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مجلة التايم الأمريكية - 31/5/2007

In the Shadow of the Six-Day War

Thursday, May. 31, 2007 

By TIM MCGIRK / JERUSALEM

On June 5, 1967 , war broke out between Israel and three Arab states-- Egypt , Jordan and Syria --after months of threats directed at the Jewish state. At a Palestinian refugee camp named Jalazon, chiseled out of a stony hillside not far from Jerusalem in the West Bank , then under Jordanian rule, Nazmeia was expecting a child. Her brother Abu Fady, then 9, remembers his family listening to an Egyptian radio announcer describe how Arab troops were advancing on Tel Aviv. Within hours, the radio said, the Jews would be keeping company with fishes in the sea. "We were flying with happiness," recalls Abu Fady. "We were making plans to go back to our village, which the Jews had stolen from us."

The radio was wrong. In the camp, the Palestinians could see an army approaching from the eastern hills. "We thought they were King Hussein's soldiers," says Abu Fady. A man from Jalazon ran down to greet the troops, firing his rifle in celebration--and had a surprise. "The first soldier slapped him and took away his gun, and the man cried out, 'Aiiee! They're Jews, not Arabs,'" Abu Fady recounts. Israeli fighters appeared in the skies, strafing Jordanian posts along the Samarian hills, and the family decided to flee. They were not alone; the roads were clogged with thousands of panicked families as more than 350,000 refugees left for Jordan . Within a few hours, Nazmeia fell to the ground, groaning, giving birth. The family pulled out of the stream of people, and as the bombs fell, she crept into the thornbushes and delivered a baby boy, Omar al-Nakhla.

That little boy, now a man, still lives with his family in Jalazon. His life, with hopes raised and dashed, consumed with bloody and often pointless struggle, parallels the Palestinian experience and explains what lies at the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. And it reveals why, 40 years on, the Six-Day War continues to shape the Middle East .

The war was a triumph for Israel . Within hours of its start, the Egyptian air force had been destroyed in pre-emptive air strikes. Israeli troops sliced through Egyptian defenses in the Sinai Peninsula , moved against the Syrians in the Golan Heights and outflanked King Hussein's Bedouin army in the West Bank . In 132 hours, it was all over. Israel had more than tripled its territory, its forces moving into ancient Jerusalem , fulfilling the age-old quest of the Jews to return to their holy city. The war changed mental maps in the Middle East as much as it did the political landscape, altering hopes and fears. In 1967, Israel as a nation was not quite 20 years old, born in the shadow of the Holocaust and a war in which Arab armies attempted to throttle the new state at birth. So for Israelis, 1967 was a time of euphoria, only to be followed by years of letdown as victory's hoped-for fruits--peace and coexistence with their neighbors--seemed ever less likely. Hardened by terrorism, many Israelis now want to wall off the Palestinians behind a mass of concrete and razor wire.

For Palestinians, the impact of 1967 was different and profound. It took the war to define a Palestinian identity. A people torn away from the Jordanians and Egyptians, under whose suzerainty they had been living, the Palestinians forged nationalism out of anger and searing loss. And gradually the vocabulary of the Palestinians' struggle changed. Today Palestinians speak less of a battle against the Israelis for land and rights than of something vaguer and more dangerous, framed in the apocalyptic terms of a holy war. The 1967 conflict, says Michael Oren of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem , the author of a book on the war, "hastened the downfall of Arab secularism and opened the doors to the new idea of Islamic radicalism." In Jalazon, Omar al-Nakhla saw it all.

Forty years on, Omar is entering middle age, and so is Palestinian nationalism. Omar is a butcher, with sinewy forearms, a black mustache and sad, dark eyes. He buys his meat from Jews and counts several of them as his friends. "They live in Haifa , and I was worried about them during the war last summer when the Hizballah rockets were falling," he says. "I told them that they could stay with us!" Omar likes the novel idea of his Jewish buddies taking shelter inside a Palestinian refugee camp, and I ask him if Jews and Palestinians are so different. No, he says. They're both smart, they value education, and they laugh at the same jokes. But in conversation with Omar, I realize that Jews and Arabs are fatally alike in another way: they both suffer from a powerful and justifiable sense of victimization--the Jews over the Holocaust, the Palestinians over the loss of their land--and this blinds them to the others' tragedy.

