Losing Israel (13 page)

Tristram first went to Palestine in 1858 for his health, and returned for ten months of travel in 1863 and 1864, from which many of his books on Palestine derive. Armed and righteous, carrying letters of safe passage, he rode on horseback through the Jezreel Valley, breezily ascribing biblical origins to architectural remains and wells, navigating by reference to ‘Judg. vii.22’ and ‘I Kings iv.’, or ‘Josh xxi.25’ and ‘Judg. v.23’, recounting anecdotes of Arab sheikhs and tribes, of raiding a black vulture’s nest, and shooting sunbirds, of feasting on lamb in Agyle Agha’s hospitable tent, and retiring after a day’s journey to blow eggs and skin specimens.

Long before recent Jewish arrivals grafted their present to the deep biblical past by naming new settlements after the old ones – Ein Harod, Beit Hashita – clergymen like Tristram roamed the country, declaring such identifications with definitive authority, or, less frequently, with more scrupulous hesitation. Tristram returned to Palestine time after time, as though, like me, he couldn’t stay away – but for him Palestine’s past, like its birds, was simple. Along with other British members of the Palestine Exploration Fund who set out into the landscape in the late nineteenth century, equipped with instruments and tents, with guides and pack-donkeys and guns, he was in pursuit of a story of God, and science, and the aspirations of Empire. The past could be discovered and described, mapped and catalogued, like the specimens and species he obtained during his forays into biblical ruin. By the end of his life, he had a collection of twenty thousand bird skins, which he donated to the Liverpool Museum, and had several species named after him, including the grackle, though he was not always so successful. He claimed to have been first to identify the little Dead Sea sparrow, whose yellow and black throat stripe distinguished it as a unique species, but its Latin name carries no hint of his.

When Tristram wasn’t making his observations down the barrel of his rifle, he was seeing everything through a biblical filter. He didn’t doubt that grassy mounds in the Jezreel Valley were signs of antiquity, or that Ein Harod marked the site of biblical Ein Harod. In 1865, he tentatively identified the village of Al Murassas as ‘Marusseh (?)’, and mentioned the sight of several grassed-over ruined villages nearby, marked by darker green. By contrast, the neighbouring village of Kafra was not ruined but inhabited and apparently flourishing.
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Ten years later, he was more confident about identifying Al Murassas ‘through careful investigation’, this time in biblical terms that also explained its ruinous state: it was Meroz, whose inhabitants had been denounced by Deborah in Judges 23. The curse was fulfilled, he concluded, for ‘in the midst of the richest pasturage of Issachar, the place has long since perished and left but a name’.
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Griffon vultures circled above Mount Tabor, and an eagle or two, at a most inconvenient distance for his gun. By then, in 1875, the neighbouring village of Kafra was also ruinous and empty, and Tristram nowhere mentions Yubla, the other village that my mother remembered.

Despite Tristram’s omission of it, I didn’t have to dig very deep to find out about Yubla. No one would have to, if they wanted to know about it: Walid Khalidi’s
All That Remains
has been in print since 1996, and there you can read that Yubla was a named settlement in the Crusader period. So too was the nearby village of Kafra, and records for Al Murassas date much further back than Tristram’s identification of the village – to 1596, when it was a farm that paid taxes to the Ottoman government. By the late nineteenth century it was a small village. And there were many more villages, a whole network of villages, most of which don’t appear in European or American travellers’ accounts, because they had no biblical significance, and weren’t on the way to or from the sites in Tiberias or Nazareth or Mount Tabor or Megiddo. Nain, important in the Christian scriptures, is a disappointment to the Christian tourists; Kawkab al Hawa is sometimes identified as an alternate name for the Crusader castle of Belvoir – but Na’ura, Taibe, Tamra, Yubla, Al Bira, Danna, Al Hamidiyya, Jabbul, Qumya, Al Sakhina and many others beyond them, spreading east towards the Jordan, north towards Nazareth, west towards the coast, and south across Gilboa to Jenin are often not mentioned at all.

In contradiction to the simple linear narrative I learned as a teenager about a Palestine mostly empty until Jewish ‘return’, the population of the country swelled and shrank and swelled again in the late nineteenth century, when drought, locusts, repeated raiding, cattle rustling, and changes in Ottoman land laws all impoverished the subsistence farmers and seasonally resident Bedouin. But if the Ottoman administration was slow to provide military protection – safely sending troops after the raiders had gone, according to Tristram – the British military conquest of Palestine in the First World War imposed a new kind of order. Soon after the establishment of the Mandate in 1921, the British authorities set out to update the surveys and maps of the Palestinian population, natural history and geological resources that had been compiled as a forerunner of empire in the 1880s by the Palestine Exploration Fund, in which Tristram had taken part. To these records they added detailed surveys of land ownership – including the villages of the Jezreel Valley.

By the time my grandfather moved into the Jezreel Valley in the late 1920s, the Arab villages there were secured against marauders from across the River Jordan, and they were settled and thriving. But now the villagers, mostly tenants of land owned by wealthy families in Haifa, Beirut and Damascus, were struggling with a new, more invisible threat. This was a threat against which they had no protection: the sale of the land they farmed to Jewish land companies, which in turn passed ownership of the land on to the new neighbouring Jewish settlements, and to other Jewish settlements-in-waiting, which included Beit Hashita.

