Hasan Abu Nimah
IT WAS IN 1940 when, as a small boy, I started to recognize the world around me in Battir.
The village of my birth has borne witness not just to ancient history, but to the consequences of the Zionist conquest and ongoing struggle over Palestine. It was through the experience of Battir that I formed my understanding of the personal and political dimensions of this struggle.
Located some six miles southwest of Jerusalem, there is evidence of human settlement in Battir at least since the Bronze Age. The village nestles on the upper part of a mountainside that faces west. The lower part was made up of neat terraces where villagers grew all kinds of produce—grapes, figs, olives, peaches, apples, pears, apricots as well as wheat and barley. The village was particularly known for batinjan battiri, a special variety of eggplant prized across Palestine.
The terraces were fed by springs bubbling out of the ground into pools and carefully maintained channels. This shared irrigation system is now recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, which calls it an “outstanding example of traditional land-use” that is “representative of many centuries of culture and human interaction with the environment.” “The integrity of this traditional water system is guaranteed by the families of Battir, who depend on it,” the UN body adds.1
In the valley separating Battir from the mountains opposite, the Ottoman-era railroad still runs. In those days it connected Jerusalem with Palestine’s coastal cities, and then on to al-Qantara in Egypt. The first train stop after Jerusalem was Battir. It provided people in the village with a quick link to other parts of Palestine. Later, a train shuttled passengers and produce from Battir to Jerusalem and back, twice daily. It also brought people from the city, who would spend weekends picnicking in the shady orchards around Battir station. Parallel to the track ran an unpaved road used infrequently by vehicles, as well as by pedestrians.
Right by the station was the boys’ primary school, where I was in my last year just as we had to flee the village in the spring of 1948. The school was partly shaded by lofty pine trees, which swayed pleasantly in the spring/summer breezes. There was enough land by the schoolhouse for students to learn basic agriculture skills, including keeping bees and chickens.
Life at that time for the 1,000 or so villagers in Battir—all Muslims—was simple, peaceful and safe. Order was maintained largely by tradition, interdependence and cooperation. As in rural communities all over the world, people depended on one another to help harvest the crops, build houses, deal with setbacks and celebrate joyous occasions. Everyone took turns to help their neighbors, and there was not much presence or need for government or a village council.
It was by no means a utopia. There were many hardships as well as the usual disagreements and rivalries. But generally, people respected each other, and the village notables had authority to settle problems amicably.
People lived in basic dwellings, often one room, with no electricity, running water or modern amenities. They cooked on open fires in front of their houses or beside narrow village paths. Some could afford Swedish-made Primus or Radius kerosene stoves to use indoors.
Many families owned animals which sheltered in the front part of the same room. Donkeys, mules and, rarely, horses were used to carry people and goods. Some kept a goat or sheep for milk or to slaughter on feast days.
Though religious and pious, people were tolerant. Women mixed with men and the veil was never known in the village. Separation of the sexes was impractical because in an agricultural community women bore many of the same burdens as men, and sometimes more. It was typically women who carried huge baskets of produce on their heads to the markets of Jerusalem, a two-hour journey they often made on foot.
This tranquil life, which must have existed for dozens of generations across Palestine, was not interrupted until world powers far outside our control decided to designate our homeland as the property of someone else.
Although Battir was somewhat isolated, people were fully aware of what was happening, and talked about the Zionist threat. They were concerned about the influx of Jewish colonists from Europe, land sales and the British commitment to help implement Balfour’s promise to turn Palestine into a Jewish national home.
Although news sources were limited to one or two copies of the daily newspapers brought in from Jerusalem, people in Battir stayed informed. Many were illiterate, but when a newspaper arrived, they would gather around to hear someone read about the political events on which their future hinged.
There was one other major information source: A radio with a loudspeaker installed by the British administration, tuned permanently to the Palestine Broadcasting Service. The radio, which ran on two car-like batteries, was placed at my family’s house. Twice a day, people would gather on the large open veranda to hear the bulletins.
Each week, a red post office car brought freshly charged batteries from Jerusalem and took away the depleted ones. The car, however, could only make it as far as the station. The batteries would be carried the rest of the way by donkey.
People were not fooled by assurances that the so-called Jewish national home would not affect their lives. They understood it, correctly as it turned out, as an existential threat. They talked proudly of the heroic Palestinian resistance against the Zionists and the British that began in the 1920s and continued to erupt until the end of the Mandate.
