26

2015–2017

‘Greater Israel is being imposed on historical Palestine.’

Hanan Ashrawi

THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR

Life in downtown Ramallah looked reassuringly normal on a sunny afternoon in February 2017. Shoppers thronged the streets, cars honked in traffic jams and uniformed policemen watched as women demonstrated in Manara Square, demanding the release of their husbands or sons from Israeli prisons. Above their heads, stretched across a trio of flagpoles, was a giant metal key – the unmistakable symbol of the Palestinian vision of return. Down a road flanked by cafes, restaurants and IT specialists in what cynics nicknamed the ‘green zone’,fn1 a handful of visitors were touring the Yasser Arafat Museum in the Palestinian Authority’s Muqataa complex, next to the PLO leader’s imposing white mausoleum. In the adjacent offices PA officials were formulating responses to a vote by the Israeli parliament the previous night to ‘legalize’ illegal West Bank settlements.

The museum displays the familiar milestones of the official Palestinian story: a prominent place is occupied by the Balfour Declaration, a copy mounted in a glass case alongside images of the Holy Land in the early days of the British Mandate and Zionist settlement. It is, by and large, historically accurate, but tends naturally to a mainstream nationalist narrative that omits some controversial events and spares neither the Israelis nor domestic opponents like Hamas. Pride of place is given to Arafat’s ‘gun and olive branch’ appearance at the UN in 1974, the apogee of his forty-year leadership. Palestinians who visit admit that the display and exhibits leave them feeling depressed. The story of past suffering, struggle and recognition is a painful contrast with what feels like a hopeless present.

‘Balfour’s chickens are coming home to roost,’ was the conclusion of Hanan Ashrawi, the veteran member of the PLO Executive Committee.

[The declaration] didn’t create the State of Israel, but it set in motion a process by means of which Zionism was adopted internationally. It is an outcome of a colonial era and it belongs to that era in many ways – the European white man’s burden of trying to reorganize the world as they saw fit, to distribute land, to create states. They defined us as the ‘non-Jewish communities’. It’s so patronizing, so racist.1

Mahmoud Abbas had recently demanded the British government apologize for its ‘infamous’ pledge to Lord Rothschild in 1917 – though that sounded more like a reflection of the prevailing despair than a matter of practical political significance.² It certainly mattered less than his call for British recognition of the State of Palestine: that was consistent with the ongoing campaign to internationalize his people’s cause by seeking UN membership and wider legitimacy. Binyamin Netanyahu, always a far slicker performer than the now-octogenarian Palestinian president, responded with a sneer: ‘Talk about living in the past!’³ Viewed from Ramallah, interim capital of a Palestinian state that had yet to be born, the balance sheet of a century of conflict was unrelentingly skewed. ‘Greater Israel’, in Ashrawi’s blunt formulation, was ‘being imposed on historical Palestine.’

The decision that prompted the flurry of activity in the Muqataa was the vote, by sixty votes to fifty-two, by Israeli MPs to ‘regularize’ the status of Jewish ‘outposts’ built on private Palestinian land in the West Bank. It reflected the balance of power in the most right-wing parliament in the country’s history, though it could be challenged by the Israeli High Court. It was a triumph for the settler lobby, emboldened by Donald Trump’s stunning presidential victory in the US. Bezalel Smotrich, a crudely outspoken MP for Jewish Home, which initiated the legislation, thanked the American people for electing the billionaire businessman and reality TV star, ‘without whom the law would have probably not passed’. Israelis on the centre and left condemned a ‘land grab’. The Labour Party leader, Isaac Herzog, warned of ‘national suicide’. It meant the retroactive application of Israeli civil – not military – law in an area that was not part of Israel and whose residents could not vote. Up to fifty settlements could thus be given government recognition. Even Dan Meridor, a former Likud justice minister, called it ‘evil and dangerous’ and likely to lead to the prosecution of Israel by the International Criminal Court for breaching the Geneva Conventions. The view from the Muqataa was unequivocal. ‘Such a law signals the final annexation of the West Bank,’ Ashrawi declared. ‘Despite being a captive people under occupation, we will resist such expansionism and oppression, and we will continue to pursue all diplomatic and legal channels to oppose Israeli violations and defend our people’s right to self-determination, justice and freedom.’4

