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The Six-Day War: Forty
years on
Donald Macintyre
Forty years ago,
Israel launched what is known as the Six-Day war.
The fighting was short, sharp and bloody. But its poisonous legacy has
lasted far longer.
For this special report, Donald Macintyre visits the heart of the
conflict.
Published: 26 May 2007
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Israeli soldiers
gather at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem |
Less than a kilometre past
the hillside olive groves of the sprawling Palestinian village of Sinjil,
Dror Etkes turns left off route 60 as it dips and winds north through the
terraced West Bank hills halfway between Ramallah and Nablus. He drives
his white Mazda pick-up at alarming speed up a bumpy dirt road to the
panoramic summit of what has been known for centuries in Arabic as Jebel
Betin Halaweh but which is designated by the Israeli military the clinical
name of Hill 804. A slight figure in his blue shirt, dark grey jeans,
sunglasses and sandals, he parks the vehicle by the Army antenna, breathes
in and announces with all the emphasis of the tour guide he once was: "We
are now really in the heart of the ideological, religious, settlement
movement."
It's easy to see what he means. We are in occupied Palestinian territory
21 kilometres east of the green line, which until the Six-Day War exactly
40 years ago denoted Israel's eastern border and in international law
still does. On the windswept hilltops along a wide three-quarter circle to
the west, north and east, the ridges are dominated by four Jewish
settlements, the houses easily distinguishable from those in Palestinian
villages by their red roofs, and eight of the satellite outposts, mainly
consisting of up to 20 grey and functional container/caravans. Due west is
Ma'ale Levona; to the north is Eli; to the east, just across Route 60,
Shilo; and beyond it Shevut Rahel, founded in 1991 and named after a woman
shot by Palestinian militants. And just south in the Shilo Valley is the
open "industrial zone" with not a single factory on it, which along with
the large municipal "jurisdictions" under their control mean that
settlement-controlled land (including land previously cultivated by
Palestinians) now accounts for 40 per cent of the West Bank.
A few minutes later, Etkes will pull off route 60 again and take a narrow
paved road up to the 20-caravan settlement outpost of Nofei Nehemia, one
of many identified as wholly illegal in the devastating Ariel Sharon-
commissioned but still to be implemented 2005 report by the eminent
lawyer Talia Sasson, showing how varying arms of the Israeli state in
this case the Housing and Construction Ministry had secretly connived to
establish such communities. Etkes keeps up a non-stop running commentary
as we approach an outpost that has doubled in size in the past two years
even though no one, including the Israeli government, pretends it has any
legal right to be here. "Oh, someone's got a sense of humour," he says,
translating a painted sign in Hebrew declaring: "Nofei Nehemia Security
Road". "Look, here's an automatic barrier. Been here about half a year,
I'd say. You can see the soldier manning it. This settlement is illegal in
every way supposed to be dismantled under the Road Map, Sasson report,
everything." Legal or not, the settlers enjoy full military protection as
Israeli citizens in a hostile environment. "It's in the DNA, it's in the
system," says Etkes. "This is the military, supposed to be part of the
law-enforcement agencies but in fact participating in massive law
violation." As we drive back down the approach road, Etkes is so
exasperated by the road sign that he jumps from the car and starts to
wrench it from the ground. Changing his mind he says with a grin: "I'll
come back when there aren't any journalists around."
If the Jewish settlers living in the West Bank have a one-man nemesis, the
fast-talking Etkes, who has joined us for the Jerusalem-Nablus leg of our
journey along route 60, is the likeliest candidate. It is doubtful that
any Israeli knows more about the evolving political geography of the West
Bank than he does. Much of his time since 2001, when he became director of
Peace Now's settlement-watch programme, is spent photographing and
documenting in minute detail the growth of the Israeli civilian presence
in the West Bank. At the peak of the intifada, when it was blatantly
unsafe for cars with Israeli plates to drive through the West Bank without
armed escort, Etkes would put on his flak jacket ironically to avoid
being shot by Palestinian snipers on the repeated journeys he took, alone,
to monitor and expose the settlers' relentless encroachment on Palestinian
land.
Increasingly Etkes concentrates on legal actions designed to secure
eviction from outposts which are both known to be illegal under Israeli
law and erected on privately owned Palestinian land. When nine houses were
finally demolished in the Amona outpost last year amid serious violence
between settlers and police, it was the result of an incontrovertible case
devised by Etkes. When the "unauthorised" Migron outpost of 60 caravans,
east of Ramallah on which the Sasson report established the Housing
Ministry had spent nearly $900,000 on infrastructure and two fixed
buildings is finally demolished, it will be because of a case brought by
Etkes and the Palestinian landowners. "That will be the biggest settlement
outpost [to be evacuated] ever outside Gaza and the settlers are terrified
of this because we are now grabbing them in the balls in certain places,"
says Etkes cheerfully. "We can go from place to place wherever there is
private Palestinian land which was seized without any permission or any
licences without any papers and we can screw them big-time."
