43 years on:
the 1967
war-revisited
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Part I
Under the Jordanian rule,
the most important concern for the Jordanian authorities was loyalty
to the King and his Hashemite family. The King was nearly ‘God on
earth’ and the entire country, including the media, the security
forces and the people orbited around his figure. Hence, the claim
often made that Jordan was a king with a country, rather than a
country with a king.
Connections to the King and the Mukhabarat (or the intelligence
apparatus) would automatically put one in a preferential position.
Shouting “Ya'ish Jalalat al Malik” (Long Live the King), would give
one an automatic certificate of good conduct. No wonder, by today’s
standards, it was a despotic regime based on sycophancy,
favouritism and nepotism.
The Jordanian regime never
really made genuine efforts to push back recurrent Israeli
incursions, forays and raids on Palestinian population centres in
the West Bank, let alone liberate occupied Palestine. Indeed, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Jordanian army in the late 1940s, when
Israel was created, and up until March 1, 1956, was a British
officer by the name of John Baggot Glubb who came to be known among
Palestinians and East Bank Jordanians as Glubb Pasha, an honorary
title. So, who in his right mind would have expected a British
officer to fight the Jews on behalf of the Arabs?
This is not to say though
that the Jordanian army didn’t perform well during the 1948-war. It
did. For example, Field Marshall Habes al Majali decimated Jewish
forces at Bab el Wad west of Jerusalem, prompting his British
superiors to warn him to “stop it or else.”
Jordanians and Palestinians took pride in having an Arab officer who
would finally teach Jews a lesson and restore a modicum of Arab
dignity lost in earlier battles. In Karak, the Jordanian city from
which al Majali hailed, Bedouins would sing in their traditional
Dehyyeh (traditional folk song chanted in rhythems) “Sariyeh Qayedha
Habes, Teheshel Akhdar welyabes” a platoon led by Habes, would
ravage the green and hard, meaning an army led by Habes would defeat
all adversaries.
None the less, the main
Jordanian strategy was as it has always been to secure the survival
and continuity of the regime.
As far as Palestinians were
concerned, the most immediate priority for the regime was to make
sure that they and other Jordanians didn’t pose a threat to the
survival, security and stability of the Hashemite monarchy. A
Palestinian would get a six-month prison term if a bullet cartridge
was found in his possession.
And as the Israelis would
do later, the Jordanians enlisted the ‘Makhatir’ (clan chiefs) to
inform on every gesture of opposition to or dissatisfaction with the
Hashemite rule within their respective clans and areas. This in turn
created a kind of police-state atmosphere all over the country.
Those free-minded
Palestinians who insisted on voicing their conscience were
persecuted and dumped into the notorious El-Jafr prison in eastern
Jordan where they were often tortured savagely, even to death. I
know of some people in my town who was tortured to death for their
affiliation with the Communist Party.
Torture is still practiced
in Jordan with the knowledge, blessing and encouragement of the
United States and Britain. Some of the so-called ‘terror suspects’
held by the CIA were secretly flown to Jordan in order to be
‘softened up’ by Jordanian interrogators.
In the mid 1950s, the
Jordanian security forces on several occasions shot and killed
demonstrators who were protesting the pro-Western policies of the
government and the regime’s failure and inability to stop recurrent
Israeli attacks. Some of these demonstrators were affiliated with
or instigated by the Ba’ath party and the Communists who openly
called for overthrowing the monarchy.
As a counterbalance to the
leftists, who were quite active especially in the West Bank, King
Hussein allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to operate relatively freely.
It was a kind of divide-and-rule policy. The leftists would accuse
the Brotherhood of being British agents and the Brotherhood would
retort by accentuating the atheism of the Communists and Ba’athists.
Hussein’s relations with the Brotherhood remained relatively stable
until the final years of his life when he introduced the
one-man-one-vote law, aimed primarily at reducing to the minimum the
number of parliament seats the well-organized Islamists could win.
Notwithstanding, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Islamic Action
Front, remains Jordan’s largest opposition party, despite repeated
government harassment.
The Muslim Brothers were
not British agents or agents of any power. They wanted to create an
Islamic state in accordance with the Sharia, or Islamic Law. In
other words, their strategy and goals were diametrically
incompatible with those of the Communists and the Ba’athists. Hence,
the mutual sullen hostility.
