13

1973–1977

‘The Palestine Liberation Organization is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and its struggle.’

Rabat Arab summit conference

ISRAELI EARTHQUAKE, PALESTINIAN ADVANCES

In the early afternoon of 6 October 1973 the wail of sirens shattered the eerie quiet of the Yom Kippur fast, heralding the outbreak of war to stunned Israelis. Egyptian and Syrian offensives along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights triggered air strikes, artillery duels and tank battles on a scale not seen since the Second World War. Israel was caught unprepared by the breaching of its Bar-Lev defence line east of the canal and initial Egyptian advances in Sinai. Its aura of invincibility was dramatically shattered and Arab pride restored. In just over a week, however, the tide was turned by the mobilization of the IDF reserves and counter-offensives made possible by the airlift of weapons and ammunition from the US. By 14 October, when a UN-brokered ceasefire began, Israeli forces were fifty miles from Cairo and twenty-five from Damascus. The entire Egyptian Third Army was encircled by the IDF near Ismailiya on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal – in Africa, as the Israeli press marvelled.1

In the course of the war a general strike paralysed life in the occupied territories. Palestine Liberation Army units were deployed in a limited role on both fronts but the vast majority of Palestinians played no part in the latest round of Arab–Israeli fighting. Jordan did not join in this time either – it sent a token force to Syria but informed the US and Israel it was doing so – and prevented the PLO from attacking from its territory. Israel’s losses of 2,650 dead were the country’s worst since 1948. Egypt and Syria together lost an estimated 16,000 men. Six years since the victory of 1967 Israelis were traumatized by what was immediately characterized as an ‘earthquake’ and focused on blunders or oversights in intelligence, which were soon the subject of angry protests and, eventually, of an official inquiry, the Agranat Commission.2

Anwar al-Sadat and Hafez al-Assad launched what Arabs called the Ramadan war with the limited goal of challenging the post-1967 status quo – but with mutual suspicions about each other’s intentions. The Egyptian president hoped to impose a peace settlement on Israel, while Assad, who was anxious to liberate the Golan Heights, at least sounded more committed to the Palestinian cause. In narrow national terms, Egypt succeeded brilliantly, eventually regaining the territory it had lost to Israel in 1967. Syria did not. The war set in train shifts that were to have far-reaching influence on the Middle East’s most intractable conflict. At the Algiers Arab summit conference in November 1973, and even more resoundingly at the Rabat summit in October 1974, all twenty-one Arab states bowed to the PLO’s increasingly strident demand to be recognized as the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. King Hussein of Jordan was reluctant, but gave way under pressure and promises of generous cash support from the Gulf States. That in turn paved the way for Yasser Arafat’s extraordinary appearance at the United Nations two weeks later, when he famously offered his Israeli enemy a choice between ‘the gun and the olive branch’. His appearance was a huge boost for Palestinian morale, and for the international standing of the PLO and its raison d’être as a national liberation movement. ‘Arafat got to the UN because he used the gun’, argued the commentator Said Aburish. ‘The UN didn’t invite a member of the Palestinian intellectual bourgeoisie who are always writing articles pleading for understanding; they invited the head of the Palestinian armed resistance.’³

The US brokered disengagement of forces agreements between Israel and Egypt, and between Israel and Syria, that were signed in January and March 1974 respectively. Both reflected the Arabs’ initial military achievements more than Israel’s final victory. Immovable deadlock gave way to a new, if limited, readiness for give and take.4 For the first time since 1947, diplomacy had joined armed struggle as a way of achieving Palestinian goals. ‘The Yom Kippur war, more than any other event since the creation of Israel and the Nakba, underlined the relative unimportance of the Palestinians in the Middle East in general and in the conflict with Israel in particular’, an Israeli expert commented. ‘On the other hand the war created the conditions that would allow them to make the biggest political advance in their history.’⁵

