Happy birthday, Israel, 60 this month. Or, rather, happy birthday, Israels.
For there are two Jewish states. The first is a vigorous democracy, with a
vibrant civil society, a robust independent judiciary and an aggressive free
press. It’s a multicul-tural society, boasting Arab members of the Knesset,
the Israeli parliament; Arab diplomats and university professors; soldiers
and beauty queens; and even a Muslim cabinet minister.
Its universities produce world-class research and teaching, especially in the
sciences and high technology. Its economy grew by 5.3% last year, beating
the UK, US and Japan. Property prices are soaring in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Penthouse apartments overlooking the sea cost millions of dollars. The
country has absorbed millions of Jewish refugees from around the world and
moulded them into a new nation, with a vibrant Hebrew language and culture –
a miracle of near-Biblical proportions.
Then there is the second Israel, whose security fence snakes beyond the Green
Line, the pre1967 border, cutting deep into Palestinian territory. That
Israel subsidises the settlers’ para-state, which has its own water and
electricity supplies, its roads forbidden to Palestinians – all guarded by
the Israeli army.
Much of the settlers’ land is simply stolen from its Arab owners. According to
the United Nations, a third of the West Bank is off limits to Palestinians.
A web of Israeli army barricades and checkpoints further atomises what
remains of Palestinian society and economy. Successive Israeli governments
have proved unwilling to evacuate the outposts that even they admit are
illegal. So, perhaps not such a happy birthday.
And despite their many success stories, the Arabs living in Israel proper –
about 20% of the country’s 7.3m population – remain second-class citizens,
nonJews in a Jewish state. It is almost impossible for them to buy
state-owned land. There are deep disparities in employment, health, welfare
and education. Welfare budgets are unequal.
Many Arabs who were displaced from their villages in the 1948 war, and are
full Israeli citizens, are still forbidden from returning home. Little
wonder then that Raleb Majadele, the minister of science, culture and sport,
said that he would stand for the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem,
which lauds the “Jewish soul”, but would not sing it.
How, then, did this strip of land, about the size of Wales, become one of the
world’s most combustible flash-points? In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a Jewish
journalist living in Vienna, published Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, the
primary text of political Zionism. It argued that antiSemitism was
immutable, no matter how much the Jews assimilated. The answer was the
establishment of a Jewish state, where Jews would no longer be an anomaly.
The Viennese Jewish community dispatched two rabbis to Palestine to
investigate. They cabled back: “The bride is beautiful but she is already
married.” The “husband” was the native Palestinian population. Like Europe’s
Jews, the Palestinians too were developing a national consciousness. The
awakening of the Arab nation and Jewish nationalism, wrote the Arab writer
Najib Azoury as early as 1907, “are destined to fight each other continually
until one of them wins”.
The Palestinians demanded that Jewish immigration be halted. But the Jews came
anyway, their numbers boosted by the rise of Nazism. The violence ebbed and
flowed. In November 1947, after the Holocaust, the United Nations voted to
partition Palestine. The Arabs rejected the proposal, the Jews accepted it
and on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister,
declared independence. Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria soon invaded.
Abd al-Rahman Azzam, head of the Arab League, declared: “It does not matter
how many Jews there are. We will sweep them into the sea.” During the
fighting 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, an episode they call
the “Nakba”, the catastrophe.
Israel was not swept into the sea either then or in the subsequent wars of
1956, 1967 and 1973. Instead the defeated Arab states took out their fury on
their own Jewish populations. From north Africa to Iraq, millennia-old
Jewish communities, many of which long predated the arrival of the Arabs and
Islam, were stripped of their possessions and thrown out. That too was a
Nakba, both for the Arab Jews and the whole Middle East.
It’s darkly ironic that Israel was the first state to be created by the United
Nations and ever since has endured a unique and sustained campaign of
attempted delegitimisation. For the dictatorships and sclerotic monarchies
that rule much of the Arab world, criticism of Israel is the best diversion
from examining their own dismal human rights records.
Was Israel born of a war in which some civilians were forcibly expelled? Yes –
but it was a fight for survival. The details have been chronicled by Israeli
historians such as Benny Morris and Tom Segev, who have based their accounts
on Israeli military and government archives. No Arab government has opened
its archives. The works of the Israeli “new historians” make for disturbing
reading, especially for those brought up on the now discredited myth that
all the Palestinians simply ran away.
Israel is hardly alone, however, in being born of war and population
displacement. In 1947, during the partition of India, and the formation of
Pakistan, a million people were made homeless and an estimated half a
million were killed in inter-communal violence, often with great savagery.
In 1923, the ancient Greek communities in Turkey were “exchanged” at
gun-point for Turkish-speaking Muslims living in Greece. Up to 2m people
were forcibly deported, few of whom wanted to leave.
The events of 1948 still shape the Middle East but are far more complex than
the propagandists would have you believe. Consider the fate of Jaffa, a
stunningly beautiful ancient port, mentioned in the Bible. Before 1948,
Jaffa was the cultural capital of Palestine and was awarded to the Arab side
under the UN partition plan. The Haganah, the main Zionist militia, did not
plan to attack the city. The Irgun, the rival right-wing force led by
Men-achem Begin, wanted a prize of its own, however, and launched a
ferocious three-day mortar bombardment in late April 1948. Tens of thousands
of Arab civilians fled.
The Irgun did not advance deep into Jaffa house by house. It did not shell the
city with heavy artillery or bomb it with fighter planes. The attack stopped
after three days when Britain, still the Mandate power, deployed troops. But
by then it was too late. Jaffa was already emptied. And those few thousand
Arabs who stayed and still live there now will tell you that Jaffa was
abandoned – even betrayed – by its inhabitants.
None of this is to deny that a great wrong has been done to the Palestinians.
Israel’s greatest birthday present to itself would be meaningful progress
towards the construction of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
The outline of a future peace deal has long been clear: Israel’s return to the
pre1967 borders, with territorial adjustments, and compromise over
Jerusalem. This would demand two concessions from the Palestinians, both
unlikely while the Islamist Hamas holds sway: the recognition of Israel’s
right to live in peace and security, and the acceptance that there is no
right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees, only a tiny
minority of whom were actually born in what is now Israel. But they can go
home to a Palestinian state.
That settlement will also depend on outside factors. The rise of radical
Islam, the bellicosity of Iran, the emerging “Shi’ite crescent” from Basra
to Beirut, have rattled Israel’s Arab neighbours and may speed the peace
process. Meanwhile, Israel must give its Arab population equal rights, and
equal budgets, in exchange for civic loyalty. At a time of rising Islamic
radicalism it is absolutely in Israel’s interests to bind its Arab minority
to the state. Farsighted Israeli officials realise this, especially at a
local level. Jaffa is now a mixed Arab-Jewish city, absorbed into Tel Aviv.
It was neglected for decades and is plagued by crime, drug gangs and high
unemployment. The Tel Aviv municipality is spending millions on urban
renovation projects, improving education and infrastructure.
It’s working. Day to day, away from the headlines, Jaffa’s Arabs and Jews
simply get on with their lives, working, living and socialising side by
side. Nowhere more than at Jaffa’s Arab-Hebrew Theatre, which stages plays
in Hebrew and Arabic; uncompromising theatre that explores the legacies of
both the Holocaust and the Nakba.
When the politicians fail, it’s left to real people to try to make peace. “We
call this place an island of sanity,” says theatre co-founder Igal Ezraty.
“Each one is telling his story and each one is listening to the other’s
story. We hope that if the wider society can behave like this, it’s the
beginning of a change.” That is the Israel that can – indeed must – triumph.
Adam LeBor is the author of City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa. Jaffa
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