Important as Etkes believes, no doubt rightly, these actions to be in
putting settlers on the defensive, they cannot of course remove the
elephant in the room: the parent settlements themselves, all 121 of them,
comprising 260,000 settlers in the West Bank in all. (If the settlements
in Arab East Jerusalem, whose annexation by Israel has never been accepted
by the international community, are included there are roughly 450,000
settlers in occupied territory.) The adults are eligible to vote in
Israeli elections; almost all have a vested interest in remaining under
Israeli jurisdiction. And these numbers have grown from exactly zero since
the triumphant victory in the war whose 40th anniversary Israel will
commemorate, with some hesitation and self-reflection, next month. The
anniversary of the war is also a reminder that the occupation of the West
Bank of which the settlements and the huge security, road and
infrastructure apparatus that surrounds them are the most visible symbols
has lasted exactly 40 years.
It all started here in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, which in the late spring is a
lush oasis of trees and flowers, with all the hillside space it needs to
grow the orchids and cherries that help make it one of the most prosperous
settlements in the West Bank. Kfar Etzion has a special place in Israeli
hearts because of the heroic last stand in the 1948 war, in the Etzion
Bloc of four kibbutzim, in which 155 Jewish defenders, men and women, were
killed by the Arab Legion irregulars and local villagers. The worst
carnage was at Kfar Etzion, an orthodox kibbutz, where almost all those
who surrendered were massacred. The women and children had mostly been
evacuated, including the mother of Gerry Katz, now 60, the man responsible
for the outstanding gardens of the kibbutz today. His father was killed in
the last battle.
Katz, tanned in his blue workshirt, chinos, sandals and kippa (skullcap),
says that each year the children of Kfar Etzion would gaze longingly down
from Jerusalem on what was now Jordanian territory today the old
Jordanian command post is the kibbutz's communications centre and dream
of coming back. Which about half the 58 children from the kibbutz Katz
was the last to be born there eventually succeeded in doing, with the
Labour government's hesitant blessing. "It was like the Jews coming back
to the land of Abraham all over again," says Katz today, who came straight
here from his wartime Army service. "It was the metaphysical becoming
reality." Of course, the special role in Israeli history of the kibbutz
made it a prime site for all those agitating after 1967 for settlement in
the West Bank. But while Kfar Etzion was special to Katz above all, he
himself is in no doubt that it was at one with the dream of Jews living
elsewhere in what had been a few months earlier the Jordanian- controlled
West Bank. "Our land is in Judaea and Samaria," he says using the name for
the territory favoured by many Israelis. "This is Jewish land." No he did
not think, even now, that it should be formally annexed. "The eternal
nation moves slowly," he adds enigmatically.
It is hard to overestimate the foreboding inside Israel that preceded the
war. The causes were complex and, like most issues in the Middle East,
still disputed. But the most immediate triggers were the clashes between
Israeli and Syrian forces on Israel's border with the Golan Heights and
(the Egyptian president) Nasser's decision, amid a build-up of Egyptian
forces in the Sinai, to close the Tiran Straits outside the Gulf of Aqaba.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the preceding months, almost every
historian has commented that this felt to most Israelis like a war for
what suddenly seemed like the fragile existence of a 19-year-old state
that no Arab country then recognised, invoking for many memories of the
Holocaust itself. There was, of course, a corresponding sense of relief
and euphoria at the subsequent decisive victory after just six days, from
the morning of 5 June to the evening of 10 June much of it shared in the
West. In London, the Daily Telegraph trumpeted the outcome as "The triumph
of the civilised", while in Paris Le Monde went deeper into the reasons
for Western relief at Israel's victory. While acknowledging that it had
happened "alas on the back of the Arabs", the paper declared: "In the past
few days Europe has in a sense rid itself of the guilt incurred in the
drama of the Second World War and before that the persecutions which
accompanied the birth of Zionism."
The war cost the lives of more than 16,000 Arab men, the large majority
Egyptian, and 800 Israeli soldiers. It left Israel in control of a million
Arabs and large new swathes of territory, including the West Bank and
Gaza, seized from Jordan and Egypt respectively, and the Golan Heights,
overrun and captured from Syria. The political debate in Israel over what
to do about the new conquests was almost immediate. The Labour politician
and former general Yigal Allon, for example, produced a plan which
provided for annexation of and creation of civilian settlements along
the border with Jordan. Moshe Dayan, the triumphant Defence Minister,
announced that he wanted an "invisible occupation", adding: "I want a
policy whereby an Arab can be born, live and die in the West Bank without
ever seeing an Israeli official."
At the same time, other forces were also at work, attracted by the
possibilities of creating a "Greater Israel" from the River Jordan to the
Mediterranean. These included but were by no means confined to the
political right, which would 10 years later propel Menachem Begin to
power, and religious Zionists like the Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who would go
on to found Gush Emumim, the movement behind so many of today's
settlements. Levinger quickly offered his support to attempts to re-settle
Kfar Etzion in the face of initial ambivalence by the Prime Minister Levi
Eshkol. And even for some of those who did not share the "Greater Israel"
dream, there was another imperative, one which still survives, and which
the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg (whose authoritative book on the
first 10 years of settlement policy will shortly be published in Britain)
describes as: "to create facts that would determine the final status of
the land, to sculpt the political reality before negotiations ever got
under way."