Ashrawi had been a highly articulate exponent of the Palestinian cause since the 1980s but she was far more effective abroad than at home, where, as an independent, she was not part of Fatah’s inner circle. Israel’s control of the occupied territories was complete, though there were frequent reminders that it was not cost-free. In the wake of the 2014 Gaza war and renewed tensions around the al-Aqsa mosque, four rabbis and a policeman were hacked to death in a West Jerusalem synagogue by two Palestinians from the eastern neighbourhood of Jebel Mukaber: pictures of bloody meat cleavers circulated afterwards on Arabic social media already saturated with atrocities perpetrated by Islamic State (ISIS) and the Syrian government. The fact that the killings were claimed by the secular PFLP did nothing to assuage concerns that religious extremism was becoming dangerously intertwined with nationalist rivalry. It reminded many of the 1994 massacre of Muslims by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron, albeit on a smaller scale – and the bloody events of 1929. In Jebel Mukaber, roads were closed off by concrete blocks and checkpoints set up at the entrances to other Arab districts of Jerusalem for the first time in years. Palestinian taxi drivers – always an accurate bellwether of the current mood – refused to cross into Jewish areas of the city after dark.

It was a similar story in January 2017, when another Palestinian from the same neighbourhood drove his truck into a group of IDF officer cadets on the nearby Haas promenade, with its panoramic view of the Old City, scattering bodies before reversing and trying to ram them again until shots were fired and the driver was killed and the vehicle stopped. Four soldiers – three of them young women cadets – died instantly. The incident looked like the recent atrocities in Nice and Berlin, both claimed by ISIS. It was an ugly moment of fear, grief and hatred, all recorded on a nearby security camera. ‘We bless the courageous and heroic truck operation in Jerusalem’, Hamas tweeted. ‘It comes within the context of the normal response to the crimes of the Israeli occupation.’ Gazans handed out celebratory sweets under the Arabic hashtag #Intifadatruck. Netanyahu, visiting the scene, immediately described the perpetrator as a follower of ISIS, though no evidence was found to support that claim. Two of the dead soldiers, who were all in their early twenties, lived in West Bank settlements.5

RIGHT TURN

No direct Palestinian-Israeli talks had been held since John Kerry’s final effort collapsed in April 2014. Barack Obama admitted the following summer that his administration had failed in its effort to help resolve the conflict. ‘We worked very hard,’ he said. ‘But, frankly, the politics inside of Israel and the politics among the Palestinians as well made it very difficult.’ The president’s 2009 pledge to work ‘actively and aggressively’ to promote peace felt like ancient history and a wasted opportunity. It was hard to disagree with his conclusion that ‘the politics of fear has been stronger than the politics of hope’⁶ – though the shortcomings of the US role were also an important part of the story.

Horror grabbed the headlines again in July 2015 when an eighteen-month-old baby named Ali Dawabsheh and his parents were burned to death in Duma, near Nablus, after a petrol bomb was thrown into their home. Two Jews were later indicted, one for murder. This latest ‘price-tag’ attack came after a court ordered the demolition of unauthorized buildings in Beit El, the big settlement near Ramallah. Netanyahu condemned the incident and ordered the Shin Bet to work harder to combat Jewish extremists. The attack had echoes of the ‘Jewish underground’ of the 1980s but Israel’s political atmosphere was now far more highly charged. Video footage showed Orthodox Jews at a wedding praising the attack, brandishing guns and knives and stabbing a photograph of the dead child. It was a disturbing parallel to images of Palestinians celebrating the killings of Israelis.7