Following on from the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan, the outcome of the 1973 war accelerated a strategic rethink by Palestinians. The debate now, in the words of Yezid Sayigh, ‘was about the historic nature and purpose of the Palestinian national movement, as the revolutionary and statist options were now brought into direct conflict’.⁶ In June 1974 the Palestine National Council (PNC) met in Cairo and reaffirmed its commitment to armed struggle. Crucially, however, it also pledged ‘to establish the people’s national, independent and fighting authority on every part of Palestinian land to be liberated’. This novel formula replaced the previous goal of a ‘democratic secular state’, though that was not explicitly renounced.⁷ It implied readiness for a partial or compromise solution, and reflected concern that the PLO could be left out in the cold if Egypt and Syria were to negotiate directly with Israel. It was explained as a tactical change but in fact it marked a broader shift; it was a compromise between those Palestinians who accepted Israel’s existence and those who held on to the vision of complete liberation (thus the addition of the word ‘fighting’).⁸ This approach did not command universal support: within weeks the PFLP, led by George Habash, now based in Damascus, quit the PLO to form a ‘rejection front’. That ultimately undermined Palestinian unity and played into Israeli hands.

Nor, crucially, was the shift enough to convince Israelis that they had a Palestinian partner for peace. Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former IDF intelligence chief, had written influential assessments of Arab attitudes to Israel. His view was that hostility was innate and unchanging and that Arabs were still bent on the state’s destruction – an argument which fuelled angry recriminations in the shocked aftermath of the war. Harkabi, along with other Israeli Arabists and the security establishment – who were often the same people – interpreted the PLO’s commitment to setting up a ‘national authority’ on any liberated territory as a ‘programme of stages’ or, more crudely, as evidence of ‘salami tactics’ designed to slice away at Israel until it had been eliminated completely. Few of them saw it as an unequivocal commitment to a two-state solution, although dissenting voices argued that Israel’s own behaviour could not be ignored.9

The debate, however, was not just an academic one. Shortly before the PNC’s decision there were two big Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilian targets: in April by Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front-General Command on the northern town of Kiryat Shmona (leaving eighteen dead, including nine children) and in May at Maalot, also on the Lebanese border. In the latter incident, three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) took hostages in a school and demanded the release of prisoners, including the Japanese Kozo Okamoto of the Lod Airport massacre. The deaths of twenty-one teenagers who were on a school outing ensured its lasting notoriety in Israel. Israeli air strikes then killed sixty Palestinians in Ein al-Hilweh and Nabatiyeh in south Lebanon. In November 1974, a three-man DFLP squad killed four residents of Bet Shean and were subsequently killed by the IDF, their bodies burned by an angry Israeli mob.

Overall, the performance of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, smashing the humiliating status quo of 1967, was a boost to Arab self-esteem. ‘Our new-found strength has taken us by surprise,’ said a Palestinian analyst in East Jerusalem. ‘We are drunk with our triumph.’¹⁰ Israelis observed the change with concern. A poll conducted after the war found ‘extensive and alarming’ support for the PLO in the West Bank and Gaza.¹¹ Yehuda Litani, a Haaretz correspondent, described a ‘revolutionary change in a [Palestinian] population which … will no longer cooperate with a military government, no matter how liberal, unless such cooperation is imposed on them by force’.¹² That assessment was to prove premature, perhaps the result of wishful thinking by Palestinians reported uncritically by an Israeli dove. Litani and another Arabic-speaking Jerusalem journalist, Danny Rubinstein of the Histadrut paper Davar, played an important role by reporting, in Hebrew, on both ordinary life and political views in the occupied territories in a way that was independent of the military-dominated version of events. Ordinary Israelis – and the swelling foreign press corps in Israel, reading their articles in English translation – were able to learn more about the Palestinians in their backyard as they returned to the centre-stage of the conflict.

VOTING FOR CHANGE

The upbeat post-war mood was reflected in changes in the West Bank. The creation of a new Palestine National Front led by activists of the Jordanian Communist Party was intended to co-ordinate resistance to the occupation. It organized jubilant rallies during Arafat’s UN appearance and accelerated the decline of the old Hashemite loyalists. Israel responded with detentions, curfews and deportations of the PNF’s leaders. In early 1976 demonstrations erupted over plans to build a Jewish settlement near Nablus and proposed changes to access to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif. Young men burned tyres, erected roadblocks and raised Palestinian flags – sometimes drawing deadly fire from the IDF – in scenes that were repeated countless times.