By September, Eshkol was seriously considering settlements in the Golan
and Kfar Etzion. He was no doubt influenced by the Khartoum Arab summit
which had responded to the Israeli Cabinet's secret offer, agreed within a
fortnight of the war, of a negotiated withdrawal from most of the
territories, with a resounding "no" to talks. In hindsight, it is possible
to see the Khartoum declaration as a heavily coded concession to some form
of indirect negotiation on recognition, in return for withdrawal from the
territories occupied in the war. But Israel, whose position was anyway
hardening, wanted direct negotiations and explicit recognition if it was
going to pull back.
In all the debate within the public and, it appears, in Cabinet one
highly significant aspect of settlement policy was barely, if at all,
discussed: whether it was legal. Since then Israel has never accepted the
argument, ratified by successive UN resolutions, that civilian settlements
violated international law. Which makes it all the more interesting that
Theodor Meron, the then-36-year-old legal adviser at the Foreign Ministry,
was asked to deliver an opinion on just that issue. Meron, a Holocaust
survivor, had been a member of Israel's delegation to the UN during the
June war. "It was a very traumatic period because in New York things
looked terribly ominous," he recalls today.
But the secret memorandum he wrote three months later initially only for
the eyes of his boss, the Foreign Minister Abba Eban, but then sent to
Eshkol's office was clearsighted and unequivocal. The document, written
after the Khartoum summit when he knew settlement in the Golan and the
West Bank was very much in the air, was unknown until it was unearthed
from the Israel State Archives and brought to light by Gorenberg last
year. In it, Meron wrote that "my conclusion is that civilian settlement
of the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the
Fourth Geneva Convention." The Convention prohibits deportation or
transfer by the occupying power of its own civilian population into the
territories it occupies. The official Red Cross commentary explains that
this prohibition was "intended to prevent a practice adopted during the
Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their
own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or
in order, as they claimed, to colonise those territories." Meron's crisp
recommendation was that the prohibition was "categorical and aimed at
preventing colonisation of conquered territory by citizens of the
conquering state." That was not all. Even when establishing military
posts, Israel, he was clear, had also to respect the 1907 Hague Convention
on Laws and Customs of war on land, which stated that "Private Property
cannot be confiscated". This has been little discussed in the
Israeli-Palestinian context but its lasting pertinence was underlined last
November when Peace Now, on the basis of leaked data from the military's
Civil Administration in the West Bank, revealed that 15,000 acres, or 40
per cent of the West Bank settlements, were on privately owned Palestinian
land, often by military order.
This could be dismissed as no more than an interesting historical
footnote, except for one thing. Theodor Meron, now an American citizen,
went on to become one of the world's most eminent international jurists,
if not the most eminent. Until 2005 he was president of the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Moreover, as a law professor
at New York University, he published much of the theoretical work which
led to the establishment of the tribunal, on which he now sits as an
appeals judge, and of the International Criminal Court. The Government was
not choosing to ignore the opinion of some obscure legal maverick.
Meron, who has never talked publicly about his opinion before, knew, of
course, that what he had been asked to write, after Khartoum, and at a
time when he knew well that settlement in the West Bank and the Golan was
being considered, was of fundamental importance. Weighing his words with
all of a judge's care, in the forbidding grey tribunal building in the
wooded outskirts of The Hague, he asked me: "Did I realise that this was a
momentous decision? Yes. But I took it very much in my stride. I mean I
don't want to say to you that I felt that I was doing something
particularly brave or heroic. I was, of course, doing my job. It was a
much more important opinion than any other that I wrote during those few
months we are talking about. But I felt that legal advisors have
professional and ethical obligations and I believe that governments should
listen more to professional legal opinions. And when they disregard those
opinions, sooner or later, things boomerang."
Meron was born in Poland, spent four years of childhood and early teens in
the Nazi labour camp at Czestochawa and lost his mother, brother and all
four of his grandparents in the Holocaust. For him, the Geneva Convention
is not some dry abstraction from a law book. "It is a convention which
deals with tangible human concerns and with the rights of inhabitants and
populations. It is a people-friendly convention It is a convention that
puts constraints on what occupying armies, even the most benevolent
occupying armies, may do and what they may not do. I very much felt that
the Geneva Conventions and this is, of course, my view today are a
very special kind of a law. We are not talking about commercial law or
contract. We are talking about norms that were established soon after the
Second World War in order to learn from the experience of that war and try
to prevent, for the future, some of the events which I experienced as a
child I wish I had not had those experiences because they were very
painful. But I never dwell on the past. I believe that basically it is not
terribly productive. We should just create the best environment in terms
of human rights that we can for now and for the future."