Obama was right to say that the state of Israeli politics in the wake of the last Gaza war offered no hope for a revival of a moribund peace process. Palestinians were largely indifferent to the outcome of the March 2015 Knesset race. ‘Time and time again, election after election after election has just brought something worse,’ said Huneida Ghanem, director of Madar, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies.⁸ The campaign was characterized by competition between the parties to strike hawkish and xenophobic anti-Arab poses, against the menacing background of the war in Syria and Hizbullah and Iranian activity on the Golan Heights. Likud videos showed ISIS fighters driving jeeps flying black flags into Israel. Netanyahu won his fourth term by campaigning for a hard line. To his right, Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu called for the annexation of big West Bank settlements like Ariel and the ‘transfer’ of Arab towns inside Israel – such as Umm al-Fahm – to ‘Palestine’. Arab parliamentary candidates were compared to poisonous weeds to be uprooted. On polling day Netanyahu used a Facebook video and the terminology of IDF mobilization orders to urge Jews to come out and vote because Arabs, organized by ‘leftist groups’, were arriving at polling stations ‘in vast numbers’ – a transparently racist statement which he later said he regretted after being rebuked by Obama for his ‘divisive rhetoric’. It was, commented the Haaretz editor Aluf Benn, ‘vintage Bibi: instilling fear and anxiety, retreating to outright racism against Israel’s Arab citizens, portraying his opponents and critics as traitors, and standing up to the powers that be’.⁹ Labour’s Herzog was handicapped by an uncharismatic manner and a lacklustre performance. The coalition Netanyahu formed did not support the creation of a Palestinian state, however narrowly defined. And shortly afterwards he clarified that he no longer believed in one anyway, not even the minimalist, demilitarized version he had described in his Bar-Ilan address in 2009, though a few days later he claimed, unconvincingly, that he still did. Jewish Home called for the annexation of Area C of the West Bank, autonomy for the remainder of the territory and the transfer of the Gaza Strip to Egypt. Its strong performance meant that Naftali Bennett, the party leader, became minister of education and Ayelet Shaked minister of justice; both were known for their incendiary comments about Palestinians. ‘In the two years since the last election, voters veered right when it came to their faith in the peace process and the future of the country as part of the Middle East’, Nahum Barnea observed in Yediot Aharonot. ‘In a sense, Israelis have gone back to living in splendid isolation, as they lived until 1967.’10

Domestic politics, as ever, determined the course of Israeli diplomacy. In February 2016 Netanyahu attended a secret summit meeting in Aqaba with King Abdullah of Jordan and Egypt’s President Sisi, though without Abbas, in a last-gasp effort by Kerry to forge regional backing by friendly Arab regimes for a peace settlement that reportedly included recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Netanyahu pleaded ‘coalition difficulties’ and objected to ‘too detailed formulations’.¹¹ Shortly afterwards he began exploring the chances of forming a national unity government with Labour but dropped that option in May when he again veered to the right and appointed Lieberman as defence minister.

The previous incumbent in that post, the Likud’s Moshe Yaalon, was no dove. He had been IDF chief of staff during the second intifada and had then overseen two wars in Gaza as defence minister. But he angered right-wingers with his comments about the case of Abdel-Fatah al-Sharif, a young Palestinian who had tried to stab an Israeli soldier in Hebron and was then shot dead at close range by another soldier as he lay incapacitated on the ground. The incident was filmed by a B’Tselem volunteer and the video went viral when it was posted online. The trial of Sergeant Elor Azaria for manslaughter – for what looked like a summary execution – prompted furious debate about the moral standards of the IDF and the reality of occupation and highlighted Israel’s political divide. Yaalon condemned the killing as ‘unethical’ – though a majority of Jews supported the shooter. Netanyahu condemned it too but telephoned Azaria’s parents to assure them that their son would get a fair trial: he was eventually sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

Israel’s shift to the right had been expressed in growing hostility to what was sometimes labelled the ‘enemy within’ – left-wing groups like Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Gush Shalom and supporters of BDS. Im Tirtzu (If You Will Itfn2), which described itself as devoted to combating the de-legitimization of Israel, had wrongly claimed that the liberal, US-based New Israel Fund provided information to the Goldstone inquiry about the actions of the IDF in Gaza in 2008–9. It targeted left-wing academics and what it termed ‘foreign agents’ on the cultural scene, including the novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman¹² – triggering warnings about ‘Israeli McCarthyism’. The Samaria Settlers Committee produced an animated video portraying the New Israel Fund and other groups as a money-grabbing, hook-nosed Jew betraying Israel in exchange for a handful of euro coins handed out by Nazi-sounding Germans.¹³ In July 2016 the Knesset passed a law, tabled by Shaked, requiring greater transparency for NGOs funded by ‘foreign government entities’. That was seen as an attempt to suppress dissent and scrutiny of the human rights abuses of the occupation and was condemned by the Obama administration and the EU. Shortly before the law was passed, in one poll, nearly 60 per cent of young Jews in their last two years at high school described themselves as right-wing, 23 per cent as centrists and 13 per cent as left-wing. But an overwhelming majority, 82 per cent, believed there was ‘no chance’ or ‘barely a chance’ for a peace agreement with the Palestinians.¹⁴