Israel’s next move proved to be a serious miscalculation, calling municipal elections in the West Bank in the hope that the pro-Jordanian mayors – Sheikh Muhammad Ali al-Jaabari in Hebron and Haj Maazouz al-Masri in Nablus, both elected in 1972 – would win new terms. But they refused to stand. That was a blow to Shimon Peres, now the defence minister, who had been exploring a ‘self-rule’ plan that Palestinians feared would be a sort of phoney autonomy under an ‘alternative leadership’ which would acquiesce in continued occupation. The PLO instead endorsed younger nationalist candidates – two of whom were expelled by the Israelis – who swept the board in the elections in April 1976. Voter turnout was an impressive 72 per cent. Bassam Shakaa from Nablus was a Baathist from one of the city’s wealthiest families. Karim Khalaf in Ramallah and Fahd Qawasmi in Hebron also represented a desire for an end to occupation and backed the PLO as the ‘sole legitimate representative’ of their people – the endlessly repeated mantra of the age. Elias Freij, the incumbent Jordanian loyalist in Bethlehem, was the exception, but he was an unusually canny operator – a gravelly voiced Palestinian Vicar of Bray – who manoeuvred deftly between the pressures of Israel, Jordan and the PLO.

Recriminations followed the elections, with Yitzhak Rabin attacking Peres for an erroneous assessment of the outcome. It seemed as if the Israeli mindset was still based on a false distinction between refugees and pro-Jordanians and that policy-makers had not absorbed the meaning of the momentous Rabat summit decision and the rapid consolidation of the PLO’s position.13 The new mayors reduced their financial dependence on the occupying Israelis by soliciting donations and loans from the Gulf States.¹⁴ Other Middle Eastern developments meant that Palestinians living under occupation could never forget that they were part of a wider community whose suffering flowed from the very fact of their being Palestinian – stateless and dispersed by the Nakba and too often powerless in the face of reluctant hosts, fair-weather friends and ruthless enemies. In August 1976, in the second year of the Lebanese civil war, the fall of the besieged Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Beirut to Christian militiamen who were backed by Syria was another catastrophic moment, leaving some 2,000 dead, many of them civilians.¹⁵

LAND AND HONOUR

The new Palestinian assertiveness made itself felt inside Israel in the wake of the 1973 war. ‘Arab has stopped being a dirty word,’ observed the journalist Attallah Mansour. Tawfiq Zayyad, the Communist activist and poet, wrote that old notions of superiority and inferiority had been destroyed overnight. Another Palestinian writer believed that the Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal would break ‘Israeli arrogance’ and bring peace.¹⁶ The restoration of Arab pride reinforced an accelerating trend: the coming together of the different elements of the divided Palestinian people. In its early years the PLO had paid little attention to Israel’s Palestinian minority, though in 1971 the Palestine National Council had broken new ground by electing Israeli-Arab members – including the poet Mahmoud Darwish and writer Sabri Jiryis. Jiryis went on to head a new PLO Research Centre in Beirut and helped expand the organization’s limited understanding of Israel; that, he felt, allowed PLO leaders ‘to accept the Jewish state as a fait accompli, rather than as a transient Crusader state that would soon disappear’.17 Beyond that, however, the Arab minority mattered ‘only in so far as they reflected Israeli iniquity and immoral behaviour’, noted one study. ‘In this capacity they were not only passive sufferers but also marginal ones compared to their fellow Palestinians in the occupied territories.’¹⁸ The Israeli authorities, always preoccupied by a potential ‘fifth column’, worried about security: in 1974 a group of young men from Bartaa spent a whole month under Shin Bet interrogation because a classmate who had gone to Lebanon claimed, falsely, to have recruited them to Fatah. It was an unpleasant reminder, in the poignant words of the Mapam MP Abdel-Aziz al-Zoabi, that ‘my people is at war with the state that I belong to’.¹⁹ In 1975 the PLO called publicly for support for the Communist-dominated Democratic Front in the municipal elections in Nazareth; after its victory, under Zayyad, Fadwa Touqan, the nationalist poet from Nablus, paid a visit to Israel’s largest Arab city.