However, to be honest, the
Jordanian regime, especially with regard to how the state treated
its citizens, was not as bad as other Arab regimes. In non-political
and non-security matters, the rule of law was generally observed and
applied. In general, an individual’s dignity was upheld as long as
he or she didn’t criticize the regime or undermine the ‘security of
the kingdom.’
More to the point, King
Hussein was truly an astute leader. Far from behaving with
vindictiveness and vengefulness toward his political opponents, even
those who sought to assassinate him and overthrow his regime, The
King nearly always pardoned them, showing magnanimity and gallantry
unmatched in modern Arab history.
Despite its authoritarianism and despotism, the Jordanian regime
never persecuted us in any way even remotely comparable to what the
Nazi-like Israelis have been doing since 1967. The Jordanians never
demolished our homes or bulldozed our farms or arrested our people
for years without charge or trial as Israel has been doing to us.
Yes, ‘wrongdoers’ were arrested and tried and often tortured, but
their families wouldn’t be detained, their homes wouldn’t be
bulldozed and their farms, orchards and olive groves wouldn’t be
decimated as the Israelis routinely do. Jordan actually granted us
full citizenship until the late King Hussein severed legal and
administrative ties with the West Bank in 1988.
An outstanding exception occurred in 1970, during the so-called
Black September events, when the Jordanian army battled PLO
guerrillas who the King claimed were planning to take over Jordan
and end the monarchy. Some atrocities were committed during these
confrontations and many people, Palestinians and Jordanians, were
killed. Nonetheless, the ‘September events’ should be considered as
a kind of painful anomaly or sad chapter in The King’s relations
with the Palestinians.
In general, one can safely contend that there is no comparison
between the Nazi-like Israeli occupation rule and the Jordanian
era. The Jordanians were not really occupiers, they never behaved
as occupiers. In many ways, The King was our king and the Kingdom
was our kingdom. Yes, the regime was authoritarian and generally
repressive, but, in all honesty, it cannot be compared with the
Israelis whose barbarianism and savagery transcend reality.
Nonetheless, Jordan was
(and still is) a weak kingdom, economically, politically and
especially militarily. The Israeli army routinely carried out
cross-border forays into the West Bank prior to 1967, murdering
innocent Palestinian villagers, and the Jordanian army was too weak
and two unequipped to drive back the Israeli incursions.
King Hussein must have
calculated that maintaining a peaceable or even friendly modus
vivendi with Israel, especially in secret, was the best insurance
policy for retaining his kingdom and the rule of his Hashemite
dynasty. I think he was wrong in thinking this way. His
non-hostility towards Israel didn’t prevent the Jewish state from
pursuing its aggressive policies, which culminated in the occupation
of the West Bank in 1967.
King Hussein did make a lot of contacts with Israel even before
1967. For example, on September 24, 1963 the director-general of
the Israeli prime minister’s office, Yaacov Herzog, met The King in
the London clinic of the King’s Jewish physician, Dr. Emmanuel
Herbert.
Another meeting took place in Paris in 1965 and Israel was
represented by Golda Meir, who was accompanied by Chaim Herzog.
It is also believed that Hussein had lots of contacts with the
Israeli state through the alumni offices of Boston University.
The Occupation
Even before 1967, the Israeli army had been carrying out routine
incursions into the West Bank, destroying poor people’s homes and
killing innocent civilians, very much like what Israel has been
doing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon in recent years.
I still vividly remember how the Israeli army, including tanks and
warplanes, attacked the small nearby town of Sammou ’, 25 kilometres
south-west of Dura, in November 1966, destroying the town, virtually
completely and killing many civilians.
In June 1967, I was ten years old. I remember how we were told to
raise the white flag when the Israeli army surrounded our small
village, Khorsa, 15 kilometres south-west of Hebron. We were told we
would be shot and killed if we didn't raise a white flag aloft. The
Jordanian soldiers left in disgrace and headed eastward, a few
donned traditional women’s clothing in order to disguise themselves,
while King Hussein urged us via Amman Radio to fight the Israelis
“with our fingernails, with our teeth.” Well, how could we possibly
fend off the mighty Israeli army with our teeth and fingernails?
Frankly, the Arab armies didn’t really put up any real fight against
the Israelis. These armies reflected the utter political, moral and
ideological decadence and bankruptcy of most contemporary Arab
regimes. Indeed, maintaining the regime’s survival was the most
paramount priority and strategy for the ruling elites and juntas of
that time. Fighting Israel and liberating Palestine were not a real
priority for these regimes, despite all the rhetoric.