Arabs enjoy rhyming puns, and the word for the 1948 creation of Israel --nakba, meaning disaster--is only a consonant away from their word for disappointment, naksa. That is how, with crushing understatement, Arabs describe the losses of the Six-Day War. For Omar and most other Palestinians, the two words are often interchangeable, and it was no surprise that when I visited Jalazon recently, they were commemorating the nakba and the naksa rolled into one. Indeed, when I press Omar to talk about the war he was born into, his thoughts leap to 1948, as though one event were indistinguishable from the other. He lays down his butcher's knife and shows me a 2007 wall calendar with a photograph of an old stone schoolhouse in Beit Nabala, his ancestral village. "The water in Beit Nabala was sweet, and the earth was so rich that beans grew overnight like magic," he marvels. Has Omar ever visited his old village home? "No," he replies sadly. "My father went back once, in 1973. He went to our house, and some Jews answered. They asked my father, 'What are you doing?' He replied, 'This house used to be mine.' The Jews said, 'You have nothing to do here. Go away!'" After that snub, Omar's father never returned, but he still keeps the rusty key to the family's Beit Nabala house. The 1967 war was their last chance to go home, Omar says--their grand disappointment.

Omar's childhood coincided with the rise of the Palestinian resistance. After the Six-Day War, the Palestinians lost faith in the ability of other Arab states to seize back the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Instead, they pinned their hopes on an Egyptian-educated former civil engineer, Yasser Arafat, whose Fatah organization began carrying out raids inside the conquered territories and later committed atrocious acts of terrorism. Like other boys in the camp, Omar would listen to TV news from Jordan and Syria about their heroes--Arafat and his Palestinian fighters. They dreamed that one day Arafat would lead them back to their lost villages.

But Arafat and his colleagues, exiled in distant lands, were losing touch with the Palestinian reality. By 1987 Omar and thousands of youths like him had grown impatient waiting for their saviors and launched their own uprising against the Israelis. The spark for the intifadeh, as it became known, was a Gaza traffic accident in which an Israeli driver killed several Palestinian laborers. Revolt spread all over the Palestinian territories, including Jalazon. "We burned tires in the road and threw stones," recalls Omar's friend Ismaeen, who wears a muscle shirt and has the dark, heavy-lidded eyes of an Egyptian pop star. Ismaeen boasts that from age 15 onward, he spent five years inside Israeli prisons. "For throwing stones?" I ask. "Well, stones and Molotov cocktails," Ismaeen says, grinning. Serving time in Israeli jail is a rite of passage for young Palestinians, though Omar says--with chagrin--that he himself spent only "a little time" in prison: a year.

Omar was one of 700 Palestinian youths from Jalazon rounded up during the first intifadeh. (At the worst of that struggle, which ran from 1987 to 1993, Israeli troops sealed off Jalazon for 45 days, cutting off electricity and shooting holes in water cisterns.) When he was released, Omar was swept right back into the violence. One day, he remembers, he was throwing rocks at Israeli solders: "I was shot in the hand. My friend next to me was hit in the chest. He died, and I survived. It could have been me."

The Palestinians' sense of identity--and their rage--was sharpened by the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories after the war. (There are now some 250,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and an additional 182,000 in East Jerusalem , which Israel has annexed.) Crowning the hill above Jalazon is the Beit El settlement. Remove the barbed-wire fencing, the security gate and guard towers, and Beit El's tidy rows of red-roofed houses and gardens could be mistaken for an Arizona suburb. A friend of Omar's named Yousef, a crude map of Palestine tattooed on his wrist, says, "All I know is that the Jews took our village, chased us away, and now we see them living up on top of the hill in their beautiful houses with flowers and swimming pools." He adds, "One person up there in the settlement uses more water than an entire family down here."

Omar's boyhood hero, Arafat, finally came home in 1994, a year after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo accords, ending hostilities in exchange for Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. The accords were meant to give shape, at last, to that sense of national identity that had been growing since the war and to lead rapidly to a Palestinian state. But for Jews and Arabs alike, Oslo and its aftermath proved to be new disappointments. Israel sped ahead with yet more settlements in the West Bank , and Arafat, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, secretly signed off on terrorism directed against the Israelis.