Polling among Palestinians provided a mirror image of that pessimism, with two-thirds believing that the two-state solution was no longer practical due to Jewish settlement construction, and 62 per cent in favour of abandoning the Oslo principles.¹⁵ ‘Rejecting the Oslo Accords fundamentally is not a rejection of peace, but a rejection of slavery and oppression that has persisted for decades’, argued Alaa Tartir, a Palestinian intellectual who dismissed the PA as ‘unaccountable’ and lacking popular legitimacy.16 The curriculum for Israel’s matriculation exams in history and civics avoided all reference to the occupation.¹⁷ Polling showed that 72 per cent of Jews did not even consider the situation in the West Bank as occupation.¹⁸ ‘ “There’s no occupation” is the latest buzz, the offspring of Prime Minister Golda Meir’s declaration that “there are no Palestinians”, and just as ludicrous’, the left-wing Haaretz writer Gideon Levy commented on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war. ‘When you claim that there is no occupation, or that there are no Palestinians, you effectively lose contact with reality in a way that can only be explained with recourse to terminology from the realm of pathology and mental health. And that’s where we are.’¹⁹ Ami Ayalon, who had been head of the Shin Bet in the 1990s, warned around the same time of the ‘incremental tyranny’ that was undermining Israel’s democracy. Carmi Gillon, Ayalon’s predecessor who resigned after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder in 1995, said that the country was being ‘driven by this occupation towards disaster’.²⁰

INTIFADA OF KNIVES

In autumn 2015 people on both sides began talking about a third intifada after a spate of ‘lone-wolf’ attacks on Israelis, mostly in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Knives, or screwdrivers and scissors, and sometimes crude, homemade guns called ‘Carlos’, were the chosen weapons – and many incidents ended with Palestinians being shot dead by Israelis, often at checkpoints. Few attackers were captured alive. The Azaria case was the best known of several in which there were suspicions about soldiers’ behaviour, with human rights organizations accusing Israel of carrying out extrajudicial killings. Vehicle ramming attacks also took place. The old journalistic cliché about fear and loathing was all too appropriate – on both sides of the green line. One dark-skinned Jew made waves by wearing a T-shirt declaring: ‘Don’t worry, I’m a Yemeni.’ The government called the attacks part of the PA’s strategy of ‘popular resistance’ and blamed it for incitement, pointing to violent and anti-Semitic images on social media and the glorification of ‘martyrs’. The UN also condemned Palestinian incitement. But the Shin Bet’s assessment was that the individuals involved had no organizational affiliation and that Abbas had in fact instructed his security forces to prevent violence as much as possible. In December a poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Research found that 67 per cent of Palestinians supported knife attacks, while 31 per cent opposed them.21

By summer 2016 this wave – habba in Arabic – seemed to be petering out.²² In nine months Palestinians killed 28 Israelis and 2 Americans while 200 Palestinians were killed, the majority in attacks on Israeli targets. Most were young men of the post-Oslo generation – part of the 55 per cent of West Bankers who were under the age of thirty – some of them reportedly suffering from mental health or social problems: the phenomenon was sometimes cynically called ‘suicide by soldier’. Improved security co-ordination between Israel and the PA – once described by Abbas as ‘sacred’²³ – helped reduce violence.²⁴ The number of Palestinian minors imprisoned for security-related offences rose from 170 in September 2015 to 438 in February 2016.²⁵ Abbas reported PA efforts to convince schoolchildren not to carry out attacks, drawing contemptuous reactions from Palestinians.²⁶ Israeli critics asked angrily why he had not ordered them sooner.²⁷ Palestinian spokesmen retorted that occupation without end and a right-wing Israeli government that included and appeased extremist settlers bred desperation – and that incitement worked both ways. The PLO began issuing its own ‘monthly incitement report’ cataloguing inflammatory comments by Israeli ministers and officials. ‘Netanyahu has promoted a culture of fear of Arabs’, complained Mehdi Abdel-Hadi of the PASSIA think-tank in East Jerusalem. ‘A lot of it is about hatred and fear between the two societies. People on both sides say: “I don’t trust you and I don’t respect you. I fear you and I will stay away from you. And if you come into my space I will kill you.” ’²⁸