Even at school, which I entered in 1942, pupils whom one might assume knew little of such things, talked with apprehension and fear about the Jewish colonization of Palestine. I remember the reaction when the Arabs rejected the UN Partition Resolution of November 1947. Even children would say that the Zionists would only accept the portion of Palestine allotted to them as a foothold, until they could take over more territory.
This kind of talk—undoubtedly reflecting what they heard from adults—was explicitly exchanged among schoolchildren even though any involvement in politics was strictly prohibited by the British authorities.
The Zionist scheme in Palestine had the blessing of the British, who had taken Palestine over from the Ottomans in 1917. It also gained the blessing of the League of Nations, which bestowed on Britain a Mandate ostensibly to prepare the country for self-determination.
But the 1922 Mandate document did not mention the Palestinian people or their rights even once. Instead, one third of its articles related to Jewish colonization and the Jewish colonists, who at that time were less than 10 percent of the population.2 The British commitment to Zionism would ensure that the only people whose desires should have mattered—the indigenous Palestinian people—were given no say in the future of their own country.
Obviously, Zionism was strongly rejected by the Arabs, particularly the Palestinians. It was also opposed by some British officials who warned of the dangerous consequences. Zionism was also inimical to the vast masses of Jews who viewed the “national home” idea as a threat to their own settled life in many countries around the world. It was precisely for this reason that Zionism ultimately gained the support of Nazi Germany, which saw it as a convenient means to transfer Jews out of Europe and, on that basis, the Nazi government signed the 1933 Transfer Agreement with the Zionist Federation of Germany.
That anti-Semitic motivation for supporting Zionism was not exclusive to Germany, however. Lord Arthur Balfour was notoriously anti-Semitic. So was Winston Churchill, who viewed Zionism as a useful way to recruit Jews into supporting the British Empire, and as a means to fight communism.3
Having banned most Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom in 1905, the British government allowed mass migration of Jews from Europe to Palestine, ensuring that a violent struggle over the land would be inevitable. The British crushed Palestinian resistance with an iron fist, while giving the Zionist colonists every advantage, allowing them to set up a state within a state—and an army—that would be ready to conquer Palestine when the time came.
The British created an irreconcilable situation, though responsibility could not be shared equally. From the start, Palestinians sought a national government for Palestine, with a parliament representing Palestinian Arab Muslims, Christians, and Palestinian Jews.
The Zionists, by contrast, demanded that all of Palestine be exclusively Jewish, a program that has not changed one iota since the earliest settlers arrived. The Nation-State law, passed by the Knesset in 2018, makes clear that the goal of Zionism remains exclusively Jewish sovereignty in the whole of historic Palestine.
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the recommendation to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under an international regime. It was a nonstarter: the plan gave the Jewish colonists, who by that time were a third of the population, more than half of the country. The indigenous Palestinian majority would be relegated to a minority portion of their own country, and many would have faced removal from the putative Jewish state, which would otherwise have lacked a clear Jewish majority.
The Zionist leadership saw it as unacceptable as it gave them too little, but eventually accepted it as a base from which to expand. Arabs rejected it for the right reason. Why should anyone be forced to give up any of their country, let alone more than half of it, to European colonists?
In contrast to the strong support the Zionists received, the British brutally crushed Palestinian resistance, particularly during the great revolt of 1936–39. Possession of weapons was strictly prohibited and severely punished. Given this context, it is no surprise that the Zionists were able to quickly initiate their plans for ethnic cleansing as soon as the November 1947 partition resolution passed.
In the months before the British departure in May 1948, the carefully planned Zionist onslaught had already turned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into refugees. The British barely intervened. Arab villages and communities were left defenseless in the face of Zionist attacks which—like that in Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948—were calculated to sow terror and precipitate the flight of the Palestinians.
Deir Yassin, the scene of a dreadful massacre, was only a few kilometers away from us. I remember terrified survivors arriving in Battir, seeking shelter. But our village was already host to many families ethnically cleansed from other villages that had fallen to the Zionist militias.
People were in disbelief, but there was a general feeling that the trouble would not last. They expected the UN to intervene and restore order and justice. They also pinned hopes on the arrival of the Arab armies, which were waiting for the official end of the Mandate on 15 May, so they could rescue Palestine, or what was left of the country, from the Zionist onslaught.
At that time, Zionist attacks accelerated, particularly in and around Jerusalem. We would hear radio bulletins and alarming stories from village men who spent whatever they had to purchase old-fashioned weapons and ammunition to defend their homes, the British restrictions on possessing arms having lapsed. Those brave men would also rush on foot to help repulse attacks on neighboring villages.
Small groups of fighters and weapons arrived from some Arab countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Sudan. They did as well as they could, winning some battles, and their morale at the beginning was high. I remember a group camped in the abandoned buildings of the Battir railway station and organized training for the village men.