Interestingly, this state of affairs remains unchanged even today,
40 years after the greatest Arab defeat in modern times.
For many years, Israel and its allies claimed that it was Israel
that was attacked by the Arabs in 1967 and that all that Israel did
was fight back for its very survival, which was at stake.
This is, of course, a big lie, as Israeli leaders themselves came to
admit many years later.
The former Israeli President Ezer Weizmann (who was also a former
commander of the Israeli air force) admitted in an interview with
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1972 that “there was no threat of
destruction…but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was
nevertheless justified so that Israel could exist according to the
scale, spirit and quality she now embodies.”
Similarly, the former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a
notorious hawk, was quoted in Noam Chomsky’s book ‘The Fateful
Triangle’ as saying that “in 1967, we again had a choice. The
Egyptian Army’s concentrations in the Sinai desert didn’t prove that
Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with
ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Yitzhak Rabin, another former Israeli Premier, had this to say about
the so-called Egyptian threat to Israel.
“I don’t think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the
Sinai wouldn’t have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He
knew it and we knew it.”
This is not to say though that the Arabs, particularly the Egyptian
and Syrian regimes didn’t do a lot of sabre rattling, threatening to
destroy Israel. However, the Israeli leadership of that time and the
Johnson Administration, as well as the British and Soviet (Russian)
intelligence knew quite well that Nasser was only indulging in
bellicose rhetoric and nothing more than that.
But, Israel, nevertheless, decided to attack with the central
purpose being territorial expansion.
Needless to say, territorial expansion had always been a central
goal of the Israeli strategy.
For example, Chomsky quoted the first Israeli Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion as saying the following:
“The acceptance of partition (by Israel ) doesn’t commit us to
renounce Transjordan; one doesn’t demand from anybody to give up his
vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But
the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish
people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”
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Part-II
Gigantic defeat
The historical defeat of the
Arab armies in 1967 (historical because Israel occupied the rest of
Palestine, including al-Masjidul Aqsa, one of Islam’s holiest places)
didn’t necessarily reflect any inherent Arab inferiority vis-à-vis
Israel; it rather reflected the bankruptcy and decadence of the regimes.
A few months after the war, the Jordanian army and the small Palestinian
Fedayeen units repulsed a massive Israeli incursion into the East Bank
in what was known as the Karama battle, killing more than 80 Israeli
soldiers.
In 1973, during the October or Ramadan war, the Egyptian and Syrian
armies could have scored a decisive victory over Israel had it not been
for the massive intervention of Israel’s guardian-ally, the United
States. It is likely that the Arab armies could, under favourable
circumstances, defeat the Israeli army, as demonstrated by Hezbollah in
its war with Israel in the summer of 2006.
At the beginning of the Occupation in 1967, the Israelis launched what
one may call a PR campaign, employing Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrants
from the Arab world and Druze officers. Some naïve people in our
community, who had been disenchanted with the heavy-handedness of the
Jordanian regime, prematurely began making positive remarks about the
new occupiers. The reason for that is the often-made assumption that
people tend to initially make positive statements about any conqueror.
Such people would speak auspiciously and optimistically about the
fledgling Israeli era. They would make casual remarks like this: “Oh,
they are better than the Jordanians, they are civilized and educated!”
and “the Jews are educated people, they treat people with dignity and
respect” and “under Israel’s rule, everybody is equal.” These people
simply didn’t know what they were talking about.
But such feelings, which were not widespread among the people, didn’t
last long, as the occupation army began revealing its ugly face by
adopting stringent measures against us. Well, occupation and decency
seemed then, as they do now, an eternal oxymoron. There is no such a
thing as a civilized or enlightened or benevolent occupation. A foreign
occupation is an act of rape, it is by nature a criminal and evil act,
otherwise it would be something else.
Actually, the Israeli occupation is probably the worst occupation ever
in the history of mankind, not only for its brutality, but for its
durability as well.
Indeed, I would argue that, in many aspects, the Israeli occupation is
probably worse than the Nazi occupation of Europe. The Nazis wanted to
conquer, pacify and stabilize rather than ethnically cleanse and uproot
non-German Europeans as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians.