At the time, however, his arguments were anything but emotional. In
particular he dealt, with great foresight, with several of the arguments
still used by the Israeli government today to justify its contention that
the settlements are not unlawful including that Jordan had unilaterally
annexed the West Bank and therefore this was not "normal" occupied
territory. First, he correctly predicted the international community would
not see it that way. "I drew attention to the fact that the United
Kingdom, for example, in [Ambassador Lord Caradon's] statement to the UN,
made it quite clear that it views Israeli presence in the West Bank as one
of classic occupation." And secondly, he pointed out that Israeli actions
like the military decree on the third day of the war providing that
military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions were "inconsistent"
with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory. Finally, as
he explained in The Hague this month, even these arguments could not be
applied to the Golan Heights, which had been undisputed as "classically
Syrian territory" before the war.
Meron acknowledges that "the fact that there was no proclaimed desire by
the Arab states for negotiations created the environment in which this
policy of establishing settlements could prosper." But he points out that,
as he advised at the time, there was a perfectly plausible and legal
alternative. "In terms of international law, it would have been entirely
appropriate for Israeli military bases and a strong military presence in
the territories to be maintained until there [was] a political resolution.
So there was an alternative to the civilian settlements approach."
Forty years later, does Meron still stand by his memorandum? While he
might have used "less bureaucratic jargon" here and there, he said: "I
reread that opinion recently and I believe that I would have given the
same opinion today ... It was quite legitimate on your part to ask me
whether this is still my view. It is. I don't believe I made a gross legal
error."
Nor it appears did his own boss which is itself a disclosure of
historical importance. "I do remember that the Foreign Minister Abba Eban
was quite sympathetic. I cannot recollect after so many years when exactly
I discussed it with him. [But] I did. And the fact that the opinion went
to the Prime Minister suggests there was no objection by the Foreign
Minister. I was constantly in touch with [Eban] and my clear recollection
is that he was sympathetic."
This was not enough, of course, to halt the Cabinet's eventual endorsement
of settlement in the West Bank. Meron is careful to a fault about avoiding
political statements, let alone comment on current Israeli political
issues. But he says: "It's obvious to me that the fact that settlements
were established and the pace of the establishment of the settlements
made peacemaking much more difficult. This is something the Arabs greatly
resented. Would peace have been achieved? I can't answer that. I am not a
prophet. Would the chances have been much better? I think so and most
people agree that the prospects of peace would have been much better."
To see why, it's necessary to return to Route 60, the almost surreal
highway that cuts through the middle of the West Bank. For much of its
length it is used only by Israelis and for much of the route that means
settlers because Palestinians are either prohibited from driving on it
by military order, or prevented from reaching it by the earthworks or
gates that block the feeder roads from their villages. To start the
journey it's worth first travelling south to the paradoxical and to Jews
and Muslims holy city of Hebron, where Rabbi Leibovich arrived in 1968
to found Kyriat Arba, the adjacent settlement that paved the way for the
growth that is visible today throughout the West Bank. Outside its
historic heart, Hebron is the most normal of Palestinian cities. Partly
this is because it is more open to the surrounding countryside and to
Jerusalem than Nablus and Jenin. Partly it is because its strong and
traditional clan nexus militates against the lawlessness that has started
to spread to those cities, as well as in Gaza, since Hamas won the January
2006 elections and the international community mounted its boycott in
response.
But the old city is notoriously a ghost town, thanks almost entirely to
the four small and notably hard-line Jewish settlements that have been
allowed to establish themselves uniquely in any part of the West Bank
in the heart of the city. For the protection of no more than 400 Israeli
settlers, the area surrounding the settlements is under direct control of
the Israeli military; the only cars allowed are those of the settlers and
the Army; most of the shops have long been boarded up; and stretches of
the main artery Shuhada Street are closed even to Palestinian pedestrians.
Earlier this month, the two most respected Israeli civil-rights
organisations, Btselem and the Association of Civil Rights, produced stark
new figures to underline what it called the "quiet transfer" of
Palestinian population from the once-teeming city centre: 41 per cent of
the housing and 65 per cent of business premises lie vacant, many of them
by direct military order. Among the reasons for the flight cited in the
report is the "failure of law-enforcement authorities to enforce the law
on settlers who assault Palestinians and damage their property."
Now, however, an ominous new problem has emerged: the takeover by settlers
of a large empty Palestinian building a mini apartment block really in
a strategic position on the road linking Kyriat Arba, outside the city,
and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, deep inside it. It's an outpost that could
just turn into a fifth inner-city settlement. As the Palestinian families
in the street warily watched their new Jewish neighbours installing water
tanks, hauling up generators and hammering in window frames at their new
four-storey home, next door to a mosque, they claimed the settlers had
sought to provoke them by tactics ranging from repeated stone-throwing to
leering provocatively at the girls and women knowing it to be deeply
offensive in traditional Muslim societies.