When the Jewish terrorist organizations turned against their British sponsors, they often planted explosives under the train tracks, causing serious damage and casualties. Cargo trains were repeatedly ambushed and goods looted. Every train had British guards on board, but they often surrendered without resistance. The line was soon blocked, and the entire railway paralyzed, when a heavy locomotive was blown up and burnt on the tracks close to Battir.
By early 1948 the situation had worsened and several villages surrounding Battir were overrun by Zionist militias. Many of their inhabitants came to Battir too, hoping they would soon return home.
But in the late spring, just as the British were completing their departure and the State of Israel was declared, Battir was exposed to heavy machine-gun fire from the slopes to its west, which were under Zionist control. We were terrified as hails of bullets struck houses and property. As we had no adequate defense, it was no longer safe to stay.
So, with the little that we could carry, all of us fled eastwards on foot. Some men remained behind in an effort to guard the village, but they could not stop Battir from being looted, with even doors and windows taken from their frames.
I remember we camped with many other families in a vineyard called Al-Qusayr that belonged to the village, about an hour’s walk away. There was a small spring. We spent the night under the trees, still believing we would soon return home. But as Battir remained under constant fire, we built shelters from branches and prepared for a longer stay. Some people took the risk of sneaking back to the village to bring additional belongings. I tried once with some of my cousins, but I was terrified, as the Jewish militias seemed to fire at anything that moved. I decided to turn back without reaching our house.
In Al-Qusayr, we survived on minimal supplies of flour, baking bread on open fires, cooking local vegetables and lentils and drinking tea. Sweet tea with bread was a standard meal, although sugar was a precious commodity. We supplemented this with grapes and figs as summer fruit became available.
The town of Beit Jala was not far away and those who had money could walk there and get additional supplies. I was with only my widowed mother and younger sister, but many relatives, including the families of my married older sisters, were of great help. We were about 20 families, but people acted as if we were one. No one would allow another to starve or suffer.
We remained in that vineyard through the summer of 1948, but by the end of September as the weather started to turn cold, each family had to decide where to go next. Battir had not been occupied but remained vulnerable to fire from across the valley. No one felt safe to return. Some families joined the refugee camps, which were forming in the Bethlehem area and the Jordan Valley. Others went all the way to Jordan.
My mother, my younger sister and I, along with the family of my eldest sister—11 of us altogether—took refuge in an apartment that had been assigned to my older brother in the Tegart police building in Bethlehem.
My brother worked in the wireless communications section of the Palestine police. When the Mandate ended, like many of his compatriots, he joined the Jordanian police. The Tegart building—one of many identical fortresses built by the British throughout Palestine—was, at that time, being used by the Jordanian army.
My brother’s rank meant that he was entitled to use one of the apartments that had formerly been assigned to British officers’ families. Along with my brother’s family, about 20 of us were squeezed into that small two-bedroom apartment. We slept on the floor and ate whatever was available.
My sister’s family eventually managed to rent a place in Bethlehem. We stayed with my brother as we had nowhere else to go. During the day I would wander around downtown Bethlehem, which was bustling with activity. Displaced people from all over Palestine were engaged in street vending. Some re-established businesses they had been forced to abandon elsewhere, including restaurants selling hummus and falafel. Others looked for whatever work they could find.
In the Tegart building there were Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers, along with the Jordanians. My brother’s ground-floor apartment had a veranda overlooking a large courtyard with a rectangular pool in the middle for horses to drink from. But there were no horses. During the day, I would play with the children of other officers, and we would entertain ourselves by climbing up the metal spiral staircase that led to the watchtower. Up there, we would spend time with the bored watchmen, who would tell us stories. We would sit on the veranda late into the night, listening to conversations in the different Arabic dialects and watching cars coming and going with supplies and soldiers.
We would also watch as soldiers on the building’s external grounds practiced shooting rifles or Sten guns. I once dared ask an officer if he would let me have a go. He agreed and invited me to the position. He showed me how to hold the Sten gun which was light, but needed to be held firmly because of the recoil. Then I tried the rifle, which was too heavy.
In the spring of 1949, the fighting ended with armistice agreements between Israel and the four countries surrounding it: Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. By that time, Israel had occupied 78 percent of historic Palestine, including western Jerusalem. The Egyptian army had to leave, as did the Syrian and Iraqi armies, which had operated in the north of the country.
Gaza remained under Egyptian control until 1967—save for the months Israel occupied it in 1956 during the Suez war. The Jordanian army kept control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which they had managed to defend with the support of local Palestinian fighters.