The butcher's feelings toward the former Palestinian leader are contradictory. Omar has heard the tales of the corruption that dogged Arafat and his entourage, of the missing millions in aid money. But he remains loyal to Arafat and insists, along with his friends, that I tour a museum in the camp whose showpiece is a photo display of Arafat in his many guises, from bug-eyed terrorist to statesman. Omar rushes me past a photo of Arafat shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; he thinks Arafat gave away too much to the Israelis, as do many Palestinians still holding keys to their families' old houses. ( Israel has never accepted that all Palestinian refugees have the right of return to their former land, since such a right would constitute an existential threat: if all Palestinians returned to what is now Israel , Jews would soon be a minority in their own state.) Was there ever a moment when Omar thought peace was attainable? "Never," he says flatly.

Many Palestinians are less charitable than Omar about Arafat and his successors in Fatah, plenty of whom have become millionaires--and some of those Palestinians have taken their disaffection in a direction hardly imaginable in 1967. Let down by the secular Old Guard, younger Palestinians are turning to radical Islam as an alternative. In the West Bank , shops sell DVDs of Iraqi insurgent attacks against U.S. troops and songs of praise for the Lebanese Hizballah militia leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah for withstanding Israel 's siege of Lebanon last summer. The last words of suicide bombers, preserved by video cameras, are given play on local TV news. As a youngster, Omar threw stones at Israeli tanks and ran away; youngsters of the new generation seek to annihilate themselves as well as their Israeli enemy. In his butcher shop, Omar points outside to a boy brandishing an exact plastic replica of an M-16 assault rifle. "Children today, they're tougher, more aggressive than we are. They have less to believe in, fewer opportunities," he says. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian writer and lawyer in Ramallah, later told me, "I'm reminded of that saying 'When you lose a nation, you resort to your church.' That's what's happening to young Palestinians. They're turning to Islam."

In Jalazon and other camps, a generational divide splits the Palestinians. The older ones, of Omar's age, belong to Fatah, the organization run by Arafat's hapless successor, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority. Those in their 20s and younger support militant Islamic groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These radicals led the charge during the second intifadeh, which began in 2000, sending suicide bombers to blow up hundreds of Israeli civilians. Militants say that in the camp they have no shortage of young volunteers eager for martyrdom. As a parent, Omar says the last thing he wants is for his young kids to heed the fatal, seductive call of the suicide-bomb recruiters.

Like many other Palestinians, Omar is impressed by the honesty and focus of the Islamists. But he has doubts that the new, religious thrust of the resistance movement will lead to peace or a fair deal with Israel . For now, he says, it has only led to fighting among Palestinians. "The Koran says that if you kill your brother, you go straight to hell--and this is what we're doing," he says, outraged by recent news reports from Gaza of Hamas and Fatah militiamen killing each other in a power struggle. He thinks Palestinians should "try to fix our own problems before we take on the Israelis." Those problems are real enough. Because of international sanctions against the Hamas government, salaries aren't paid, and most Palestinians are broke. As it has been since 1950, it is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency that provides basic humanitarian aid to Jalazon and other Palestinian camps.

As if on cue, a young mother enters the shop cradling a baby in a lace bonnet. Omar cuts her a hunk of meat from a carcass hanging in the window, then writes down her name in a ledger. "These are the people who can't pay me. See? Many pages. Thousands of shekels. But how can I refuse them?" he asks. The woman leaves, and the shop is empty save for a few flies stirred in the air by a ceiling fan.

"We want peace with the Jews," says Omar, "but we want to go back to our land." It's the same thought his uncle had in 1967, listening to Egyptian radio, and it has as much chance of happening now as it did then. Forty years after their great disappointment, those who live in the Jalazon refugee camp know that it may be the only home that they, their children and their grandchildren ever know. [This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1627015-1,00.html

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نشرنا لهذه المقالات لا يعني أنها تعبر عن وجهة نظر المركز كلياً أو جزئياً

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من حق الزائر الكريم أن ينقل وأن ينشر كل ما يعجبه من موقعنا . معزواً إلينا ، أو غير معزو .ـ