12

1968–1972

‘We have to prove to the Israeli enemy that there are people who will not flee. We are going to confront him in the same way David confronted Goliath.’

Yasser Arafat, 1968

SETTLING IN

In the space of a few weeks in the summer of 1968, Palestinians marked two gloomy anniversaries: the first of the 1967 war, and the twentieth of the Nakba – both landmarks which had transformed relations between Jews and Arabs. On the ground, the year began with the expropriation of 3,345 dunams of mostly private land in East Jerusalem to build the new Jewish suburb of Ramat Eshkol – named for the hesitant Labour prime minister who had presided over the extraordinary victory of the previous year. It was the first settlement built in occupied territory after the war, just beyond what had been no-man’s-land. It was intended to create a land bridge to secure Mount Scopus, so it could not be cut off again, as the university enclave had been after 1948.1 Its apartment blocks and supermarkets, clad in obligatory pale Jerusalem limestone, formed the first link in a chain of new Jewish residential areas that were to change the topography and the demography of the city beyond recognition over the coming decades.

The first – and explicit – principle of an urban masterplan drawn up that year was ‘to ensure [Jerusalem’s] unification … to build the city in a manner that would prevent the possibility of it being repartitioned’.² Teddy Kollek, whose mayorship had begun in 1965, saw the need to respond to the ‘staggering change’ of post-war realities, and justified building in former Jordanian areas on grounds of urgent housing needs. Palestinians were neither consulted nor considered. ‘It is never pleasant for anyone to have his land expropriated, and although this was uncultivated land, the very fact that compensation was offered by the people the Arabs regarded as “conquerors” made for resentment’, Kollek admitted.3 Later a smaller area was confiscated to build Neve Yaakov, further north, the site of a Jewish settlement that had been established in the 1920s and abandoned in 1948. Sari Nusseibeh, an astute if unusually forgiving Palestinian observer, commented of the Israeli mayor: ‘When he lobbied his government to build the neighbourhoods [of] Ramat Eshkol, Neve Yaakov and Gilo he didn’t set out to harm our national rights. He simply didn’t factor them into his plans.’⁴ The other big project in Jerusalem was in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, from where Arab residents, many of them refugees from 1948, were quickly evicted. In April the finance ministry issued an order expropriating 116 dunams – 20 per cent of the Old City – for ‘public purposes’.⁵

Settlements were slow to expand beyond East Jerusalem, partly because of the political implications. Israel argued that the West Bank did not constitute occupied territory since Mandatory Palestine had been divided in 1949 by armistice lines that were military and temporary; furthermore, Jordan’s unilateral annexation of the West Bank the following year had been recognized only by Britain and Pakistan. The terms of the armistice, it claimed, had been annulled by Arab attacks.⁶ The Arab summit conference at Khartoum strengthened the hands of those Israelis who saw little or no future for peace talks. On 1 September 1967 the leaders who had assembled in the Sudanese capital issued a famous declaration of ‘three noes’: no to peace, no to recognition, no to negotiations. Israel’s official interpretation skated over the salient fact, which was as clear to the IDF as it was to the PLO, that the Arab states had resolved to employ political and diplomatic means, not war, ‘to eliminate the consequences of the aggression’. Back in 1964, the first Arab summit had called for ‘the final liquidation of Israel’.⁷ Still, both Israel’s justice minister and the foreign ministry’s legal adviser advised that implanting settlements in occupied territory would be in breach of the fourth Geneva Convention, which was designed to protect civilians in time of war.

Nevertheless, Kfar Etzion, between Bethlehem and Hebron, was re-established and officially described as a Nahal (paramilitary) outpost or ‘strongpoint’ to circumvent legal objections. That fiction – also used for Merom Golan, the first settlement on the Golan Heights – was undermined by the fact that these pioneers included men like Hanan Porat, who had been born in Gush Etzion in 1943 and left five years later, and were exercising what they saw as their ‘right of return’; a ‘right of return’ that was parallel to the way Palestinian refugees dreamed of going back to Jaffa or Haifa but were unable to do so. Eshkol’s decision reflected nostalgia for a settlement that had been lost in 1948, lobbying by Orthodox nationalists, and uncertainty about the future status of the West Bank. Many saw it as a one-off gesture, not a precedent.8 But even then Yosef Weitz, who had spent his life promoting Jewish settlement before and after the watershed of 1948, thought it was a bad idea that would ‘anger our few friends and provide our many enemies with a stick to beat us’.⁹ The US and Arab governments were indeed quick to condemn the move.