At the Tegart police building that spring, I watched a very neat military ceremony in a spacious yard behind the fortress. It was the handover of the Egyptian garrison to the Jordanian army. The rows of soldiers on both sides were elegantly dressed and neatly organized. When they exchanged the flags, I saw some soldiers crying. It was a very emotional moment. The Egyptians then got in their trucks and left.
Soon after, we received good news. We were told that the Joint Jordanian-Israeli Armistice Committee and the UN Armistice Committee were in Battir drawing demarcation lines.
Battir had never been occupied despite its evacuation during the war. So, the village notables who met with the committee insisted that it should not be included in the occupied part. However, because the railway—which Israel wanted to use—ran through part of Battir’s land, Israel insisted on drawing the armistice line some 200 meters east of the track.
A barbed wire fence erected immediately after the agreement cut Battir in half. Two gates allowed people to cross to either side. The special arrangement meant that, despite shifting the line well into the village, the people of Battir would not be separated and would preserve their right to use their lands that lay west of the track.
According to the agreement, Israeli soldiers could patrol the area west of the fence, which included about half the village houses. My school, right by the railway station, also fell within the Israeli-controlled zone. Our house, still standing but abandoned, was just about 10 meters east of the fence.
With that arrangement in place, we and the other villagers returned home. Houses were repaired and life resumed. The school reopened with a Jordanian flag flying on top, though Israeli patrols went by daily. In 1950, the West Bank was unified with Jordan, creating a large country in which we were free to move about—even if we were cut off from the areas that became Israel. For Battir it was a period of relative prosperity.
UNRWA built an asphalt road connecting the village to Bethlehem, which was required after the link with Jerusalem was severed. UNRWA also established a school for girls, the first in the history of the village. People generally rebuilt their lives, and many young people were able to pursue their education in secondary schools in Bethlehem. But they still believed that the injustice done to the Palestinians had to be redressed.
The joint armistice committee used to meet in the school yard. General Moshe Dayan was often there, driving down in a convoy of jeeps from Jerusalem. The atmosphere was generally calm, but sometimes, Israeli patrols arrested or even killed villagers tilling their land on the western side of the fence, believing they were trespassing. The armistice committee would secure the release of detainees but could do nothing for those who had been killed.
When the school reopened, I was able to finish, as the only student in the seventh grade. We had only one volunteer teacher in the village, so I would help teach the lower classes. Later, the school would be better organized under the Jordanian education ministry.
I also finished my high school in Bethlehem, in the only private co-educational school in the country, Al-Ummah College, established by Shukri Harami, a visionary educator who had previously served in the Ottoman army.
The school defied norms by using English as the language of instruction, except for the use of the Arabic language where it concerned religion, and opened from Monday to Friday, with the weekend on Saturday and Sunday. I received my diploma in the summer of 1954 from the hand of Sir John Bagot Glubb, the British head of the Jordanian army at the time. From Al-Ummah, I went to the American University of Beirut on an UNRWA scholarship, becoming the second university graduate in the history of Battir.
When I returned home with my diploma in the summer of 1959, I was received with singing and dancing, and rooftops decorated with torches.
Following the 1949 armistice, Israeli forces continued their night raids on defenseless frontline villages, blowing up homes, killing innocent people and terrorizing the population. The villages of Husan and Nahalin, near Battir, suffered such attacks.
In 1953, an Israeli force led by Ariel Sharon massacred dozens of people in Qibya, in the northern West Bank, laying total waste to the village. Sharon would, of course, later gain notoriety as defense minister for the crimes committed during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, especially the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. All such raids were reported to the armistice committee, but it could do nothing. Israel never respected rules or obligations of any kind.
The raid on Husan in September 1956 took place as night fell. It was a was a major attack by a motorized brigade. The Israeli force destroyed a recently built Jordanian police station, killing around 10 officers. They continued along the road in the direction of Al-Khader, attacking a Jordanian army garrison, causing heavy casualties. Both the police station and the garrison were right on the road linking Battir to Bethlehem.
Israel claimed such attacks, which killed hundreds of people each year, were “reprisals” for armed “infiltrators.” In fact, these “infiltrators” were, in most cases, simply unarmed Palestinians trying to return home to the lands and villages from which they had been ethnically cleansed just a few years earlier.4 Despite such horrors, life in the West Bank under Jordanian rule achieved a certain stability until 1967, when Israel fulfilled its goal of conquering the whole of Palestine. That marked the end of my own time in Battir. Because I was overseas when the occupation happened, Israel denied me family reunification and I have only ever returned there once, for a visit in 1997.
The Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate and later, the UN Partition plan were all elements of the larger European imperial conspiracy to control the region. Yet, the loss of Palestine to the imperial-backed Zionist movement may not have been inevitable, had there been a serious Arab strategy to defend the country.
Ultimately, Palestine was lost on the battlefield, where the Arab states were bitterly defeated in almost all engagements with Israel. History tells us that it is the will of determined peoples, more than political declarations or decrees, that shape events.
Israel has always been the biggest violator of UN resolutions and international law, but has always acted by Ben-Gurion’s maxim that what matters is not what the United Nations says, but what the Jews—by which he meant the Zionists—do. Israel disobeys any and all laws as it sees fit.
The Arabs could have confronted an aggression based on illegitimate imperial decisions without needing to disobey. But they barely did so. For a century, many Arabs have blamed Balfour for repeated defeats. But the Balfour Declaration would not even be remembered if the Arab states had effectively exercised their legitimate right to defend Palestine.
Founded in 1945, the Arab League always officially considered Palestine to be its cause and defending Palestine a collective Arab responsibility. The Palestinian struggle during the Mandate was supposed to be part of their greater struggle for independence.
Regrettably though, what were supposed to be assets—Arab states, armies and political weight—turned out to be a liability for Palestine. From November 1947 until the British departure in May 1948, Zionist forces had a free hand to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.
The Arab armies belatedly joined the defense of Palestine only after the British departure and failed miserably in their mission. They lacked a joint strategy or command, each acting without coordination. Despite pretensions towards “unity,” Arab relations were governed by competition, which reflected itself in their military performance.
Except for the Jordanian army, which managed to save the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Syrian, Iraqi and Egyptian forces did not do well at all. The Gaza Strip was saved, but probably because the narrow territory was packed with refugees from the surrounding villages, rather than because it had been well defended by the Egyptian army.
Apparently, the other Arab armies entered the war as a mere fulfillment of duty. The Arab League had failed to come up with a coordinated war plan to defend Palestine, leaving each member state to act on its own, whether that was only because they went in out of duty or were incapable or had no genuine motivation to protect the land under attack.
The Palestinians, who rebelled during the Mandate and later fought in the war, showed all the determination one would expect of people defending their own homes and communities. However, having only primitive weapons, lacking training and without an organized army, their feeling was that they just had to hold on until the Arab armies arrived.
The Palestinians could have done better, had the Arab League and its member states helped by providing effective weapons, money, training and volunteers, rather than leaving them to face the well-organized and armed Zionist militias with scarce and obsolete weapons. That would have cost a fraction of sending in the Arab armies and might have been far more effective. But improvisation, fragmentation of responsibility and absence of strategy meant that disaster could not be avoided.
From 1949–1967, the Arab states’ discourse was based on the notion that the existence of Israel was illegal. They asserted that the armistice was temporary, until they were ready to fight again and liberate all of Palestine.
Egypt under Nasser waged intensive propaganda campaigns, accusing Arab “reactionary” regimes of responsibility for the loss of Palestine and calling for their overthrow. Soon after the first Palestine war, the governments in Syria, Egypt and Iraq were overthrown by their militaries, who called on other Arab countries to toss out existing regimes.
Palestine was mostly a pretext for such actions. Ambitious military adventurers repeated the claim that the road to liberating Palestine started with liberating Arab capitals. But in most cases—and despite some investment in the needs of the people, in Egypt, for instance—military rule ultimately proved to be no less oppressive and corrupt than what came before or existed elsewhere.
At the very least, these revolutions failed to lay the ground for long-term development and prosperity of the people, as rulers focused solely on remaining in power. Neither national nor common Arab issues were of any significance on the agenda of the emerging revolutionary elements.
Declarations aside, the world, including the Arab states, began to view the 1949 armistice lines as permanent borders. But Israel’s territorial ambitions had barely been met. While Arab states’ rhetoric was not matched by actions, Israel was quietly getting ready for the next round and the opportunity it would afford to seize more land.5
The opportunity arrived when the Egyptian leadership was lured into escalating its threats after Israel shot down six Syrian fighter jets in a dogfight in April 1967. Nasser was bitterly criticized for not coming to Syria’s aid. In response, Nasser mobilized his forces in Sinai in late May. Then, moving deeper into the trap, he ordered the United Nations UNEF observers to leave.
That was an historic blunder. Although within Egypt’s rights, Nasser should not have made the demand. The move played well in Israel’s favor as did Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran, virtually laying siege to Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat. Egypt, with half its army bogged down in Yemen, neither wanted a war nor was ready for one. Its leaders were simply hoping for a propaganda victory at no cost, and Israel knew it.
