinians believed that the Israeli lawyers were less intimidated by the military and thus better able to defend their clients. ‘It’s a slave mentality,’ one Arab lawyer said. ‘People simply refuse to believe that they can be helped by another slave in a conflict with the master.’³⁷

By summer 1981 it was clear that Sadat’s initiative would achieve nothing on the Palestinian front. Moshe Dayan held meetings with leaders from the West Bank and Gaza, but given the absence of any Palestinian buy-in and the slow pace of talks it was obvious that any benefits of Israeli–Egyptian peace would be strictly bilateral. In March 1982 Israel outlawed the National Guidance Committee on the grounds that it was an arm of the PLO and dismissed the mayors of Nablus, Ramallah and El-Bireh – all democratically elected six years earlier. Milson tried to justify the move by claiming that the 1976 polls were not democratic but were influenced by ‘terrorism, intimidation and bribery’. Bir Zeit University was shut, triggering unrest that left at least seven Palestinians dead38 – and sarcastic jokes about the Israeli professor’s attitude to academic freedom. Strict censorship was imposed on newspapers published in East Jerusalem, and they were banned from being distributed in the West Bank.

In October 1981, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist gunmen at a parade marking the Ramadan war. His murder was a profound shock to Israel and immediately triggered worries about the durability of the peace treaty he had signed. (When Yasser Arafat heard of the Egyptian leader’s death, his first comment was reportedly: ‘This is what happens to people who betray the Palestinian cause.’³⁹) But Sadat’s vice-president, Hosni Mubarak, quickly reaffirmed Egypt’s commitment to peace with Israel. Viewed from Cairo, it would have been short-sighted to do anything else: in just a few months Israel was required not only to return Sinai to Egypt but also, under the peace treaty, destroy the settlements it had built on Egyptian soil since 1967. In April 1982, Yamit on the north-eastern coast of Sinai near el-Arish was evacuated as Begin asserted his authority in the face of alarm on the Israeli right about the implications. ‘In the struggle for Yamit I saw a struggle for Judea and Samaria,’ said Yoel Bin-Nun, a Gush Emunim leader.⁴⁰ Begin’s colleague Yitzhak Shamir – a former leader of the Stern Gang – was filled with ‘regret … and foreboding’.⁴¹ In the end, though, the promised battle was a damp squib. In a show of resistance that some thought carefully choreographed, residents barricaded themselves on the rooftops before being dragged into buses by Israeli soldiers, but there was no bloodshed – despite the dramatic TV coverage. Still, a significant precedent had been set – removing settlements for peace – even though it would not be followed for a very long time, and even then not where it mattered most.