The single word "Revenge" had been scrawled in Hebrew by someone on the
door of Fathi al Razem's yard. Like many others, the al Razem family lost
nine acres of vines a generation earlier to the new settlement of Kyriat
Arba. "All the people are silent," said Mr al Razem, who is 60, "because
they are hoping the [Israeli government] will evacuate them. But we won't
accept harassment if they don't." Whether they will have any choice
depends on a current appeals process by the settlers against an order to
move. As Talia Sasson among others has pointed out, the best way to have
stopped the hardline Hebron Jewish residents forming what could yet become
a fifth settlement within the city, was for the Army to have forcibly
prevented them entering in the first place.
Hebron and the conflict with the settlers throws up a telling vignette of
everyday life under the modern occupation. In 2002, Nidal Jamjoum, then
23, watched in horror as his 14-year-old sister Nasseem was shot and
fatally wounded on the roof of their old city home by settlers who were on
the rampage after the shooting by a Palestinian militant in the south
Hebron hills of a settler who was also a soldier. Maybe it's because he
has, despite everything, kept the sense of humour he definitely needs that
the story of Nidal's struggle to rise above the tragedy has a tragic-comic
flavour worthy of Paradise Now, the Golden Globe award-winning film set in
the West Bank.
According to the Israeli legal NGO Yesh Din, no one is indicted in 90 per
cent of cases of settler violence. And so it was when Nidal's sister was
shot by a settler who has never been brought to court. At the time, Nidal
was studying at the Al Quds Open University and as recompense for the
tragedy, he was promised by Mohammed Hourani, an expansive Fatah Hebron
member of the Palestinian parliament, a "Yasser Arafat scholarship" to
study abroad. So he abandoned his course at Al Quds. "He promised me I
would go to Algeria, Russia or Romania," Nidal recalls, "but it was a
false promise." Smiling ruefully at what he evidently now sees as his
naivety, he adds: "I didn't know he was a liar. I thought he was a
responsible officer in the Palestinian authority and cannot tell a lie.
Then I discovered."
Nevertheless, Nidal retained a keen desire to study abroad. "Everywhere
here in Hebron I am reminded of what happened," he explained. Finally,
using the internet, he says, he managed to secure a promise of admission
to a university in Alberta, Canada. Which left him needing a visa, which
in turn meant meeting two requirements. One was raising (or at least being
able convincingly to pretend that he had raised) enough money to persuade
the Canadians that he could initially support himself. And the second was
a trip to the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv, some 50 miles away, to apply
for his visa. The first requirement proved rather more trouble-free than
the second.
Without much difficulty he was able to secure a note from a businessman
acquaintance guaranteeing a donation of $12,000. By Nidal's account, the
man probably did not intend to pay up, but Nidal thought perhaps also
naively that it would be enough to get him the visa. Next he went to try
and get a permit from the Israeli military to travel to Israel to do so.
"But they told me I couldn't have the permit because my sister had been
killed and that made me a security risk because I might try and commit
some terrorist act in revenge."
So on 6 January 2003 Nidal can remember the date more than four years
later he found a taxi driver from East Jerusalem prepared to take him,
along with two Palestinians working illegally in Israel. They left Hebron
through the back roads, avoiding the checkpoints, and on to Tel Aviv. He
did his business at the embassy he was later to hear he did not get the
visa and rang the taxi driver on his mobile. But the driver was still
some way away. "I was walking up and down in front of the embassy. The
driver was late. The people in the restaurant next door were staring at
me. They could tell I was a Palestinian and I was scared."
Then the police arrived. "They asked me where I was from and I told them I
was from Hebron. They put me in handcuffs and searched my body for
explosives. Then they checked my story with the Canadian embassy. They
kept me in the police station for four or five hours. I had to sign
something saying I would not come back again. I told them I didn't come to
Tel Aviv for fun; if the Canadian embassy had been in Hebron I would have
stayed there. And I had to sign something saying they hadn't beaten me
up." (They hadn't.)
He was then dropped somewhere at 4.30pm. He is not sure of the place
except that it was two hours' tramp to the Arab village of Kafr Qasem.
There he found some Hebronites to stay with, and indeed to return home
with part walking across the hills, part hitchhiking on the Palestinian
backways. He left at 6am and finally got home at 4pm. The walking was the
worst part because of a fierce and icy hailstorm which drenched all of
Nidal's precious papers, the Palestinian passport, the high school
certificates, the Al Quds University credits, the (probably worthless)
$12,000 "guarantee".
Though he still dreams of getting away from Hebron, Nidal is today
searching for a job so far in vain because of an economic blight roundly
blamed this month by the World Bank on Israeli restrictions on Palestinian
movement. He is back at Al Quds Open University, supported by his two
brothers, who are in the business of producing wire mesh a commodity
much in demand in a city which, thanks to the presence of the settlers, is
the undisputed capital of the throwing of stones and trash between Jews
and Arabs.