Palestinian confidence was expressed most forcefully on 30 March 1976 when the National Committee for the Defence of Arab Lands, formed by the Communist Party, called for a nationwide general strike for the first time. The immediate cause was a government decision to expropriate 20,000 dunams of Arab-owned or Arab-farmed land in Galilee, between Sakhnin and Arrabeh, to construct Jewish settlements and a military training area – a grave blow in its own right as well as a painful reminder of the massive land confiscations of the 1950s. Curfews were imposed and violence ensued when crowds threw stones and petrol bombs at police stations, shouting ‘Fatah, Fatah’. By the end of the day there were six dead, scores of injured and hundreds arrested in an event that underlined the anger and the second-class status of the Arab minority, incensed by the ongoing policy of Judaization of the Galilee. ‘When did the police in Israel ever shoot at Jewish demonstrators?’ one organizer asked.²⁰ Israel’s security establishment saw the Land Day demonstration as an alarming ‘act of civil disobedience’ motivated by PLO calls to emphasize the ‘Arabness’ of the Galilee and the Triangle, the start of a slippery slope leading to demands for autonomy or even secession. It was a sobering reminder that reality was harsher than pious declarations about promoting Jewish-Arab relations, especially on the Zionist left. Shuli Dichter, of Kibbutz Maanit, described candidly how relations with the neighbouring village of Umm al-Qutuf were strained by the confiscation of land and disputes over grazing rights – and the behaviour of the kibbutz’s Arab ‘experts’ (Mizrahanim).

Their orientalism was based on research and study. They didn’t complain about the theft of lands from the adjacent Palestinian villages. They would be furious with the plantation workers or the field hands if they slapped an Arab kid who dared to come too close to the kibbutz lands. But they didn’t challenge the power structure … or demand genuine partnership or equality in the allocation of resources with the Arabs. Their sense of justice and moral obligation was limited to social, interpersonal, private relations with the Arabs. Moreover, they took it upon themselves to absorb the anger and resentment of the neighbours as a sort of flak jacket for the kibbutz and the movement. They presented the kind face of the new settlers and identified with every complaint from the Arabs about the rudeness and insensitivity of the Jewish authorities … Many times I heard myself say to people from Umm al-Qutuf who were angry about the theft of their pastures: ‘There’s nothing to be done; it’s the government, not us.’ I didn’t believe myself and they didn’t believe me. They knew perfectly well that the government discriminated between us, and that I was on the side that benefited from that discrimination.21

Confirmation of the fears of Israel’s Arab citizens was provided soon afterwards with the leak of a confidential government report. Yisrael Koenig, the senior interior ministry official for Galilee, expressed concern about control of the minority in the light of demographic, political and economic trends. He called for the intensification of Jewish settlement in the north to break up the contiguity of Arab villages; a more systematic ‘reward and punishment’ policy, and a smear campaign against Communist activists.fn1 Arab intellectuals were to be encouraged to emigrate and student organizations undermined. The government condemned the recommendations but the report still won wide support from local Jewish leaders.22 Over time Land Day was to transform the image of ‘the Arabs of 1948’, as they were often referred to by other Palestinians.²³ PLO interest in them intensified further. Ever since then Land Day, like Balfour Day, has been marked annually, a collective experience not just inside Israel but among Palestinians everywhere. The 1976 victims are commemorated in a fine stone monument, which calls for Arab–Jewish rapprochement, in the Muslim cemetery in Sakhnin. Mahmoud Darwish penned a poem in their honour.²⁴

