The Great War for Civilisation (76 page)

“There are things which have been written that were wrong about Deir Yassin,” he said. “I was in Jerusalem and I saw the two truckloads of prisoners that came from here. Some reports say Arabs were killed, others that they were not. Not all the people were killed. There is much propaganda. I do not know. The Arabs killed their Jewish prisoners. There didn't have to be much fighting for the Arabs to leave.”

But when he saw those Arabs leaving, did they not, for Josef Kleinman, provide any kind of parallel—however faint, given the numerically far greater and infinitely bloodier disaster that overtook the Jews—of his own life? He thinks about this for a while. He did not see many Arab refugees, he said. It was his wife, Haya, who replied. “I think that after what happened to him—which was so dreadful—that everything else in the world seemed less important. You have to understand that Josef lives in that time, in the time of the Shoah. Of the twenty-nine thousand Jews brought to Dachau from other camps, most of them from Auschwitz, fifteen thousand died.”

But is it just about the enormity of one crime and its statistical comparison to the exodus of Palestinians in 1948? A group of Jews, Muslims and Christians have long been campaigning for Deir Yassin to be remembered—even now, at the height of the latest Palestine war. As one of the organisers put it, “Many Jews may not want to look at this, fearing that the magnitude of their tragedy may be diminished. For Palestinians there is always the fear that, as often before, the Holocaust may be used to justify their own suffering.” The Kleinmans do not know of this commemoration—nor of the organisation's plans for a memorial to the Palestinian dead not far from their home in the suburb of Givat Shaul. Josef Kleinman won't talk about the bloodbath in Israel and Palestine that continues while we are talking. But he admits he's “on the right” in politics and voted for Ariel Sharon at the last Israeli election. “Is there any other man?” he asks.

Yet Josef Kleinman's memory of Deir Yassin is imperfect. Red Cross records and the dispatches of foreign correspondents of the time make it quite clear that the villagers of Deir Yassin were murdered and that some of the women were disembowelled. All over that part of Mandate Palestine which was to become Israel, there were little massacres—sometimes initiated by the Arabs, more frequently by Jewish fighters who were transmogrifying into the Israeli army as the war progressed—and just one small and tragic story gives an idea of what happened during the dispossession of Palestinians.

It is the year 2000 and I am in a rain-soaked village in southern Lebanon, a place of poverty and broken roads called Shabriqa. And eighty-five-year-old Nimr Aoun rolls up his trouser leg to show the twisted ligament and muscle where an Israeli bullet tore into him fifty-two years earlier. Aoun's story is a tale of two betrayals, because he was a victim not only of the Israelis but of the two Mandate powers—Britain and France—who were supposed, in the aftermath of the First World War, to protect him. He comes from a village called Salha—now 2 kilometres inside Israel on the other side of the Lebanese frontier—and was the only survivor of an Israeli massacre of the male villagers.

The story of Salha and six other villages—En-Naame, Ez-Zouk, Tarchiha, El-Khalsa, El-Kitiyeh and Lakhas—goes back to 1923, when the British ruled Palestine and the French ruled the newly formed state of Lebanon. The two imperial powers were doing a little frontier-changing for their own ends and Paris decided to cede to London a few square miles of Lebanon—the British Mandate of Palestine was moved slightly north to take in the seven villages. A grubby deal lay behind this transaction. Old records in Beirut show that the land was handed over in exchange for a contract granted to a French company to drain marshland in the region for commercial use. At the time, it was called—I preferred not to tell old Nimr Aoun this—“the Good Neighbourhood” agreement. And it doomed every villager.

Nimr Aoun was no longer a Lebanese under the French Mandate. He was now a Palestinian under the British Mandate—although neither the Aoun family nor any of the other villagers were consulted about the matter. Anyway, Aoun remembers the British fondly. He was a farmer who married a girl of thirteen, and had nine children, living amid the cornfields of Salha. But his voice rises in pitch when he comes to 1948, the British departure and the arrival of the Jewish army outside the village. “They showered us with leaflets saying that, if we surrendered, we would be spared,” he says. “The women and children had already fled. So we believed the leaflets and surrendered. But the Israelis had lied. They cursed us and made seventy of us stand together.”