It did turn out to be a precedent. In April 1968 another group of religious nationalists, led by a rabbi named Moshe Levinger, secured permission from the IDF to celebrate Passover in a Hebron hotel (at that time permission was required if Israeli civilians wished to stay overnight in the occupied territories). The town’s significance to Orthodox Jews, drawn to it by the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the powerful memory of the 1929 massacre, was as obvious as the hostility of its Muslim residents, who had a reputation for religious conservatism. The day after arriving the group announced that they had come to ‘renew’ the Jewish presence in Hebron. Their principal ally was Labour’s Yigal Allon, who quietly arranged for them to be armed. Within a few months the government had decided to establish – or re-establish – a Jewish neighbourhood in the city. This landmark episode combined official dithering, dubious legality, sympathetic nodding and winking and, above all, determination by an ideologically motivated minority to create irreversible facts on the ground. And subterfuge became official policy. In July 1970 Dayan and other officials discussed how land would be confiscated ostensibly for security purposes, and decided that buildings on it would be falsely presented as being for military use – and thus communicated to the mayor of Hebron.10 The pattern was to be repeated again and again in years to come. Israel may have acquired an ‘accidental empire’ in 1967¹¹ (an argument akin to John Seeley’s famous notion that the British Empire was born ‘in a fit of absence of mind’), but some very calculated actions were nevertheless made from its earliest days. By January 1969 there were already ten settlements on the Golan, two in Sinai and five in the West Bank. Several more were approved the same month.¹²

Israelis on the left were dismayed by these zealous right-wingers, and discomfited by the implications of their appeal. ‘The Six Day war created the conditions necessary for the transformation of the cult of the homeland into a fundamentalist-religious-chauvinist mythology’, observed Meron Benvenisti, a political scientist who later served as Kollek’s deputy for Arab affairs in the Jerusalem municipality. ‘In the name of “love for Eretz-Yisrael”, fanatics set out to complete the journey into the past by nationalising newly-occupied territory, which necessitated the dispossession of anyone who did not belong to the Jewish collectivity.’¹³ Benvenisti’s liberal Zionist argument was correct, but it failed to address the large-scale dispossession and removal of Palestinians that was – certainly for the Palestinians – the central feature of Israel’s independence and the Nakba. The difference between two types of settlers was captured in Hebrew usage that became common after 1967 – almost without anyone noticing. Hityashvut – an unequivocally positive word in the Israeli/Zionist lexicon – meant simply ‘settlement’. That was what took place, uncontroversially, in the Negev or Galilee. But the word preferred by partisans of Eretz-Yisrael – hitnahalut – carried an additional and unmistakable connotation of ‘inheritance’ or ‘patrimony’. Hitnahalut only took place in the occupied territories. Palestinians made no such distinction. It was the start of what Israeli ‘doves’ came to refer to as a process of ‘creeping annexation’.

RESISTANCE AND RESPONSE

Israel’s grip on the West Bank and Gaza was firmly established by the end of 1967, thanks to aggressive counter-measures, denunciations by collaborators and lax security by Palestinian groups. In December alone forty-two Fatah men were rounded up by the simple expedient of observing who approached a dead-letter box next to a soft drinks stall in Hebron. In February 1968 the army surrounded the Nablus casbah and paraded thousands of men in front of masked informers provided by the security service. Two arms caches were found and seventy-four people identified as belonging to guerrilla organizations. ‘Our great achievement was creating a distinct barrier between the population at large and the terrorist organisations’, one Shin Bet officer explained.

People knew that anyone who helped the terrorists would have his house blown up, be deported or arrested. We also showed them that captured terrorists were the first to inform. We created the impression that those who were supposed to be liberating the people were the most likely to betray those who helped them. This was a deliberate decision. We’d go to a village, impose a curfew and put all the men in the square and then file them past one of our prisoners – a captured terrorist – sitting in a car with a hood over his head. Now, whether or not the prisoners actually identified any suspects, we’d pretend that he had done. The cumulative effect of all this was that when the terrorists came to a village the locals would say: ‘get out of here. We know that you’ll inform on us.’ We even tested this once by sending a group of soldiers, dressed as terrorists, into a village to ask for help. And they got exactly that answer.14