And going back to the reason for the Army's refusal to grant him a permit,
has he been tempted to join the militants? On this, Nidal is emphatic. "If
I join either: 1) they arrest me and put me in gaol, or 2) I will be
killed and my family may get arrested." Indeed, he says, the first is just
what happened to a distant cousin of his who joined Islamic Jihad. So what
did he think of the second intifada, in retrospect? "It was a big failure.
What are the gains? Tell me what it achieved? A few good songs and that's
it."
Turning north back to Jerusalem, you pass through two long tunnels carved
into the mountain one of them directly under the Palestinian town of
Beit Jala. They were built at a cost of tens of millions of dollars so
that the settlers would no longer have to risk driving through Bethlehem.
Next you pass through the new and dauntingly permanent-looking Beit Jala
"terminal" and indeed it is more like a border crossing than a
checkpoint, except that in international law, if not in the view of
Israel, both sides of it are actually in occupied territory.
Jerusalem, of course, is a story all of its own. The city is far from
immune from just the kind of encroachments on the Arab eastern sector that
threaten the prospects of a final, two-state deal between Israel and the
Palestinians. When the senior European diplomats and their American
counterpart in the city refused to join in this year's Jerusalem Day
celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the "reunification", they
reflected the official Western view that the annexation that followed the
Six-Day War had no basis in international law.
It's a view endorsed in a report produced by the International Red Cross
committee, which acts as the official guardian of the Geneva Conventions
that Theodor Meron presciently predicted would be the core of Israel's
international problem. In other words, East Jerusalem is still occupied
and the ring of huge Jewish "neighbourhoods" which Israel has built there
since the war are settlements. Israel refuses to accept this, standing by
the annexation and pointing out that after it Palestinians were offered
Israeli citizenship and in the main refused. This is hardly surprising
since Palestinians have always insisted on Jerusalem (these days in
practice East Jerusalem) as the capital of a Palestinian State and no
international statesmen seriously believes a final peace is negotiable
with anything less.
Although it was never officially published as intended by their foreign
ministers for fear of angering Israel the European consulates produced
a devastating report in November 2005 report. Leaked to The Independent,
it charged that use of the separation barrier cutting some Arab quarters
off from East Jerusalem and dividing others along with what the report
called without embellishment "illegal" settlements in and outside East
Jerusalem and the highly restrictive system of building and other permits
for Palestinians were all "reducing the possibility of reaching a
final-status agreement on Jerusalem, and demonstrate a clear Israeli
intention to turn the annexation of East Jerusalem into a concrete fact".
That report was largely written in the British Consulate which by a
serendipitous irony, now finds it could itself have a Jewish settlement as
its neighbour in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. But if
the plan to demolish the old Shepherd's Hotel and build a clutch of
multi-storey apartments for Jewish families on a site acquired by the
right- wing businessman Irwin Moskowitz is upsetting the diplomats, it is
upsetting the poorer residents of Sheikh Jarrah even more.
A few doors down, 70-year-old Bahia Siam remembers 1967 with barely
expressible sadness. Her sadness is not for the war itself when she
walked on the last day all the way to Ramallah to find her husband who had
been cut off from home while working at the old Jerusalem airport in
Atarot but for the following month when her three young sons were killed
as they played in the yard behind the house, possibly by an accidental
explosion detonated by Israeli troops operating in the area. "All our
relations with our neighbours are good," says her daughter Ibahe, age 35.
"What will it be like if our neighbours are extreme Jews?"
Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer specialising in fighting the settlement
projects in East Jerusalem, warns that the "Hebronisation" of Jerusalem is
the stark alternative to Israelis and Palestinians dividing and sharing
the city in partnership. The Sheikh Jarrah plan may only be a small
example but it would be one more step towards the settlers' objective of
interrupting the "contiguity" of Arab East Jerusalem by helping to cut off
the Old City from the northern neighbourhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina.
As Ibahe Siam says, "If they manage to build a settlement here, the whole
of Sheikh Jarrah will go."
It's on Route 60 leaving Jerusalem that Etkes joins us. Here, on the
heavily restricted sections on which Palestinians are allowed to drive,
Israeli cars simply pass the long queues at the checkpoints and are waved
through by the soldiers painstakingly inspecting the queues of cars with
Palestinian registrations plates. Starting in the 1990s, the highway has
been re-routed to bypass the main Palestinian cities so that settlers
don't have to drive through them. Arab villages along the way are
virtually never mentioned on the signposts and the road has imposed an
alternative reality on the West Bank. Here, on the outskirts of Jerusalem,
one of the many long stretches where no Palestinian cars are allowed at
all, we pause for a few moments just past another new "terminal", above
the Palestinian village of Hizma, which also has occupied territory on
both sides. Most West Bank Palestinians will be denied entry through it to
Jerusalem, of course. Etkes points out that much of the huge settlement
or Jerusalem "neighbourhood" on the other side of the barrier was built
on Hizma land. He adds that Israel has unilaterally defined its border
"and then basically denies the right of Palestinians who live here, half a
kilometre from what used to be their land, to get inside. It's really
crazy when you think about it. Most of us don't even think about it. Most
of us don't even know it. But it is a hard story."