What happens next is confirmed in Israeli archives. The historian Benny Morris writes that in an Israeli attack called “Operation Hiram,” after “light resistance” by Arabs near Salha, ninety-four of the villagers were blown up in a house on 30 October 1948. Nimr Aoun has a different version of events, but one given veracity by his scars:

When we were all standing together, they opened fire on us. There were thirteen tanks all round the area. We had no chance. What helped me was that after I was shot in the leg, I fell under piles of bodies. They were on top of me and most of the bullets were hitting my friends. I was bleeding so much, I felt nothing. When night came, I pulled my way out and crawled past one of the tanks and then through long grass until I found a donkey.

Nimr Aoun heaved himself onto the animal's back and rode painfully north to the Lebanese village of Maroun, where he was given medical treatment. A government official prevented doctors from amputating his leg, which is why Nimr Aoun can still hobble around his home at Shabriqa, 40 kilometres from the site of the once-Lebanese village of Salha in which only a long low building survives today. Most of the land is now covered by Israeli apple orchards.

Until 1998, Nimr Aoun and the other few survivors from the “seven villages” of 1948 were treated as Palestinians with Palestinian documents. Then the Lebanese government—not immune to the political advantages of such an act— awarded them all Lebanese citizenship. Aoun produced for me his new Lebanese identity card, the image of a cedar tree close to his passport picture. He started life as a citizen of the Ottoman empire, became a Lebanese under the French, turned into a Palestinian under the British, became a Palestinian refugee from Israel and, at the very end of his life, was Lebanese once more.

My files on the last years of the British Mandate are packed with letters from British army veterans, interviews with former Jewish and Arab fighters, along with hundreds of contemporary newspaper clippings. It is a story of anarchy and pain and—to use Israel's current use of the word—“terrorist” attacks and bombings, most of them by the Jewish Haganah and Irgun and Stern gangs. A British Colonial Office pamphlet of 1946 reads like an account of the first year's Iraqi uprising against American occupation in 2003: attacks on road and rail bridges, the kidnapping of British officers and clandestine radio stations broadcasting propaganda for the insurgents. “The action of blowing up the bridges expressed the high morale and courage of the Jewish fighters who carried out the attack,” the document reports Kol Israel as broadcasting on 18 June 1946.

Undisciplined British army raids—against Arabs as well as Jews—provoked ruthless revenge operations. The bombing of British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun on 22 July 1946, killing ninety-one British, Jewish and Arab civil servants, was only the most infamous of the assaults carried out against the occupying power. British soldiers opened fire on civilians in the streets of Tel Aviv and when—after the British went ahead with the hanging of three Jewish Irgun fighters—the Irgun hanged two British army hostages, there were anti-Semitic attacks across Britain. Intelligence Corps Sergeants Mervyn Paice and Clifford Martin spent days hidden underground by their captors in the city of Netanya while the Irgun repeatedly threatened their execution. Paice's father wrote a pleading letter to the Irgun leader Menachem Begin—later, the prime minister of Israel who would order the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—just as the relatives of Western hostages would appeal to Iraqi kidnappers in 2003 and 2004. I possess a photocopy of a statement from the “Court of the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Palestine” which was found pinned to the chests of the two men after they had been murdered. It says that the “court” found Paice and Martin guilty of “(a) illegal entry into our homeland. (b) Belonging to a British Terrorist Criminal Organisation known as the British Military Occupation Forces . . . the judgement was carried out on 30th July 1947. The hanging of the two spies . . . is an
ordinary
legal action
of a court of the Underground which has sentenced and will sentence the criminals who belong to the criminal Nazi-British Army of Occupation.”