Yaakov Perry, a Shin Bet man stationed in Nablus, recruited a sheikh whose wife was given permission to undergo gynaecological treatment in Israel. On another occasion a Palestinian informant agreed to a clandestine meeting and arranged for the Israeli contact to be ambushed by Fatah. But a second Palestinian informed on the first and the plot was foiled.¹⁵ Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Arafat’s deputy, candidly attributed Palestinian setbacks to ‘the efficiency of the Israeli secret services and the carelessness of our fighters’.¹⁶ Control of the Jordanian border, protected from Tiberias to the Dead Sea by fences, mined strips, floodlights and surveillance devices, was another vital factor: ‘Trying to get men and weapons across the Jordan is a waste of time and effort’, concluded Wadie Haddad of the PFLP, for whose professionalism and discipline Israeli security officials had a grudging respect: it was far tougher to penetrate than Fatah.17

If the Israelis proved that they were good at counter-insurgency operations, they found it harder to deal with political and non-violent opposition. Sheikh Sayih’s deportation was followed in March 1968 by that of his successor as head of the National Guidance Committee, Ruhi al-Khatib, the deposed mayor of Jerusalem, marking ‘a further emasculation of the independent-minded leaders of the occupied Palestinians’.¹⁸ Organizations like the Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Arab Women carried on but were eclipsed over time by PLO institutions in exile, which always seemed anxious not to allow too much autonomous activity. Fatah’s brief period of armed resistance had effectively ended, though it had defeated any idea of acquiescence in the occupation. Exploratory talks on the creation of a Palestinian entity under Israeli auspices went nowhere, in part because of threats and at least one armed attack on the people involved.

Outside the occupied territories the Palestinians were able to inflict one painful blow on the Israelis – in propaganda if not in conventional military terms. In March 1968 came long-threatened retaliation in the form of an Israeli assault on Fatah and other guerrillas, backed by the Jordanian army, at Karameh in the Jordan Valley – by coincidence its Arabic name meaning ‘dignity’. Arafat ignored the advice of the Jordanians to avoid a confrontation after an Israeli bus ran over a mine near the border in the Negev and two civilians were killed. The Fatah leader, by his own account, decided to make a stand. ‘No, we have to prove to the Israeli enemy that there are people who will not flee. We are going to confront him in the same way David confronted Goliath.’ The overwhelmingly superior Israeli force secured its objectives but lost 28 dead, the Jordanians 61 and the Palestinians 120. The Israelis left behind a tank, a half-track and several trucks – supporting the Palestinian image of triumphant resistance. Fatah leaders and King Hussein were photographed in front of these spoils. Fatah recruitment soared, as did weapons flows from Egypt, Iraq and Syria, and boosted Arafat’s own reputation, carefully cultivated by a slick PR campaign. ‘Unlike the propaganda effort surrounding his infiltration of the West Bank’, his biographer noted, ‘the difficult publicity task of turning defeat into victory, this time he actually had something to celebrate.’19 The battle he called ‘a second Leningrad’ was ‘the first victory for our Arab nation since the 1967 war’. Even the Israelis admitted that Karameh had been a ‘moral victory’ for the Palestinians.²⁰ King Faisal of Saudi Arabia granted an audience to Arafat’s senior colleagues. Nizar Qabbani, the famous Syrian poet, praised Fatah for raising the Arabs ‘from the mire of shame’.²¹

Four months later the Palestine National Council – the PLO’s ‘parliament’ – allotted seats to the fedayeen groups for the first time, giving a harder edge to a body hitherto dominated by the rivalries of Arab states which prioritized their own interests. The PLO’s national covenant also underwent significant changes in July 1968. Reflecting the post-war situation, it emphasized the nationhood of the Palestinians and highlighted the role of armed struggle as an ‘overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase’, as the only way to liberate Palestine. It also clarified that the only Jews who could be considered Palestinians would be those ‘who had resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion’. On the understanding that that meant 1917 – the start of British occupation and the Balfour Declaration – the majority of the Jewish population of Israel were excluded. That was a regression compared to the 1964 version of the charter, which had used the date of 1947.²² In December 1968 Time magazine chose ‘Fedayeen leader Arafat’ for its cover story.²³ Fatah then issued its own seven-point platform stating that its goal was an ‘independent democratic Palestine’ whose citizens would enjoy equal rights regardless of their religion’. Arafat explained that alongside 2,500,000 Palestinian Arabs of the Muslim and Christian faiths there were ‘another 1,250,000 Arabs of the Jewish faith who live in what is now the state of Israel’.²⁴ Israelis, unsurprisingly, were not impressed by that definition. In February 1969 Arafat became chairman of the PLO executive committee – a position he held until his death thirty-five years later.