Soon enough, the Israelis began
confiscating the land and building settlements, employing all kinds of
dirty tactics, including bribery, shadowy deals, deception, tricks,
falsification of documents and outright coercion. They also resorted to
the harsh policy of collective punishment such as demolishing homes as a
reprisal for guerrilla attacks or membership in the PLO, especially in
the Fatah organization, founded and headed by the late Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat. In our Palestinian culture, if you want to express
extreme ill will towards somebody, you say “Yikhrib Beitak” – may your
home be destroyed.
The Israelis sought to take
full advantage of this weak spot in our social psychology. Thus, they
demolished thousands upon thousands of houses. The demolitions, a
clear-cut war crime under international law, have never ceased. Today,
they do it mostly by bulldozers and by pinpoint bombing from the air. I
don’t know for sure the number of Palestinian homes Israel has destroyed
since 1967. However, I can safely claim that they exceed the 15,000
figure.
In fact, the wanton demolitions of Palestinian homes and villages
started immediately after the war. Indeed, immediately after hostilities
were over, the Israeli army utterly destroyed more than 170 homes in the
Maghariba and al-Sharaf neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the al-Aqsa
Mosque.
In the third and fourth weeks of the occupation, Israeli army bulldozers
wiped out the Palestinian villages of Beit Nuba, `Imwas (Emmaus), and
Yalu, all on the orders of Yitzhak Rabin.
Approximately twelve thousand people were driven away from their homes,
many of them trucked to the River Jordan, others were sent wandering in
the desert without food or water.
Eventually, the Israeli government, thanks to a generous gift of
Canadian tax-payers’ money, built an infamy on the ruins of ‘Imwas. They
called it Canada Park. This is Canada, which claims to be a guardian of
human rights and the rule of international law!!!
Home demolitions would leave deep psychological scars in people’s
memories. Children would return from school only to see their homes
being destroyed by bulldozers driven by soldiers wearing helmets with
the Star of David engraved on them. That Star of David, which we are
told is originally a religious symbol, symbolized hate and evil and
cruelty. Even today, I couldn't imagine a more hateful and evil symbol.
It is very much comparable to the way Holocaust survivors view the Nazi
Swastika.
Phobias, deep stress, neurosis
and depression are among the disorders children of demolished homes
would suffer as post-traumatic effects.
I personally witnessed numerous demolitions when I was eleven years old.
The demolition, or blowing-up operation, would begin with declaring the
village where the doomed house was located a closed military zone. The
declaration would be made via loudspeakers located atop military jeeps.
In the process, all males betweens the ages of 13 and 70 would be
ordered to gather at the playground of the local school, where they were
forced to stand with their heads bowed down. Very often, the soldiers
would shoot over the heads of people with the purpose of terrorizing
them. And anybody daring to raise his head would be kicked in the back
by heavily armed soldiers. Civility and simple human decency were always
absent, as is the case in these days, and there was no al-Jazeera or CNN
to report on Israel’s shameful acts, so the Zio-Nazis always felt at
liberty doing to us as they saw fit.
Then, the commanding officer in
charge of the operation would give the doomed family ten minutes to
salvage whatever meagre belongings they could. (These days they demolish
our homes immediately without giving a grace period to get our
belongings out).
The scene of young children comforting younger children is devastating.
The distraught housewives would struggle to get their utensils and
whatever mattresses and foodstuff out, lest they be crushed and
irretrievable. A small child would rush to get his favourite toy or an
enlarged picture of his late grandfather, before it was too late. Then
the commanding officer would give the go-ahead signal and the house
would become rubble in a few seconds.
Afterwards, the Red Cross would bring a tent, as a temporary shelter for
the victims, otherwise the tormented family would simply make an
enclosure and sleep under the trees, or, if the weather was cold, find a
cave to live in until a permanent solution could be found. These were
indelible images of misery I won’t ever forget, an ugly testimony to
Israel's Nazi-like savagery.
Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions (ICHAD), an anthropologist and scholar of the
occupation, observed that the Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80
years have all conveyed what he calls “the Message to the Palestinians.”
The Message, Halper says, is “Submit, only when you abandon your dreams
for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has
become the Land of Israel, will we relent.” 8
The implication and deeper meaning of the message is very clear. It is
the “you (Palestinians) do not belong here. We uprooted you from your
homes in 1948 and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel
.” 9
Halper reminds us that Zionism has been from the very inception a
“process of displacement” and house demolitions have been “at the centre
of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians” since 1948.