The sense of hopelessness was sustained by the routine strangulation of everyday life, highlighted by media-savvy BDS activists with a #loveunderapartheid video campaign that showed a young man trying to meet his girlfriend but frustrated at every turn by Israeli checkpoints and the permit system required for Palestinian movement.²⁹ Political activity was paralysed too, the atmosphere fearful and authoritarian. Few saw any hope that the Fatah–Hamas rift would end despite occasional flurries of excitement about rapprochement. The impasse was blamed on a lack of will and the vested interests of those in power in both camps. Abbas privately described the Islamists as ‘flies in a bottle’ and said he was determined to keep them in it.30 The president, who turned eighty-two in 2017, never named a deputy, surrounded himself with yes-men and sidelined rivals. Ahead of Fatah’s seventh congress in late 2016, loyalists worked hard to see off a challenge to Abbas’s leadership by Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza-born former security chief who had been accused of corruption and misusing public funds, and who was supported by the UAE and Egypt.³¹ Fatah’s congress was held in the Muqataa – a striking reminder that there was no separation of powers between the PA and the president’s political party. The congress, commented one expert, ‘only intensified the aimless drift that characterises the Palestinian condition today’.³² Nor was there any expectation that Abbas would overcome his habitual caution and improve his own credibility, let alone meet the increasingly insistent demand that he end security co-operation with Israel – potentially one of the Palestinians’ strongest cards – never mind rip up Oslo, dissolve the PA and force the Israelis to reassume the burden of direct control of the West Bank.

The IDF and Shin Bet operated freely in Area A, which, according to the Oslo arrangements, was under exclusive Palestinian control. In reality, co-ordination consisted of Israeli instructions to PA forces to stay off the streets when an operation was under way.³³ Security cameras captured a raid on a Hebron hospital by Israeli soldiers wearing fake moustaches and beards or dressed as women, dragging away a wanted Palestinian in a wheelchair and shooting dead another man.³⁴ Art imitated life: the popular Israeli TV series Fauda or Fawda (Arabic for ‘chaos’), broadcast globally on Netflix, dramatized the work of these undercover units, focusing in a grimly realistic way – the dialogue largely in colloquial Arabic – on the war on Hamas and others, facilitated by high-tech surveillance and intelligence. In hot spots like Jenin, youths stoned PA policemen once the Israelis had left, taunting them as collaborators. Hamas claimed its supporters were tortured in PA custody.³⁵ Journalists who criticized the PA on social media were detained and interrogated.³⁶

In March 2017 demonstrations erupted in Ramallah after the Israelis tracked down and killed Basel al-Araj, a high-profile BDS activist who they claimed had been planning attacks and had previously been in PA custody, along with two others who were freed and then gaoled by the Israelis under the ‘revolving door’ principle. The IDF said al-Araj, a pharmacist, had been found in al-Bireh with an M16 rifle and a homemade ‘Carlo’ submachine gun and died in an exchange of fire. Palestinians said he had been ‘executed’. The Shin Bet described al-Araj as ‘connected to a local terror cell’. Supporters called him a ‘martyr of the security co-ordination’ and demanded the dissolution of the Sulta (the PA). The PA in turn accused ‘mercenaries’ and ‘foreign agents’ of sparking clashes to cause internal strife and called the protests ‘cheap incitement’. The dead man’s father was among those who were beaten by riot police.37

Incidents like that put the PA uncomfortably on the spot. Majid Faraj, head of Palestinian General Intelligence (Mukhabarat) and a confidant of Abbas, had pointed out before that the PA had foiled many armed attacks on Israelis but also warned that popular support was fading in the absence of any prospect for change. ‘We in the security establishment witnessed three wars in Gaza, the continuation of Israeli crimes in the West Bank and almost daily Israeli invasions,’ Faraj said in a rare interview. ‘There’s no hope for a political horizon … We have no state, but rather a state of settlers.’³⁸ The PLO’s state-building project was frozen, with no strategy for the way ahead.