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a massive surprise attack, destroying most of the Egyptian air force on the ground. The Israeli army quickly swept into Sinai, occupying Egyptian territory up to the east bank of the Suez Canal. Israel then moved to open fronts with Syria and Jordan. The quick collapse of the Egyptian front left political and military morale in Syria and Jordan low, and the war was over in days.
The Arabs suffered a resounding defeat, as Israel occupied the West Bank and Golan Heights, along with the Sinai—tripling the territory it controlled in the space of a week. Nasser took responsibility for what he called the “setback,” and resigned. But following massive demonstrations in Arab capitals protesting his resignation, he reversed course and decided to stay.
Israel immediately began colonizing the newly conquered territories, as well as annexing East Jerusalem, totally belying its claims that it would only hold the newly occupied land until the Arabs recognized it and made peace.
In November 1967, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which would become the reference for subsequent diplomatic efforts. It called for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” infamously omitting “the” before the word “territories.” This meant that Israel could interpret the text to mean that any withdrawal would be enough to fulfill the resolution’s terms. Indeed, that is exactly what Israel claimed when it withdrew from Sinai after its 1979 treaty with Egypt.
But ambiguity was not the main problem with the resolution. Even if it required Israel to withdraw from every inch of the land it had occupied in 1967, Resolution 242 granted Israel de facto recognition on 78 percent of historic Palestine—far more even than the 56 percent allocated by the already grossly unjust 1947 Partition resolution.
Acceptance of 242 was a massive Arab concession to Israel, one arguably borne from a lack of other options following the defeat. However, rather than salvaging what they could, the Arab states’ diplomatic performance compounded their losses on the battlefield with even more political losses.
The “compromise” in 242 was that the Arabs would regain the lands they lost in 1967 in return for recognizing Israel as it was on June 4, 1967. But such a deal could only succeed if both sides comply. Strangely, however, the Arab states—as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization—have insisted on fulfilling all that was required of them without demanding that Israel meet its obligations. So, Israel ended up with the land as well as recognition.
Indeed, in the context of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the PLO explicitly recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.” Israel, by contrast, offered no such explicit recognition of even a single Palestinian right. Rather, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin only agreed “to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.”6 Far from being a concession, this suited Israel’s agenda: Israel wanted the PLO, which was about to surrender Palestinian rights and become Israel’s security subcontractor, to be seen to be doing so in the name of the Palestinian people.
Nowadays, Arab and other governments still talk about a Palestinian state “based on the 1967 borders” with East Jerusalem as its capital. This vague language is meant to enable Israel to annex settlements illegally built in occupied territory under the land-swap formula already accepted by the Palestinians and Arab states.
When Israel began to colonize the lands occupied in 1967, Arab states made verbal protests which no one took seriously, but they never insisted they would not move one inch on the diplomatic front until Israel ceased building settlements. Rather than a deterrent, such hollow condemnations became an encouragement for Israel to carry on with its building plans.
It is not hard to see why the Arab states, including the PLO and later the Palestinian Authority, failed in their diplomacy, just as they did in war. States must be independent and free in order to take the decisions and actions to defend their rights. This has not been the case with respect to most Arab states, including the PLO and the PA. To be fair, there are not many states that are totally free to conduct their policies without external influences and pressures.
Still, most Arab regimes lack the legitimacy that comes from any sort of genuine democratic process. Thus, they rely on support and protection from foreign powers against any danger, foreign or domestic. The equation is well known: America is a staunch supporter of Israel, right or wrong. For any regime to gain American favor or avoid its ire, it must obtain and maintain Israel’s approval and consent.
The road to Washington passes through Tel Aviv. For example, the Arab countries that scurried to normalize relations with Israel recently did so to satisfy President Donald Trump. These regimes were happy to help Trump exchange Palestinian and Arab rights for illusory political gains for Trump, his ally Benjamin Netanyahu and themselves. But even after those leaders leave the scene, Israel continues to enjoy the fruits of those normalization deals.
One can always argue that losers in war must make do with what they can get. But even the most disadvantaged person—think of a political prisoner hunger striking against his captors, as Palestinians jailed by Israel have always done—can find a way to defend their rights if the will is there.
There is no doubt that Israel, armed by the US and European states, is the stronger party. Yet, that is insufficient to explain the Palestinians and Arabs losses that have continued to mount since 1967. The responsibility also lies with the PLO, the PA and the Arab League and its members, who persistently undermined their own rights and interests in these major ways:
The Palestinians and Arabs failed to condition any negotiations on Israel first ceasing settlements and other illegal changes to the Occupied Territories, as required by international law. That transformed protracted sterile “negotiations” into time for Israel to create more irreversible facts on the ground.