COSTS AND BENEFITS

Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza depended on more than just security measures and repression. Within months of the war’s end Palestinians began to cross the green line to work in Israel, where the economy was expanding. Palestinian unemployment had been severe before 1967 and was aggravated by the war, but it gradually declined in its aftermath. Initially, West Bankers travelled to farms or building sites near the green line, especially in Jerusalem, to be recruited by intermediaries and labour contractors – many of them Arab Israeli citizens who were well-placed to take advantage of a fresh supply of cheap labour. By the end of 1968 5,000 people were working in Israel, so the following year the government set up labour exchanges in the main towns. This enabled workers to obtain benefits such as holidays and health insurance, though the majority probably continued to work unofficially – to avoid paying taxes and social security contributions. Palestinians were in any case defined as day labourers, which meant they did not qualify for the same level of benefits as Israelis; nor were they permitted to join the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation. Israelis also earned six times more than West Bankers, and eight times more than Gaza’s inhabitants.25 Workers were banned from staying in Israel between midnight and 6 a.m. By 1974 the number of Palestinians working in Israel had reached 68,000.²⁶ Two Palestinian families in five were sending one of their members to work in Israel. Most commuted daily, but a tendency grew, especially among Gazans who lived further away, to risk arrest and stay, illegally, overnight in their workplaces or makeshift quarters.²⁷ For the first time since 1948 Palestinians again became a familiar part of the Israeli landscape, replacing Jewish workers in agriculture, construction work, restaurant kitchens and other menial jobs. ‘Arab work’ acquired a negative connotation of being cheap and shoddy. The massive influx of workers into Israel and the virtual elimination of unemployment boosted growth in the West Bank by nearly 60 per cent by 1973. The exception was in East Jerusalem, where Israel’s annexation and the abolition of its separate administrative status was a blow for Palestinian doctors, lawyers, civil servants and the tourist industry – because of direct competition from Jews. Between 1968 and 1972 GNP rose annually by 16 per cent in the West Bank and 20 per cent in Gaza. Private consumption also increased rapidly.²⁸

Exposure to Israel’s economy and society – not just to the relatively small numbers of soldiers and officials who maintained the apparatus of occupation – was highly unsettling. ‘With the June war’, observed Aziz Shehadeh in Ramallah, ‘all previous modes of life were shattered. The whole social structure was challenged. All previous values and convictions were put to the test … Everyone could see the progress the Jews had been able to make. The organisation of … society … values … ideals were all upset.’29 For a visiting American-Palestinian expert, the Israelis brought a ‘western-style bureaucratic and legal system, rationalized by an ideology of the rule of law. The indigenous Palestinian society, on the other hand, was organized on a kin and highly personalized basis.’³⁰ The growing numbers of Palestinians working in Israel were sharply aware of the differences between the two sides of an increasingly porous green line. Labourers from villages or refugee camps ‘left a house in the morning that had no electricity, running water, or sewage, and worked all day in an environment where these utilities were taken for granted’, commented one analyst. ‘Unlike other political contexts where such stark disparities also exist, the distinction between the haves and have nots was based on national identity rather than class. The disparity no doubt reminded the Palestinians that they were an occupied people. And that the situation was not normal.’³¹

The traditional West Bank political elite, Jordanian loyalists who continued to receive pensions and run their businesses from across the river while urging people not to co-operate with the Israelis,³² gradually saw its influence decline as sympathy for the fedayeen grew, especially after Karameh and the boost it gave to the PLO.³³ The foundation of three universities in the West Bank in the first half of the 1970s – Bir Zeit near Ramallah, al-Najah in Nablus and Bethlehem – not only advanced higher education but also helped nurture a new generation of politically conscious activists. In later years all three required their students to do community work, combating illiteracy or volunteering in clinics and hospitals.³⁴ Bir Zeit in particular attracted attention as a centre of Palestinian nationalism, elections to its student body providing an informal barometer of the political mood among young people. The tone was set by a stirring quotation from George Bernard Shaw (John Bull’s Other Island) that was posted prominently on the campus: ‘If you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it back again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation.’35