Hamas, meanwhile, chose a new leader in Gaza to replace Ismail Hanieh: Yahya al-Sinwar, from a family of 1948 refugees, was a hard-line figure in its military wing and had spent twenty-two years in Israeli prisons for killing collaborators before being released in the Shalit exchange. Other key Hamas men were assassinated in Gaza and even Tunisia. Three Gazans were tried and executed for one of these killings. At the same time the movement again displayed signs of pragmatism by discussing long-heralded changes to its 1988 charter. In the end the charter itself was not amended but a new document of ‘general principles and policies’ saw the replacement of anti-Semitic language by references to ‘Zionist occupation’ and the acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, though again without recognition of it.³⁹ It mirrored the evolution of the PLO’s position in the 1970s and 1980s and paved the way for wider Palestinian consensus, but it convinced few Israelis that Hamas itself had become a potential partner for peace. The summer of 2017 marked a decade since the takeover of the Gaza Strip, still isolated and under siege. Hamas’s slick online propaganda – lauding the Qassam Brigades’ martyrs, boasting of its arsenal and cataloguing Israeli crimes – was in stark contrast to the unrelenting misery and hopelessness of everyday life.

In September 2014 some three hundred Gazans had reportedly drowned off Malta after leaving the Strip via tunnels to Egypt and sailing to Europe – a sad footnote to the huge number of Syrians fleeing their war-torn country.40 In 2015 a UN report warned that Gaza would be unfit for human habitation by 2020. The electricity supply was disrupted, the water close to being undrinkable, unemployment soaring and construction efforts delayed.⁴¹ Scores of young men risked their lives to jump the heavily guarded border fence to try to work illegally in Israel. Even a spell in prison – with a modest salary paid by the PA – was preferable to enforced idleness at home.⁴² Occasional rocket salvoes by radical Salafi groups brought instant retaliation by IDF air strikes and tank fire. Following the 2014 war, rocket fire directed at Israel from the Strip dwindled to one or two missiles per month.⁴³ Israel appeared to understand that Hamas control, however unpalatable, was the most effective way to ensure quiet. But it could clearly not be guaranteed.

Elsewhere, Palestinian attacks of a more organized nature still took place. In June 2016 two cousins from the Hebron hills shot and killed four Israelis at a cafe in an upmarket shopping centre in the heart of Tel Aviv – symbolically just across the road from the ministry of defence compound. Ron Huldai, the city’s Labour mayor, raised a troubling issue to which Netanyahu’s government had no answer: ‘We can’t keep these people [the Palestinians] in a reality in which they are occupied and [expect] them to reach the conclusion that everything is all right and that they can continue living this way,’ he said. Eli Ben Dahan, the deputy defence minister and a Jewish Home leader notorious for referring to Palestinians as ‘animals’,⁴⁴ retorted that ‘the suggestion that terror attacks occur because of the occupation or because we haven’t signed a peace deal is absurd’. Israel’s own actions, in the blinkered view of an ascendant right, were not a factor in unchanging Palestinian hostility.

Netanyahu’s appointment of Lieberman to his government boosted his narrow majority and rendered the already slight chance of meaningful peace negotiations even more unlikely. Ehud Barak, the former Labour prime minister – exploring his chances of making a political comeback – made headlines when he warned that the government had been ‘infected by budding fascism’ and that Israel was on the way to becoming ‘an apartheid state’ unless it changed course. Ehud Olmert had made the same point in 2008. The A-word, rejected by the Netanyahu government and its supporters, had become a normal part of the country’s polarized political discourse even if the parallels with the South African experience were not exact. It appeared increasingly in comment pieces and editorials in Haaretz, the lonely liberal voice of the Israeli media and the paper with the most comprehensive and sympathetic coverage of Palestinian affairs.45 Language like that was rejected and attacked elsewhere, especially in the influential right-wing Hebrew free-sheet, Yisrael Hayom, owned by Netanyahu’s American billionaire supporter Sheldon Adelson. Even the country’s president, Reuven Rivlin, a Likud supporter of unusually liberal views, warned that the 2017 land ‘regularization’ law would make Israel ‘look like an apartheid state’, even though, he insisted, it was not one.⁴⁶ The neologism ‘occupartheid’ – which emphasized the specific nature of the Israeli case, especially the differences between the two sides of the now invisible green line and the dual system of military control and legal and spatial separation in the West Bank – was arguably a more accurate term.⁴⁷