Further north, we come to the Jewish West Bank settlement of Beit El,
where Etkes has identified a section including a water tower among other
buildings which is outside the zone commandeered by official military
order. He will now search the registries of Palestinian landowners in the
hope of bringing a case. "The state basically assisted this to happen," he
says. "Look at the antennae. Look at the pavements. Look at the
electricity. Everything here belongs to the state. It's part of the state
system. This is what happens in 40 years, if you just close your eyes and
act according to the assumption that there are no red lines [limits] to
what Israel can do in order to achieve its political goals."
Next stop is Ariel, the large settlement block (population 18,000) which
cuts deeply eastwards across the West Bank and is already partly
surrounded by the separation barrier which may or may not one day be
completed around it. Ariel has a 7,000-student college and advertises
itself as being in "The Middle of Israel", even though it is entirely east
of the 1967 green line. When Ariel Sharon secured (in 2004) a promise from
President Bush that existing "population centres" would remain in Israel
under any final deal with the Palestinians, Israel assumed that Ariel
would be among them. But the unofficial Geneva Accord between Israeli and
Palestinian politicians Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, reached in the
dark days of the intifada's peak, assumed that it would be Palestinian.
Etkes points to the metal fencing clad in barbed wire, the two trenches
and the electric wire which make up the 20m-wide barrier here. Then he
gestures towards some unkempt olive trees inside the barrier and
explains how once they were carefully tended by Palestinians: "This is an
attempt unilaterally to annex Ariel to Israel. That's what it is." New
houses here cost some 30 per cent less than in Israel proper, and there is
a string of other financial incentives to make it more attractive to the
often non-ideological settlers who choose to live here.
As we drive north bypassing the Palestinian city of Nablus, of course
Etkes muses on the part played by the settlements in the conflict. He is
emphatic in saying that he doesn't "legitimise terrorism". Of the second
intifada, with its trail of suicide bombings, he says that the
Palestinians had "a wide spectrum of choices [to act against the
occupation] and they failed to select the good one or the right one." But
he says that the rapid acceleration of settlement growth under four prime
ministers, starting with Yitzhak Rabin, after the Oslo Accords, was a
crucial factor in precipitating it. "I think that the second intifada was
a direct result of settlement policy. If in 1994 Israel had seriously
taken responsibility and said, 'Hey, this is a real opportunity to think
about what we have done in the last 26, 27 years,' I don't think the
intifada would have erupted."
Etkes spent six years of that period abroad, after doing his military
service in a combat unit during the first intifada. He first became truly
interested in the settlements when he got back to Israel and started
taking taxis to places where he had served as a soldier. He was
dumbfounded by how much had changed. He says now, by way of explanation of
his earlier undoubtedly controversial remark: "There is a very
important difference between how Israelis consider reality and how
Palestinians consider reality. Israel concentrates on what Israel says,
while Palestinians are very much aware of what Israel does. If you look at
what Israel does rather than what it says the conclusion is that Israel is
not willing to accept a Palestinian state.
"The conclusion of the Palestinians is that there is no point in
discussing with Israelis a political [deal] because they're building
settlements all the time and Israel is not willing eventually to give up
the majority of the West Bank. That is very much the collective experience
of Palestinians in the West Bank. When I was there and I looked at what
Israel was doing I reached the same conclusions. I refuse to live and
dream in their world of fantasies. I refuse to be enchanted by the
beautiful declarations of Israeli politicians. Because I go into the field
and check what they actually do."
As Hebron is the southernmost city in the West Bank, so Jenin where the
Israeli military has recently been carrying out operations against
militants, and into which, of course, Etkes, as an Israeli civilian,
cannot accompany us is the northernmost. Al Haq, the Palestinian
civil-rights organisation, has been investigating what it believes is the
"widespread practice" of harassment of local ambulance drivers, which it
says contravenes international legal provisions prohibiting states from
"denying or actively limiting access to health". Sitting on the floor,
over a simple lunch of omelette, sausage and salad, driver Feda Subh
describes how, with six members of a mobile clinical team, he was on his
way to the village of Seer. Along the way, he passed, as ambulances
routinely do, to the front of a queue of around 25 cars halted at a
typical flying checkpoint consisting of three Hummers and seven Israeli
soldiers. "It all depends on the mood of the soldiers," he said.
"Sometimes they let you go and sometimes they make you go to the back of
the queue." But this time, he says, "three of them dragged me out of the
car and threw me on the ground. It was raining and they started kicking me
and threatening to kill me." After the whole incident, which lasted about
five minutes in all, Subh says he was told to go and that he drove
through the checkpoint without the ambulance even being searched. "My face
was bleeding," he said. "When we started the clinic, I was the first
patient." The military said this month that it was opening an
investigation into Mr Subh's case.