Rather than insisting on the removal of all Israeli settlements from all Occupied Territories, as happened in Sinai and Gaza, the Arabs agreed on “land swaps” that would let Israel annex most of its settlements in the West Bank. Since the putative swaps were not limited to any area, this incentivized Israel to accelerate construction, anticipating that the thefts would later be legitimized in a “peace” deal.
Arab states followed Israel’s lead in adopting the empty slogan of “peace” as the goal, rather than the restoration of Palestinian and Arab rights in accordance with international law. This meant that any refusal of “peace” on Israeli and American terms turned Arabs into the aggressors and Zionist colonizers into the victims. However, there is no such thing as “peace” without justice, equity and the restoration of usurped rights.
The question of Palestine was supposedly a pan-Arab issue and its defense a collective responsibility based on the notion that no Arab country would act alone, on its own. Yet even after 1967, Arab states failed to act together. In 1991, they went to the US-sponsored Madrid conference and later to negotiations in Washington, as separate delegations. There was coordination, though mostly formal and ineffective, but they did not have a united approach. This suited Israel well, as it always insisted, since the 1949 armistice agreements, on dealing with each Arab state separately, correctly understanding that this would strengthen its hand.
Even worse, the PLO undermined its own Washington delegation, ably led by Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi, by secretly negotiating behind its back with Israel in Oslo. When the Oslo process was revealed in 1993, it rendered the Palestinian delegation in Washington redundant.
At every stage, Israel has opposed UN involvement. This is understandable since international law and countless resolutions render its usurpation of Arab and Palestinian rights illegal. What is not understandable, however, is how Arab states allowed the UN to be sidelined, for example by agreeing to deal with the so-called Quartet—an ad hoc committee of officials from the UN, US, EU and Russia. How could the United Nations, a body of more than 190 countries, reduce itself to a mere member of, and a fig leaf for, a US-dominated committee whose purpose was to sideline it? Arab states and the Palestinians should have refused to deal with the Quartet.
Zionist leaders hoped that once Israel was founded, the ethnically cleansed indigenous Palestinian majority would resettle wherever they ended up and melt away. Those remaining behind could be dealt with gradually and quietly. The Zionists have always believed that, once established, facts on the ground cannot be reversed.
In its early years, Israel dealt with the perceived threat from hostile neighbors by building a formidable military, including nuclear weapons. In addition to its dependence on the US, Israel sought alliances beyond its immediate neighborhood—Turkey, Iran and African states, including, of course, South Africa’s apartheid regime.
But dashing Israel’s hopes, none of this has been sufficient. Today, the number of Palestinians inside historic Palestine almost certainly outnumbers the Jewish population. Millions more Palestinians live just miles from their homeland, in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, with more scattered around the region and the world.
Those who are in Palestine will not leave again. In May 2021, as Israel savagely bombarded Gaza and attacked Palestinians in Jerusalem, Palestinians rose up collectively across the whole country, perhaps for the first time since 1948. The protests and resistance from Gaza to Jerusalem to the Galilee proved that decades of Zionist efforts at colonial divide and rule have only strengthened the collective Palestinian national consciousness.
There is no military “solution” to this “problem” from Israel’s perspective. Even if Israel can, through violence and force, suppress this population for a few more years, Palestinians will not forever agree to live under occupation and apartheid in their own country.
For now, Israel maintains the support of the US and EU, as well as of a few Arab regimes. But its former alliances with Iran and Turkey crumbled and even in the US there are dramatic political and demographic shifts that are undermining long-term political support for Israel. As the consensus around the world grows that Israel is indeed an apartheid regime, its remaining international political support will also erode.
Israel succeeded in neutralizing most Arab countries (and, of course, the PLO through the Oslo Accords) because these regimes do not, or have ceased to, represent their people. Just like Israel, these regimes rely on American protection and support. For none of them, including Israel, is that a viable formula for the long-term—especially as the US itself retreats in the wake of its own failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For Israel, too, the days when sweeping military victories could dictate regional politics are over. To many, Israel once seemed invincible as it won all its wars against the Arabs from 1948 until its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But Lebanon was the turning point where Israel’s military superiority turned out to be counterproductive. Early military “victories”—even besieging Beirut—failed to translate into long-term political gains and only spurred stronger and more capable local resistance.