Attached to this document is a British Palestine Police report on the finding of the bodies of the two sergeants in a eucalyptus grove:

They were hanging from two eucalyptus trees about five yards apart. Their faces were heavily bandaged so it was impossible to distinguish their features . . . Their bodies were a dull black colour and blood had run down their chests which made it appear at first that they had been shot . . . the press were allowed to take photographs of the spectacle. When this had been done, it was decided to cut down the bodies. The RE [Royal Engineers] captain and CSM [colour sergeant major] lopped the branches off the tree which held the right hand body, and started to cut the hang rope with a saw . . . As the body fell to the ground, there was a large explosion . . . The two trees had been completely blown up and their [
sic
] were large craters where the roots had been. One body was found horribly mangled about twenty yards away . . . The other body had disintegrated, and small pieces were picked up as much as 200 yards away.

The Irgun published tracts in poor English, urging British soldiers that if they wished to stay in Palestine, the best way to do so would be to “risk your life every day so that the [British] Government may have ten more years to make up its mind to claar [
sic
] out of Palestine.” The British broke many of the rules of war. A British member of the Palestine Police was to describe how, when British soldiers travelled on the railway line from Lydda, “we usually had a gangers' trolley preceding us with several prisoners on board—for them to enjoy the explosion of mines laid along the line.”

There is a fierce irony in all this. Israel came into being after a classic colonial guerrilla war against an occupation army; yet within fifty years, Israel's own army—now itself the occupation force—would be fighting an equally classic anti-colonial guerrilla war in the West Bank and Gaza. The connection, however, often seems lost on the Israeli government. On 6 November 1944, Jewish gunmen assassinated Lord Moyne, the British minister-resident in Cairo, a former colonial secretary and close friend of Churchill. Moyne, who had favoured partition in Palestine, had upset Palestinian Jews because in 1942 he had urged the Turks to turn back the
Struma
, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from the Holocaust;
⁸⁰
he had also made a number of racist remarks about Jews, although few could argue with his observation that “the Arabs, who have lived and buried their dead for fifty generations in Palestine, will not willingly surrender their land and self-government to the Jews.”

Moyne's murder prompted Churchill to reflect that “if our dreams for Zionism should be dissolved in the smoke of the revolvers of assassins and if our efforts for its future should provoke a new wave of banditry worthy of the Nazi Germans, many persons like myself will have to reconsider the position that we have maintained so firmly for such a long time.” Yet in 1975 the two murderers, Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri, were given a state funeral in Israel with a public lying-in-state attended by the prime minister and a military funeral attended by the deputy prime minister and two chief rabbis. Moyne's son was to ask former Haganah officer David Hacohen: “Why then did your people murder my father? . . . In the end Palestine was partitioned and you are now consolidating your state on the basis of that partition, yet none of you has been assassinated for accepting this solution.”

This question—of honouring one's own murderers while condemning the other side's killers as “terrorists”—is one that lies at the core of so many modern conflicts, yet one that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have failed to understand. Equally, the 1948 war threw up extraordinary portents of other, later, Middle East wars—of events that we regard as causes of present danger but which have clearly been a feature of conflict in the region for longer than we like to imagine.

In 1997, a Palestinian humanitarian group in Scotland decided to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UN Partition resolution, the end of the British Mandate, the Israeli war of independence and the Palestinian
nakba
by publishing a day-by-day account of events in Palestine throughout 1948, largely drawn from the pages of the
Scotsman
—a project that sometimes yielded devastating results. Here, for example, is a dispatch “from a Special Correspondent recently returned from the Middle East,” which appeared in the paper on 13 September 1948:

A new danger to law and order is emerging in the Middle East. It comes from a loosely formed association of Arab terrorist gangs of hot-headed xenophobic young men who have sworn to rid their countries of all Westerners and of course particularly of British and Americans. Open threats have already been made to Europeans living in Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo—oil men mostly—that if they continue to have business relations with the Jews they will be killed . . . The backbone of this new terrorist organisation is provided by young Palestinian Arabs. They have seen their country overrun . . . and have lost everything they possessed—homes, property, money, jobs; they have nothing further to lose. They feel they have been let down by the British and the Americans, by the United Nations, and also, to some extent, by the other Arab countries. They now realise there is a grave danger that the present situation in Palestine, with the Jews in total possession of the best part of the country, will be generally recognised and legalised . . .