Meanwhile, on the cypress-lined main road from Jenin south to Qabatiya,
there has been a recent death in the forenoon. Taxi driver Ashraf Haneishe,
age 25, was ordered out of his Toyota by Israeli special forces and shot
dead after being ordered to lie spreadeagled on the road with his two
passengers. According to local witnesses, two of the Israelis who emerged
from the van were dressed in plain clothes like Arabs, and had been
spotted earlier getting into the yellow and white VW van with Palestinian
registration plates from which they and the rest of the soldiers, dressed
in normal uniforms, emerged. Mohammed Nazzal, 42, a cousin of the dead
man, who runs a car wash 25 metres from where it happened and who drove
him to hospital, heard the shots and came out in time to see the body
being dragged "by the legs" by two of the soldiers from the middle of the
road.
According to the Israeli military, Haneishe had been active in helping the
"Islamic Jihad infrastructure" in Jenin by handling funds for it though
it was the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade that claimed him as a member in the
"martyr poster" they swiftly produced, as the factions regularly do
whether the casualty was a militant or not. Mr Nazzal says he doesn't
believe it. Only the previous day, he said he had asked Haneishe to take
him and his young son to hospital. "Do you think if I had known he was
wanted I would have let my son go into his car?" Certainly, it would have
been a dangerous thing to do in Jenin.
But in any case that still leaves the question of why he was killed rather
than arrested. The Army's answer is that he pulled a handgun on the troops
even though the sworn affidavits mention no gun, and one, from a farmer
who saw the incident and is also a member of the Nazzal family, says
specifically that Haneishe got out of the car slowly with his hands up and
was shot as soon as he had laid down. Haneishe's 35-year-old brother Maher
says: "It was an execution; they should have considered him a prisoner of
war." Citing the testimony of one of the passengers, he claims that as the
soldiers drove off "they laughed".
Whether the anniversary reflections in Israel will prompt any hope of
finally settling this seemingly endless conflict remains to be seen. Etkes
thinks it possible that one factor the ferocious political power of the
settlers may have reached its "high-water mark". Last year's Israeli
elections were the first in which a majority of voters opted for
withdrawals from the West Bank. "I have no doubt that the massive terror
attack on Israeli society during 2001 to 2003 was one of the main
contributions to the killing of the peace camp in Israel." During that
period, he says, settlers enjoyed "wide manoeuvrability because there was
no energy left to deal with them". Now that might be changing.
On the other hand he still believes that this is more likely to revive the
idea of "unilateralism", on which Ehud Olmert fought the election and is
now too hobbled by the Lebanon war and other factors to deliver. In other
words partial withdrawals on Israel's terms and not on negotiated ones.
This is most favoured by those who want withdrawals for what Etkes calls
the "wrong reasons" "demography" or the fear that if Israel controls a
state populated by more Arabs than Jews then it will have to choose
between being Jewish or democratic. It is an argument that appeals not a
jot to most settlers, of course. David Wilder, the Hebron settlers'
spokesman, told me last year that democracy had been elevated to a "deity"
and added: "If I have to choose between the survival of the state of
Israel over democracy then I choose the survival of the state of Israel."
By that Wilder means a state which includes the West Bank.
The 1967 war was of course the moment at which Israel had showed its
strength something warmly welcomed at the time in most of the West. For
the international community, reinforced by Meron's remarks and the
International Red Cross's now-public concerns over Jerusalem, the 40th
anniversary may be time for the West to reflect on how long it will
tolerate what it sees as 40 years of the breach of international law.
Meron says: "I don't see a conflict between strength and compassion. Of
course, it would have been and it is entirely appropriate for Israel to
defend itself. It was then, it is now. At the same time, Israel or any
country must be, and its people must be, compassionate and respectful of
others. If you do not respect the rights of others you simply exacerbate
the problems that will one day haunt you."
Moreover, logic if that ever counted for anything in the Middle East
would suggest that now is just the time for a negotiating effort. The Arab
League Mecca summit has, however belatedly and with however little
international impact so far, turned the history of the last 40 years full
circle by promising pan-Arab recognition in return for an end to the
occupation. Writing earlier this month in Haaretz, the eminent Hebrew
University scholar Eli Podeh declared: "It is already possible to say
today and not 40 years from now that there has been a turnaround, and
that the voices coming from the Arab and Islamic world calling for a
dialogue are sufficiently serious and important. We should not ignore
them."
If so, that moment may need to be soon, before the new generation, the
children of the second intifada grow up.
Jenin impoverished, increasingly lawless and isolated from Nablus, let
alone Jerusalem seems a world away from Kfar Etzion. As Mohammed Nazzal
and his neighbours drink coffee, they discuss the "situation" in the late
afternoon sun. Abu Ezzat, age 63, reflects back to the mid-point between
the Six-Day War and now: the first intifada, which unlike the second had a
concrete result the Oslo process. "In 1987 we felt it had been a long
time and we wanted to liberate ourselves. At one moment we thought we
could have peace and co-existence, open relations between Israel and
Palestinians. Now it doesn't seem possible. And if you take the kids to a
toy shop to buy them something at the end of Ramadan, all they want is a
gun." |