JOINING HANDS

Netanyahu’s 2015 election victory had been accompanied by a striking achievement for Israel’s Palestinian minority – by now one in five of the country’s population – when MPs banded together to form a single bloc that became the third largest in the Knesset, with 13 of its 120 seats. The Joint List was created in response to a law, tabled by Lieberman, which raised the percentage of votes required for representation in parliament with the aim of pushing out the small and divided Arab parties. It had the opposite effect. Hadash, the Communist-dominated Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, championed Jewish-Arab co-existence. Balad was an Arab nationalist grouping founded by Azmi Bishara, who resigned his Knesset seat and moved to Qatar after being accused of spying for Hizbullah after the 2006 Lebanon war but dismissed what he called trumped-up charges. Conservative Islamists were represented along with the independent Ahmed Tibi, who had served as an adviser to Yasser Arafat and remained close to the PLO in Ramallah. The Joint List was led by a Haifa lawyer named Ayman Odeh. ‘This has been the worst government in Israel in decades, not only because it killed 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza but because of its racist policies and because it has entrenched the occupation and increased the economic gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel,’ Odeh declared. ‘It has undermined democracy … and increased incitement against Arabs.’

Contact between Palestinian-Israelis and their kinfolk across the green line continued to intensify. Palestinian Israelis were exempt from the strict ban on Israeli citizens entering Area A (cities) of the West Bank – the subject of stern warnings on large red signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English at all crossing points – so that the markets of Jenin and Nablus teemed at weekends with customers from Haifa, Nazareth and Galilee. Extensive commercial ties also existed. On some issues common political agendas were forged as well. Israel’s demolition of Bedouin homes at Umm al-Hiran in the Negev – to make way for the establishment of a new exclusively Jewish settlement – looked identical to actions against Palestinians who had built without permission in Area C. Arab MPs accused the police of provoking violence when a policeman and demonstrator were killed. Homes demolished at Qalansawa, also in Israel, belonged to Arab families who had failed to obtain construction permits from the authorities: that operation was carried out just before Netanyahu (then facing criminal investigations for corruption) reluctantly bowed to a Supreme Court order to evacuate settlers from the ‘unauthorized’ West Bank outpost of Amona in the run-up to the passage of the 2017 land ‘regularization’ law. It was a sign of the times when Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human rights group, announced plans to issue a joint report on house demolitions with Adalah, an Israeli organization based in Haifa. Palestinian Arabic media in the West Bank and Gaza referred routinely to areas inside Israel as ‘occupied’.

Hard-line policies and the exclusionary and racist discourse used by Lieberman and other right-wingers reinforced the perception that there was no difference between Palestinians on either side of the green line. But Israeli-Arab citizens flatly rejected calls for the ‘transfer’ of border towns and villages to a future Palestinian state or demands for a ‘loyalty oath’ to the Jewish state. The so-called ‘stand-tall’ generation was more confident than any since 1948. The country’s 1.6 million Arabs were poorer than Jewish citizens and faced discrimination in housing, land allocation, employment, education and services. But they lived much better lives than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza: fundamental freedoms, standards of living and job opportunities were all superior, especially for a young generation studying at Israeli universities in growing numbers – a phenomenon that drew fire from Jewish right-wingers. Still, in 2015 the government announced a five-year-development plan to narrow the gaps between the two communities. In 2016 Arabs made up 25 per cent of the first-year students at the Haifa Technion.48 The 2017 film In Between provided an intriguing glimpse into the experiences of Palestinian-Israeli women living in Tel Aviv and torn between the conservative values of their families and the liberal lifestyle of the Jewish city.