THE DAY OF THE HAWK

In May 1977, the ‘earthquake’ of the October 1973 war produced a massive political shift that was to have a profound and lasting impact on the course of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Menachem Begin’s Likud, an alliance of the right-wing Herut party and the Liberals, emerged as the largest party in the general election. The campaign was dominated by accusations of incompetence surrounding Yitzhak Rabin’s Labour government, still tainted by the failures of Yom Kippur. Begin was remembered internationally as the leader of the Irgun, perpetrator of the bombing of the King David Hotel and the Deir Yassin massacre. In Israel he seemed a marginal, old-fashioned figure, commander of the ‘dissident’ group that had initiated terrorist attacks on Arabs and challenged the authority of the new state in the Altalena gun-running affair. He was not even mentioned in a best-selling book about Israel that was published in 1971.²⁵ Begin had a reputation for rabble-rousing demagoguery, combined with courtly manners that harked back to his Polish origins. He had seemed destined to remain in opposition. But the Likud victory reflected a populist mood born of far-reaching social changes, notably the increasing weight of oriental Jewish immigrants who resented Mapai, the ‘natural party of government’ since 1948 and the Ashkenazi-dominated establishment. Begin’s only experience in office was as minister without portfolio in the national unity government of 1967–1970. He remained a follower of the Jabotinsky school of ‘revisionist’ Zionism and a firm believer in ‘Greater Israel’. His knowledge of Arabs was extremely limited. When he came to power ‘the outcasts became the establishment’, as Begin’s biographer observed.26

Highly significant changes were to take place under Begin’s rule, both domestically and vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but above all in the expansion of settlements. The settlement enterprise in the occupied territories had gathered momentum in the preceding years. In 1974 a new movement called Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), energized by the recent war, burst on to the scene. Its supporters protested against Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, as he shuttled between Jerusalem, Damascus and Cairo to negotiate the disengagement agreements with Syria and Egypt. Crowds gathered outside Jerusalem’s King David Hotel whenever Kissinger was in town, carrying black umbrellas – a none-too-subtle reminder of Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. In June 1974, under the Rabin government, its supporters had set up a ‘wildcat’ settlement at Hawara, south of Nablus. Weeks after their initial eviction they tried again, with Begin cheering them on. The Labour party sent out characteristically mixed signals. ‘After all, this isn’t an enemy that has come to conquer the country,’ Shimon Peres – Rabin’s indefatigable rival – told more dovish colleagues who opposed appeasing the settlers. ‘Our visa to Judea and Samaria is that they are Judea and Samaria and we are the Jewish people,’ declared Moshe Dayan, who had abandoned Labour to become an independent MP.²⁷ Rabin, however, would later call Gush Emunim ‘a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy’. Ariel Sharon recalled later that Rabin had asked him around that time about Gush Emunim. Sharon had replied: ‘They’re like we were 40 years ago, only more serious.’²⁸

By the end of 1975 continuous lobbying, government vacillation and rivalry between ministers had led to the establishment of a settlement housed temporarily – pending another decision – in an army camp at Kadum near Nablus. It was named Elon Moreh – mentioned in the Old Testament as the place where God promised Abraham: ‘Unto thy seed I will give this land’ (Genesis 12:7). Another factor, Peres explained, was the resolution passed by the UN General Assembly that November – a year after Arafat’s ‘gun and olive branch’ appearance – defining Zionism as racism. Building settlements in response to international pressure on Israel was a pattern that was often to be repeated in the decades to come. By 1977 eight settlements around Jerusalem housed 33,000 people, though there were only 4,300 settlers elsewhere in the West Bank.29 These included Kfar Etzion and Kiryat Arba, just outside Hebron, as well as several outposts in the Jordan Valley. There were twenty-seven in the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. On the north coast of Sinai, construction was under way for a city called Yamit. Labour had already announced the construction of twenty-seven of forty-nine new outposts scheduled to be built over the next fifteen years.³⁰