Halper elucidates the policy of house demolitions. In 1948, he says,
Israel systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel ,
fully 85% of the villages existing before 1948. And since the occupation
began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 Palestinian homes. More
homes, he adds, are being demolished in the path of Israel’s Separation
Wall, with the number of homes demolished estimated at 40,000 in the
past four years.
And contrary to Israeli propaganda that Arab houses are destroyed for
security reasons, Halper points out that the 95% of these demolished
homes have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are
designed specifically to displace non-Jews to ensure the advance of
Zionism.
In addition to the manifestly barbaric practice of home demolitions, the
Israelis really ‘excelled’ in the widespread practice of physical and
psychological torture, especially in the first few years of the
Occupation. In fact, a villager by the name of Salim Mahmoud Safi from
Khorsa, my village, was tortured to death in 1970.
And Israel often imprisons the bodies of Palestinians killed or tortured
to death for years in order to further torment and inflict pain upon
their families. This is a well-known fact here.
Born into a very poor family, I started working in Beer Sheva when I was
thirteen as a construction worker and then as an assistant plasterer
(Maggish in Hebrew). I did this usually during the summer break and
occasionally on Fridays. However, I was always careful not to allow my
‘job’ to seriously undermine my school learning.
In Beer Sheva, or Bir al Sab’a as the city is known in Arabic, I was
able to learn Hebrew as well as the Moroccan dialect spoken by many Jews
who had immigrated from North Africa. Like Palestinians, most Moroccan
Jews worked in the construction sector. Some were street sweepers as
well, and almost all of the beggars in the streets were Jews originating
from North Africa.
I was able to tour the city, which in the 1980s and 1990s received tens
of thousands of immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet
Union.
In the Old Town, I saw the old Palestinian homes, which the Jews seized
after expelling their original occupants and proprietors at gunpoint. I
also saw the town’s mosque, which dates back to around 1911, when
Palestine was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire . Israel
converted the mosque into a ‘museum’ and later into a ‘House for the
Artists.’ And when some local Israeli Muslim leaders petitioned the
Israeli government to rehabilitate the holy place and allow the town’s
Muslim community to pray there, the Israeli authorities said an emphatic
“NO.” This is how the ‘only true democracy in the Middle East ’ behaves
toward its own non-Jewish citizens.
On some occasions, the people for whom I worked would not give me my
wages. I worked with such famous construction firms as Rusco, Solel
Bonei, Hevrat Ovdeim. I still retain my old Israeli work card.
As Palestinian labourers, we were continually humiliated at Israeli
checkpoints and roadblocks at the A’rad Intersection on the way to Beer
Sheva. I remember a Jewish police officer who spoke Arabic with an
Egyptian accent beating one of my relatives savagely without a
convincing reason. I made many Jewish friends then, but the
psychological barrier remained largely intact. I did intermix with some
Tunisian and Moroccan Jews in A’rad, Beer Sheva and Dimona. However,
their sense of superiority (and victory) over us always impeded the
evolution of normal human relations between them and myself. They viewed
us then, as they do now, as the Biblical equivalents of wood hewers and
water carriers. We were only good for making coffee and doing the hard,
menial works for the “master race”, the chosen people. “Muhammed Ta’asi
coffee” (“Muhammed! Prepare the coffee for the Jews”) they would scream
scornfully at us in a condescending tone.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel as ‘day-labourers’,
mostly in the construction and agricultural fields. They would wake up
one or two hours before dawn in order to be able to reach the worksite
before eight o’clock .
Work in Israel lured most able-bodied Palestinians who abandoned
agriculture, which was not financially very rewarding. Indeed, at one
point, a day-labourer became economically better-off than erstwhile
middle-class professionals such as teachers, clerks and other civil
servants.
The Israelis knew what they were doing. By the mid 1980s, the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip became the second biggest market for Israeli products
after Europe. So, it was really a kind of indirect slavery. We worked in
Israel, building multi-story buildings for would-be immigrants, and then
we spent the wages we earned buying Israeli products, even Israeli
produce, as Palestinian agriculture fell into neglect as greater numbers
of Palestinians preferred to earn more money working in Israel than
working their land which comparatively yielded little money.
I said it was a kind of indirect slavery because Palestinian workers in
Israel, whose number in the mid-1980s reached more than 130,000, were
deprived of social benefits and health insurance, and they had no
political rights whatsoever.
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