RUTHLESS IN GAZA

It took longer for the Israelis to pacify the Gaza Strip. It was there, in the second half of 1971, that the military struggle against the fedayeen reached its violent peak, numbers swelled by fighters fleeing an escalating crackdown on the PLO in Jordan. ‘Gaza’, a foreign journalist reported that August, ‘is the only place where the Palestinian resistance, at a terrible cost and with suicidal tenacity, is worthy of the name.’ General Ariel Sharon of IDF southern command disagreed with Moshe Dayan, who wanted only a minimal Israeli military presence in Gaza. Killings of Palestinians accused of collaboration were routine, seventy-five in 1970 alone,³⁶ but a grenade attack by a Palestinian teenager that killed two Israeli children and injured their parents in January 1971 triggered a hardening of policy. Weapons stockpiled during Egyptian rule and left behind by the PLA circulated freely. Others were smuggled in from Sinai. Dense orange groves provided natural cover for guerrilla fighters. From that July Sharon led a brutal counter-insurgency campaign targeting 700–800 ‘terrorists’ by his own account. It was gruelling work and required innovative methods and detailed local knowledge – and the collaborators needed to identify strangers and likely fedayeen. The Israelis imposed 24-hour curfews, interrogated all adult males and instituted a shoot-to-kill policy. Battalion commanders were ordered to deploy bulldozers in search of underground bunkers hiding fighters and weapons. Wide roads were cleared through Gaza’s three biggest refugee camps: Jabaliya, Rafah and Shati. Roads were paved and street lighting introduced to allow easy access for the IDF and reduce the dangers from mines. An estimated 6,000 homes were destroyed.³⁷ By mid-1971 about 100,000 people had been forced to find new homes.³⁸ ‘We used every kind of subterfuge’, Sharon wrote later:

We infiltrated our own ‘terrorists’ into Gaza on a boat from Lebanon, then chased them with helicopters and search parties, hoping that eventually the real terrorists would make contact. And eventually they did … We had people selling vegetables in the market, drinking coffee in the coffeehouses, riding donkeys. Our ‘terrorists’ would sometimes take a suspected PLO man out of his house and accuse him of cooperating with the Jews. He would say, ‘No I’ve never cooperated with them. Ask my commander.’ So we would get the suspect and the commander too … At one point our fake terrorists even built bunkers and became bunker dwellers. Our imaginations worked overtime at this sort of thing. We faced the terrorists with new situations constantly, putting them off balance, bringing them out into the open.39

By February 1972 104 fedayeen had been killed and hundreds more captured. In the year up to April 1971 Israeli courts had convicted 5,620 Palestinians of committing security offences in Gaza.⁴⁰ In November the charismatic fedayeen commander Ziyad al-Husseini committed suicide rather than surrender in the cellar under the home of Gaza’s mayor, Rashad al-Shawwa, a patrician businessman who had been appointed by the Israelis but who maintained clandestine contact with the PLO. Shawwa had had some of his orange trees destroyed because a bunker and weapons cache were discovered in one of his orchards.⁴¹ Husseini’s widow accused the Israelis of killing him.⁴² The PLO, anxious about competition from Jordan in the West Bank, directed fewer financial resources to Gaza. Sharon deployed the border police, whose Druze personnel were renowned for their brutality, as well as a newly formed IDF special forces unit named Rimon (‘pomegranate’ or ‘grenade’). The harsh methods they employed faced opposition from the governor and the area military commander – facts that were seized upon by the many critics of the controversial general. Rimon’s commander, Meir Dagan, acknowledged later that ‘scores’ of wanted Palestinians had been killed if they opened fire or refused to surrender. The unit worked closely with the Shin Bet.⁴³

Israel’s calculation from the start was that economic opportunity and the lure of ‘normal’ life would blunt resistance. Dr Hayder Abdel-Shafi, the nationalist president of the Gaza Red Crescent Society, recognized early on that the imperative to work in Israel was hard to square with fighting the occupation. In 1969, he recalled, Dayan complained to him that Gazans were not crossing the green line to work.

It was just after the war, people were still enthusiastic and confident that the occupation would not last long. Because of sheer economic necessity, however, workers – in the face of physical injury – began going to Israel. It was absolutely impossible to try to preach against it when you can’t support any other way. Once it started, there was no way to stop it.44