MORE ELON MOREHS

Begin changed both Israel’s discourse about settlements and the pace of implementation. Immediately after the election he travelled to Kadum, temporary home of the Elon Moreh settlers. It was, he declared in front of the TV cameras, not occupied but ‘liberated Israeli land’, and he promised ‘many more Elon Morehs’. Within months the government had quietly given its blessing to two other previously ‘unauthorized’ outposts – a ‘work camp’ at Ofra, in the middle of a cluster of Palestinian villages in the hills near Ramallah, and workers’ accommodation for an ‘industrial area’ at Maaleh Adumim, north-east of Jerusalem. Begin’s election was a shock to many Israelis, to Palestinians and the wider world – a sentiment that was reflected in dramatic headlines like ‘THE DAY OF THE HAWK’ – but it ended much of the ambiguity and double-talk surrounding land and peace. His views on Arabs were neither complicated nor conflicted. He refused to use the terms ‘West Bank’ or ‘Palestinians’ and spoke only of ‘Judaea and Samaria’ and the historic rights of the Jewish people. ‘The Likud was too absorbed in the realisation of its own vision to fret about those Israelis who could not share it – or Palestinians who opposed’, one observer noted.³¹ Expectations of any moves towards peace were low to non-existent. Moshe Dayan, whom Begin appointed foreign minister, suggested to King Hussein that he meet the new Likud prime minister. The Jordanian monarch refused out of hand, saying there was no point as Begin’s positions were well known.

Begin’s victory was greeted with jubilation by the settlers. Gush Emunim saw itself as ‘an avant garde that would awaken and lead the entire nation, and was imbued with a sense of total confidence in the justice of its path’.32 Its activists were disappointed to hear that outright annexation was not an option and that their plan for twelve new settlements would have to be debated in cabinet, rather than simply nodded through. But their dismay did not last long. Begin’s choice of agriculture minister – the confident and pushy Ariel Sharon – was a natural ally. Sharon’s reputation for bulldozing ahead without formal authorization went before him. During his campaign against the fedayeen in Gaza he had ordered the eviction of hundreds of Bedouin from the Rafah area with a view to promoting Jewish settlement. Having quit the army he had returned to fight as a reserve officer on the Egyptian front in the 1973 war, enhancing his popularity as ‘Arik King of Israel’ by leading the decisive IDF counter-offensive into the Nile Valley. In the mid-1970s Sharon had advised the settlers in private, and cheered them on publicly as they kept up pressure on Rabin. Having joined and then left the Likud, he ran in the 1977 election on his own independent list, his two Knesset seats a useful addition to Begin’s coalition. In September he unveiled a new master plan for settlement entitled ‘A Vision of Israel at Century’s End’ – which envisaged 2 million Jews in the occupied territories by 2000. In 1978 a shorter-term plan to settle 100,000 Jews by 1982 was drawn up by Matti Drobless, a Begin loyalist who ran the settlement department of the Jewish Agency.

Sharon looked at the big picture between the Mediterranean and the Jordan: his strategy was to build a bloc of Jewish settlements to break up the contiguity of the Arab population on both sides of the 1967 border, simply ignoring the green line. New highways would link Samaria to the coastal plain in the west and the Jordan Valley in the east. Military logic was at work too, as it had been when Jewish outposts were established in Mandatory times. ‘Individual settlements were located on strategic summits, thereby allowing them to function as observation points: maintaining visual connection with each other and overlooking their surroundings, main traffic arteries, strategic road junctions and Palestinian cities, towns and villages.’ Tents, caravans and pre-fabricated homes on West Bank hilltops replaced tanks as the basic battlefield unit. ‘Homes, like armoured divisions, were deployed in formation across a theatre of operations to occupy hills, to encircle an enemy or to cut its communication lines.’33 For Sharon the key was the motivation to defend a place. ‘The fact that you are present, that you know every hill, every mountain, every valley, every spring, every cave; the curiosity to know what is on the other side of the hill – that’s security,’ he explained.³⁴ But all this required more than small numbers of Gush Emunim activists equipped with religious fervour and a few caravans. It needed ordinary Israelis taking a practical view of how to improve their standard of living, given the opportunity of moving into a house rather than a cramped apartment, benefitting from tax exemptions, cheap mortgages and other incentives. Families could move to the West Bank and enhance their quality of life and still be in short commuting distance from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem – or ‘five minutes from Kfar Saba’ as the cheery advertising slogan went, emphasizing ease of access and comforting familiarity. The old green line was becoming a thing of the past. And as far as Sharon was concerned there was nothing accidental about its gradual but steady erasure. ‘Sharon pushed and I implemented,’ said Drobless.³⁵