Following Israel’s successive defeats in Lebanon and its inability even to crush the resistance in isolated Gaza, the myth of the invincible Israeli warrior has been shattered. It is now Israeli soldiers who fear facing fighters in Lebanon and Gaza. Nor can Israel’s nuclear weapons be used to defeat resistance in Gaza or southern Lebanon. Israeli strategists certainly know all this. For Israel, there is no viable strategy except to delay the end as long as possible.
In my many meetings with European ambassadors and officials in recent years, I often heard that Israel is happy to maintain the current situation forever. They told me Israel faces no major threats and its relations with the Palestinian Authority and Arab states are stable or growing. They did not want to hear it when I told them that whatever “stability” they thought Israel was enjoying was illusory. You cannot build sustainable peace or stability on top of such horrifying and escalating injustice.
Israeli leaders always used to claim that the “Palestinians missed no opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.” Yet, it is Israel that has missed every opportunity given by the Arabs and Palestinians to consolidate its ill-gotten games. Had Israel agreed to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, for example, it could have legitimized virtually all its territorial conquests, save for a tiny Palestinian state, and normalized ties with more than 50 Muslim-majority states. But, perhaps, we should be thankful for Israel’s stubbornness now, because no “peace” deal that Israel would have agreed to, at any time in the last five decades, would have been just.
Palestinians have endured many decades of injustice and have not given up their determination to be liberated from Zionist rule. They have shown patience and steadfastness. But Israel needs an exit from the current impasse. True, fatal mistakes by Arabs and Palestinians were of great benefit to Israel—mistakes that helped Israel secure international legitimacy.
But Israel has, however, relied so much on the dysfunction of Arab and Palestinian leaders that it has taken the situation for granted. Why should it not, when even the Palestine Liberation Organization willingly transformed itself from an anti-colonial liberation movement into a police force working on behalf of Israel? And still, some Arab regimes are in a frenzied rush for normalization, even as Israel intensifies its oppression of Palestinians.
Israel may have succeeded in neutralizing the least dangerous parties but it underestimated the resistance. It was able to defeat every formal Arab army, but not the guerilla resistance. It is experiencing the same paralysis as the United States, whose post-9/11 military adventures have ended in humiliation.
Both the Israeli and the US militaries have tremendous capacity to destroy, but repeated experience shows that this is no guarantee of success or security, and only widens the circle of determined resistance. Israel has also relied on unconditional support and impunity from the UN and the so-called international community. Although too slow, that impunity too is starting to erode as the International Criminal Court takes up the case of Palestine, and public opinion—especially in the US and Europe—is turning sharply against Israel’s apartheid regime.
Throughout my four-decade diplomatic career, representing my country, Jordan, in the United States, Europe and at the United Nations, and participating in the Washington peace talks of the early 1990s, I dealt with the question of Palestine almost every day. Yet I have never believed that Israel was serious about reaching a just settlement for its conflict with the Palestinians, simply because I knew that it could never meet the minimum conditions for such an outcome. That is why it refused all the generous offers repeatedly made by the Palestinians and the Arabs.
I see no sign that Israel will ever willingly change. But the world and the region are changing around Israel. Palestinians are, once again, the majority in historic Palestine and will never leave or accept subjugation. Just like white South Africans had, Israeli Jews face a choice of whether to remain an embattled, isolated minority trying to impose its will by force, or to seek a different path. But if they do not make the choice to change, it will eventually be forced on them through resistance and international pressure.
I remain convinced that the violent partition of Palestine that I witnessed as a child will end, and the country will be made whole again, with people free to live and move wherever they wish. There is no room for an apartheid regime in Palestine. Yet, there is enough space for all the people there to live in equality, justice and peace, regardless of their nationality or religion.
That must be the final destination of the terrible century-long journey Palestine has endured. The only question is how many more precious lives will be wasted before we get there.
1 “Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines—Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir,” UNESCO (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1492/)
2 Joseph Massad, “Recognising the right of the Palestinians to surrender,” Middle East Eye, July 30, 2021.
3 See: Joseph Massad, “The Balfour Declaration’s many questions,” The Electronic Intifada, November 8, 2017.
4 See Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford University Press, 1993)..
5 See Ilan Pappé, “Israel’s occupation was a plan fulfilled,” The Electronic Intifada, June 6, 2017. Serge Schemann, “General’s words cast a new light on the Golan,” The New York Times, May 11, 1997.
6 See: “Israel-PLO Recognition-Exchange of Letters between PM Rabin and Chairman Arafat-Sept 9, 1993,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, https://buff.ly/3lByQ2X (last accessed October 12, 2021).