Dayan believed that improved living conditions would mean not only acquiescence in the status quo but the abandonment of the Palestinian dream of return. ‘As long as the refugees remain in their camps … their children will say they come from Jaffa or Haifa’, he argued. ‘If they move out of the camps, the hope is they will feel an attachment to their new land.’⁴⁵ Ordinary Gazans did reap material benefits, though otherwise there was no change and no obvious prospect of change in the status quo. ‘For the first inconceivable time in their whole lives they are able to bring meat, tins of food, biscuits, shoes, fresh milk, into homes where hitherto everything has been a matter of scrounging and 1,500 UNRWA calories’, a visiting foreign journalist reported in 1971. ‘Terrorism has failed to offer them any alternative. A few grenades exploding into queues of labourers … are not sufficient deterrents.’⁴⁶ In June that year thirty-four terrorist incidents were recorded; in December, just one.⁴⁷ The numbers of Gazan workers crossing into Israel more than doubled in 1972 and rose every subsequent year.⁴⁸

CONFRONTATION IN JORDAN …

Military defeat, the stick of repression and the carrots of economic improvements in the West Bank and Gaza all combined to push Palestinian resistance to Israel abroad. The battle of Karameh had been a huge boost for the PLO. But subsequent Israeli attacks forced the fedayeen to abandon the Jordan Valley and find new sanctuaries. That increased tensions with the Jordanian authorities, alarmed by the increasingly confident fedayeen presence in Amman and elsewhere. Trouble erupted on 2 November 1968 during a demonstration marking the fifty-first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – always a potentially disruptive marker and link between past and present injustice – when Palestinians attacked the US embassy in the capital. That was followed by Jordanian army shelling of Palestinian refugee camps. Over the following months the PLO presence increased to the point where King Hussein, ever suspicious of Palestinian ambitions, began to fear not only that he would never regain the lost half of his kingdom across the river but that the very future of his regime was in doubt. In 1969 Fatah was mounting two hundred operations a month from Jordanian territory and drawing harsh Israeli retaliation.49 In February 1970, the king announced a new clampdown on the Palestinians but then backed down and agreed a hudna – a truce or armistice – with Arafat. In June there was further escalation when the PFLP took eighty-eight foreigners hostage in Amman hotels.⁵⁰ Israel, with the US, watched the position of the ‘plucky little king’ or PLK, as he was nicknamed by Western diplomats and journalists, with growing concern, stiffening Hussein’s resolve to force a showdown. It began in September 1970 and attracted global attention when the PFLP hijacked three civilian airliners and landed them at a remote desert landing strip in the kingdom called Dawson’s Field – renamed ‘Revolution Airport’ – and blew them up. ‘Things cannot go on,’ the king declared. ‘Every day Jordan is sinking a little further.’⁵¹ Hussein declared martial law. In fighting punctuated by feverish inter-Arab diplomacy, PLO forces were routed and driven out of the country. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians and 600 Jordanians were killed.⁵² Palestinians came to refer to this period as ‘Black September’. The common interests of Jordan and Israel had never been so clear. In October 1970 King Hussein met the Israeli deputy prime minister, Yigal Allon, in the desert near Eilat and promised to work to prevent further fedayeen raids.⁵³ Scores of Palestinian fighters fled from the East Bank during the final confrontation with the king’s men in July 1971. An estimated 3,000–5,000 fled to Lebanon, while another 2,300 were taken prisoner. Seventy-two even surrendered to the Israelis rather than continue fighting the Jordanians.⁵⁴ It was, as the king put it, ‘a cancer operation that had to be performed to save Jordan’s life’.⁵⁵

The PLO’s violent expulsion from the Hashemite kingdom was to Israel’s benefit since, until September 1970, most Palestinian operations against Israel originated from there. By 1972 the number of such incidents had plummeted by over 90 per cent. Hussein’s announcement of a plan for a United Arab Kingdom in March 1972 was ostensibly to ‘reorganize the Jordanian-Palestinian home’, but in fact it appeared designed to legitimize his renewed control of the West Bank. It conspicuously made no mention of the ‘Palestinian people’ and met with immediate and furious rejection by the PLO, which condemned Jordan for ‘offering itself as an accomplice to the Zionist enemy’. Israel’s plans for municipal elections in the West Bank had already created an alarming impression of collusion with the Jordanians, the suspicions based on Allon’s 1968 plan for an Israeli line of defence in the Jordan Valley and the return of densely populated Palestinian areas to Jordanian rule. In the Knesset, however, the new prime minister Golda Meir rejected the United Arab Kingdom plan. On this occasion there had in fact been no collusion. Hussein’s plan was stillborn and disappeared without trace.56