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND

Other consequences flowed from the expansion: Palestinian land was confiscated in ever larger quantities for what was usually defined as military or public purposes. Water resources came increasingly under Israeli control. In 1979 Israeli law was extended to five regional councils where Jewish settlers were now concentrated. ‘Arrangements enacted to protect and empower Jewish settlements are extraterritorial extensions of the law of one country over the territory of another’, observed the Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh. ‘They constitute a system of apartheid in all but name, resulting as they do in the creation of two communities living side by side subject to two different and discriminatory sets of laws.’36 Numbers of West Bank settlers rose steadily, to 12,500 by 1980. The new settlements were built by Palestinian workers, driven by the same economic necessity that sent increasing numbers to work inside Israel.³⁷ The government’s intention was that the West Bank be carved up ‘by a grid of roads, settlements and strongholds into a score of little Bantustans so that [the Palestinians] shall never coalesce again into a contiguous area that can support autonomous, let alone independent, existence’, commented one Israeli analyst.³⁸

At the same time the West Bank became Israel’s most important trading partner.³⁹ Many ties bound them together in a pattern of mutual but unequal dependence. West Bank industry remained stunted, contributing progressively less to the territory’s GDP. Local investment and development were stagnant. Economic growth was driven by remittances coming from Israel and the Gulf States. Within the space of a few years Palestinians had become an indispensable element of the Israeli labour force, almost without anyone noticing. Yet social intercourse between them and Israelis remained limited. ‘While Arab workers in the construction sector have numerous contacts with Jewish contractors, they rarely work with Jewish workers on the same site’, a Palestinian study observed.

In fact, most of their contacts, both in going to work and on the construction site, happen to be with people from their own village, and often from their own clan. Buses transport villagers to their work site in Israel and bring them back in the evening, thus reinforcing this village identity. When they do have contacts with Jewish workers, politics are rarely discussed; social interaction is amiable but is kept at a minimum. On the Israeli side, the villager’s contact is mostly with the contractor, the boss, the police, the prostitute and the border guard. Despite his deep penetration into the Israeli economy and his workable command of Hebrew, the Arab peasant-worker’s conception of Jewish society remains that of a closed and undifferentiated mass.⁴⁰

That growing presence was nevertheless unmistakable. When an Israeli sociologist embarked in the early 1980s on a project to document Palestinians employed inside the green line it opened his eyes to what he and most other Jews had long preferred not to notice:

Suddenly I see Palestinian workers everywhere in Tel Aviv, on building sites, in hospitals, at the university of Tel Aviv, in my own department, at restaurants, shops … suddenly I see that other people, like myself before the survey, do not see all this; they do not see that at night the campus [of TAU] is like a big dormitory for Palestinian workers spending the night in TA, and so are the basements of hospitals, shops, warehouses, the food market areas of the city, the beach in summertime, the space underneath Kikar Dizengoff – Tel Aviv’s central piazza; suddenly I realise that people are not only blind to all this, but that they do not want to look at it, even when their attention is drawn to it.41

The prevalence of Palestinian labour a decade after the watershed of 1967 gave rise to wry jokes about what this meant for Israeli society and its values: one featured an elderly Jewish man, reminiscing to his increasingly wide-eyed grandson about his youth as a pioneer, a Zionist Stakhanovite tilling the fields, toiling on construction sites, draining swamps and making the desert bloom from dawn till dusk. ‘Gosh granddad, that’s amazing,’ replied the astonished child. ‘So when you were young, were you an Arab?’