On the negative side, senior public-sector jobs remained largely closed to Arabs, with a few token exceptions such as a High Court judge – who famously refused to sing ‘Hatikvah’, Israel’s national anthem and expression of the Jewish soul’s yearning for Zion – and a handful of diplomats. Druze, Bedouin and some Christians served in the IDF but the majority of other Arab citizens did not: a Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth who encouraged members of his community to do so was condemned by Arab MPs. In 2016 just 2 per cent of Israeli policemen were Muslims.⁴⁹ Security considerations were invoked when the radical northern branch of the Islamic Movement was banned – against the advice of the Shin Bet – following an attempt to bar Haneen Zoabi of Balad from standing for the Knesset. When another Balad MP was accused of smuggling mobile phones into prisons to be used by Palestinian detainees, Lieberman denounced the Knesset bloc as a ‘joint list of spies and traitors’ and vowed to eject them not just from parliament but from the country.50

Brighter spots in Jewish-Arab relations included the growth of joint NGO coalitions – though mostly dealing with anti-Arab discrimination – and rising enrolment in a handful of bi-national schools where teaching was in Hebrew and Arabic, despite problems created by the education ministry and an arson attack on the Jerusalem branch of the pioneering network. The slogan posted outside the damaged building – ‘We refuse to be enemies’ – was defiant but optimistic.⁵¹ Right-wing plans to revoke the status of Arabic as an official language alongside Hebrew were dropped, but road signage was still often inadequate or wrong. Arab citizens were usually bilingual while interest in Arabic among Jews remained limited, with 10 per cent saying they spoke or understood it well, but just 2.6 per cent able to read a newspaper and 1 per cent literature.⁵² The majority of young Israeli Jews who studied advanced Arabic did so in IDF intelligence under the rubric of ‘knowing the enemy’.

Comedy was one exception to this indifference: the primetime TV series Avoda Aravit (Arab Labour, with its idiomatic Hebrew meaning of shoddy work) by the Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua introduced an Arab family to Jewish audiences for the first time. Kashua caused a stir in the tense summer of 2014 when the Gaza war was raging and he left his West Jerusalem home to move to the US, declaring: ‘The lie I’d told my children about a future in which Arabs and Jews share the country equally was over.’⁵³ Kashua wrote in Hebrew, like the acclaimed novelist Anton Shammas, who had also emigrated in despair after the first intifada. Another exception was Arab food. Hummus and falafel had long been transformed into Israeli national dishes, generating Palestinian complaints about cultural and culinary appropriation: an ‘Arab salad’ of finely diced tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley, onions, lemon and olive oil, like an elegant Arab house, had an unequivocally positive ring to it.

Outside Hadash and small leftist groups, joint Arab–Jewish political activity remained rare and relations between the communities a highly sensitive issue. Mixed marriages were still unusual. Racist abuse of Arabs by Jews on Facebook and other social media, monitored by Palestinian groups, was casual and rife, rising during periods of tension. Arab MPs, along with Mahmoud Abbas and Arab soccer teams, were regularly targeted. Fans of the Beitar Jerusalem football club were notorious for their anti-Arab chants. In the dry late autumn of 2016, when severe forest fires ravaged Haifa and other areas, there were accusations that Arabs had launched an ‘arson intifada’ – though no one was charged for having done so.

Shortly before that Ayman Odeh was criticized when he and other Arab MPs failed to attend the state funeral of Shimon Peres, Israel’s former president, prime minister and foreign minister, who was widely hailed as a ‘man of peace’ when he died aged ninety-three. Eulogies to Peres, at home and abroad, emphasized the later, more dovish stage of his long career and tended to overlook his intimate involvement in defence and security and the promotion of the first West Bank settlements in the 1970s. ‘I try to feel the historical pain of the Jewish people – the Holocaust, the pogroms,’ Odeh explained. ‘I’m asking Jews to feel my historical pain.’54 Ahmed Tibi, who was renowned for his oratorical skills in Hebrew, honed a clever and quotable line about Israel’s oft-declared wish to remain Jewish and democratic. ‘This country is Jewish and democratic,’ he said: ‘Democratic towards Jews, and Jewish toward Arabs.’⁵⁵