… AND IN LEBANON AND BEYOND

Palestinian forces in Lebanon – ‘a garden without a fence’ in the words of a senior PLO official⁵⁷ – had launched raids against Israel from the end of 1969. The organization acted according to an agreement concluded in Cairo that November, and operated throughout 1970, especially from the rugged Arqoub area in the south, quickly dubbed ‘Fatahland’, where the PLO assumed complete control. In one cross-border attack on a passing school bus, twelve Israeli children were killed in May 1970 at Moshav Avivim. Israel retaliated with air raids and artillery barrages, which intensified after the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan. Attacks on Israeli targets abroad began with the PFLP hijacking of an El Al plane (Israel’s national carrier) to Algiers in 1968. In December another Israeli plane came under fire on the ground at Athens airport. Three days later, IDF commandos landed by helicopter at Beirut airport and blew up thirteen planes belonging to Middle East Airlines, Lebanon’s national carrier. The PFLP hit back by firing Katyusha rockets across the border, killing three people in Kiryat Shmona. In 1969 Leila Khaled – a refugee from Haifa – hijacked a TWA flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, or, as she put it, ‘expropriated an imperialist plane and returned to Palestine’.58 Other attacks were mounted against Israeli embassies and El Al offices. The PFLP, in the assessment of Hisham Sharabi,

upheld the principle of total war: if Israel used napalm to kill civilians, dynamited homes in retaliation for commando activity, and engaged in collective punishment, then the guerrillas were justified in refusing to distinguish between civilian and military targets or to limit themselves to a single kind or field of action.⁵⁹

In 1971 foreign operations accounted for just over 3 per cent of all PLO military activity, rising to 12 per cent in 1972 and peaking at 30 per cent in 1973. The bare statistics, however, mask some notorious incidents that were magnified by the ensuing publicity. In May 1972 the PFLP hijacked a Belgian Sabena plane to Lod Airport where it was stormed by Israeli commandos who freed the hostages. Soon afterwards three members of the Japanese Red Army who had been recruited by the PFLP killed twenty-four people, mostly Puerto Rican nuns on a pilgrimage, at Lod Airport – in an attack that was named ‘Operation Deir Yassin’ after the 1948 massacre so often referenced by Palestinians. The PLO took credit for this. Kozo Okamoto and other attackers were tried and gaoled for life.

The most notorious terrorist incident was the Munich Olympic Games massacre of Israeli athletes that September, mounted by the shadowy Black September organization, a group that was created in the wake of the 1970 Jordanian crisis by Ali Hassan Salameh, an aide to Salah Khalaf and the son of the renowned 1948 martyr of the same name.⁶⁰ Eight Palestinian gunmen infiltrated the Olympic Village and took 11 athletes hostage, demanded the release of 234 prisoners held in Israel as well as the German-held founder members of the far-left Baader-Meinhof group. Meir rejected the demand. Two hostages were killed at once and the other nine in a firefight between German police and the Palestinians at a military airfield, where five of the gunmen also died; three were captured but released later.⁶¹ Arafat and the PLO disclaimed all knowledge of it, though the Israelis and the CIA learned that the operation had used ‘Fatah funds, facilities and personnel’.62 It was named ‘Operation Ikrit and Biram’, after two Galilean villages depopulated in 1948. Israelis were horrified. Arafat’s view after Munich was that ‘violent political action in the midst of a broad popular movement cannot be termed terrorism … it is appropriate in certain objective conditions in a given phase’.⁶³ It and other attacks attracted approving comments in Fatah publications and reinforced the perception in Israel of the unremitting hostility of the PLO. Munich triggered internal debate within the organization though, with some blaming Khalaf for the harsh global and Israeli reactions.⁶⁴

In every case Israel retaliated with attacks on Syria and Lebanon, after Munich reportedly killing up to two hundred people, many of them civilians, but never attracting the same degree of attention as spectacular terrorist incidents abroad and rarely much sympathy. ‘Palestinians think that western perspectives of terrorism are absurdly distorted’, commented a sympathetic foreign writer.

They believe that the West judges the issue with much emotiveness but with little understanding of its context. Moreover, its view is almost entirely one-sided. A guerrilla with a gun is more ‘newsworthy’ than an air-force pilot spraying napalm over a refugee camp, but is he more of a terrorist? The eleven Israeli athletes who were killed at the Munich Olympics are remembered all over the world, but how many people recall the four hundred refugees who were killed in the Israeli vengeance raid three days later?⁶⁵

Munich, observed Yezid Sayigh, ‘marked the turning point for the Palestinian leadership as it … threatened any diplomatic gains made by the PLO’. In the months that followed, Israeli assassinations in the so-called ‘war of the spooks’ conducted by the Mossad took a heavy toll. In February 1973 the Israelis hit bases near Tripoli and killed forty Palestinians, mostly from the PFLP. In April Israel launched one of its most daring operations yet, a raid in the heart of Beirut that killed three senior PLO officials: Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser and Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar. Israel named the raid ‘Springtime of Youth’. The number of Palestinian operations dropped sharply, from 670 in 1971, to 351 in 1972 and 271 in 1973.⁶⁶ The international image of Palestinians suffered badly in this period, their cause all too often being seen as synonymous with terrorism. But the reasons behind their animosity to Israel were rarely addressed by Western governments or reported in the mainstream media. Naji al-Ali, a refugee from al-Shajara in Galilee who had fled to Lebanon as a child in 1948, made a lasting contribution to humanizing his much-misunderstood people: Handala (a bitter, wild gourd in Arabic), the barefoot, spiky-haired but faceless cartoon character he drew for a Kuwaiti newspaper, came to symbolize Palestinian suffering and patience. ‘Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old’, al-Ali explained. ‘At that age, I left my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him. He is unique. Things will become normal again when the homeland returns.’67

ISRAEL ADJUSTS

In the first few years after 1967, Israelis adapted with apparent ease to the new reality of occupation, and continued to take advantage of what it had to offer long after the first post-war months of frenzied tourism and shopping. Jerusalem’s Old City – now energetically promoted by the government as the heart of Israel’s ‘eternal’ capital – remained the most popular destination, with its restaurants, colourful bazaars and historic sites. Unrestricted access to the West Bank also meant regular trips to cheap and picturesque markets in Bethlehem, Qalqilya and Nablus – what the writer Anton Shammas dubbed ‘hummus and falafel-land’.⁶⁸ Hiking in the Judaean desert, especially near Wadi Qelt off the Jerusalem–Jericho road, became a favourite weekend pastime. In July 1967, when Gaza City was first open to civilians, 35,000 Israelis had streamed in for Saturday morning shopping. Numbers dropped as armed attacks increased and it became a less attractive destination with its squalid refugee camps and cramped conditions. The Hebrew media usually referred to the ‘administered territories’. On the right the terminology was ‘liberated territories’. Over time, the more neutral simple ‘territories’ (shtahim) became common usage. In general, prospects for political change seemed limited, with the famous three ‘noes’ of the Khartoum conference fixed in the minds of most Israeli Jews, along with Moshe Dayan’s famous line just days after the war about ‘waiting for a telephone call’ from Arab leaders.69 (The one most likely to make the call was widely assumed to be King Hussein, reflecting the long-standing Israeli preference for a ‘Jordanian option’ for resolving the conflict.) In August 1968 the playwright Hanoch Levin produced a satirical show, You and I and the Next War: ‘Wherever we walk, we are three: you and I and the next war.’ Among Israelis, awareness of Palestinians as a distinct national group was still limited, as crudely illustrated by Golda Meir’s notorious and revealing statement in 1969 that ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.’⁷⁰ It was not at that time a controversial remark for the majority of Israeli Jews. In October that year Meir’s Labour-led coalition was returned to power with the largest number of seats ever won in an Israeli election – 56 out of 120 seats. And Meir was nothing if not consistent: she insisted there could be no return to the pre-1967 borders, but brushed aside concerns about the annexation of parts of the West Bank. ‘Israel wants only a minimum of Arab population in the Jordanian territory it wishes to keep,’ she said in September 1972, in the angry anti-Palestinian mood after the Munich Olympics killings.⁷¹

Unease about the future was given powerful expression in 1970 in Hanoch Levin’s controversial play, Queen of the Bathtub. It played to packed audiences in Tel Aviv – though some who watched were so outraged that they threw stones and stink bombs during performances. It featured a dead son speaking from the grave, sarcastically thanking his father for sending him to sacrifice his life for restoring the now undivided Jewish kingdom.⁷² It brought condemnation from Meir and Moshe Dayan – for giving comfort to the enemy – as well as from bereaved families. (Dayan’s actor son, Assi, made waves when he called for the return of all the occupied territories, including Jerusalem, as ‘the price we must pay for a true peace’.) In one scene, the eponymous queen grabbed the pompous-sounding Labour foreign minister, Abba Eban, by the crotch at a cabinet meeting to prevent him from putting forward any peace proposals. The play, Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote later, was ‘the loudest and most articulate expression of the young generation’s despair with a war that never ended and with the politicians and generals incapable of departing from the logic of war’.73