It was disorientating to read the history of that place from this other perspective – to read not a heroic tale of tough pioneers and peasant workers, my grandfather among them, but a story of communities embattled by those new arrivals, these back-to-the-land Jews with their new technology and alien agricultural methods and voracious land acquisitions. Jewish settlements sprang up throughout the valley during the 1920s and 1930s, and raiding and fighting between Arab and Jewish neighbours was continual until the war in 1948. In 1948, of those many Arab villages in the valley, all but a handful – Na’ura, Taibe, Nain, Shulam, and Tamra – were emptied, and almost all of them were later destroyed.

I found it almost impossible to trust any account of what happened to the villages. It wasn’t that the historical material itself was contradictory, but the interpretation of it was, and is. Still, in many ways, however you interpret its causes and consequences, the facts tell their own clear statistical story. During the unofficial war before the declaration of Israeli independence, with the implicit or explicit collusion of the withdrawing British Mandatory authority, and then the open war after the establishment of the state of Israel on 15 May 1948, the inhabitants of the villages left in fear, or were threatened, or were expelled. From Yubla, two hundred and ten people fled. From Al Murassas, four hundred and sixty. From neighbouring Al Bira, two hundred and sixty; from Danna, one hundred and ninety; from Kafra, four hundred and thirty; from Kawkab al Hawa, three hundred; from Al Hamidiyya, two hundred and twenty; from Jabbul, two hundred and fifty; from Qumya, four hundred and forty. Those are the numbers I found in Khalidi’s compendium – village statistics based on projected population growth from earlier British census figures. Other historians give slightly different numbers, but it does not, in fact, make any difference.

I tried to imagine the village where I live, with its forty or so houses, its approximately one hundred people, gone, and all the villages within ten miles of it emptied, too – Bronant and Swyddffynnon, Ystrad Meurig and Ty’n Graig; Llangwyryfon and Llanilar and all the hamlets in between: whole valleys empty, villages of two hundred or three hundred years’ standing, or longer, with deep histories, with graveyards full of ancestors, falling into ruin, or blown up.

Almost 3,000 people fled the villages that lay within a few kilometres of the new Jewish settlement of Beit Hashita, but in total, some ten thousand people from the greater Beit She’an or Beisan area headed east across the river border as refugees. My mother had been right when she’d speculated, hesitantly, about where the inhabitants of Al Murassas and Yubla had gone: they had fled to Jordan, and they were never able to come back.

With the exception of Na’ura, Taibe, Nain and Tamra, almost all the villagers left in the struggle for control of the valley, when the Golani brigade of the Haganah, the new Israeli army, began its ‘Operation Gideon’ campaign. The biblical Gideon, following God’s diktat on who should fight with him against the Midianites, had selected his men according to how they drank from the fountain at Ein Harod, near Gilboa – three hundred men who drank from water scooped up with their hands, and none who lapped at the water like dogs. With too numerous an army, Gideon and his men might have been able to claim the success of battle as their own, whereas with three hundred men instead of tens of thousands, the intervention of an egotistical God would be clear. The Golani brigade perhaps did not have the same divine help, but the biblical precedent marked every battle by the Haganah in that valley, just as the biblical precedent determined the naming of the Jewish settlements – Kibbutz Ein Harod, where Gideon’s men had been selected, and my mother’s kibbutz, Kibbutz Beit Hashita, the place to which the Midianites had fled before them.

In the face of this modern conflict for control of the valley between the Golani brigade and the Iraqi forces under the Arab Liberation Army commander, Fawzi Qawuqji, the flight of the villagers was nothing like the early departures for summer or winter quarters in Beirut and Damascus by wealthy, urban Palestinian Arabs. Those property owners had somewhere else to go, and had decided to make themselves scarce, as they thought, until the trouble was over. In contrast, the people who left the villages were poor tenant farmers, labourers, and semi-skilled and seasonal workers. They bundled their belongings, picked up children, and left, abandoning their harvests and hurrying along the network of paths between the villages, and then on to the gravel road to Beisan, heading away from the fighting. From the valley, from village after village, from hamlets and farms, from stone houses, adobe houses, and the mud and cane homes of settled Bedouin, people fled. Hundreds left each village, some of which were conquered and occupied by Jewish forces, and some of which saw no military conflict at all.

I found Khalidi’s compendium of statistics and village remnants devastating. It was far more compelling than the many historians’ conflicting accounts, because it was inarguable. The numbers of communities that were destroyed, the description of rubble-filled wells, broken gravestones, the now invisible sites of schools and mosques, all expressed the raw truth of what had happened, in a way that no analysis about causes and consequences could do. But what happened in the villages, and why people left, is contested, and the number of villages included in the lists of those emptied in 1948 varies from historian to historian, from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other. To Ilan Pappe, Jewish settlement in Palestine was an act of Western colonialism, and the Palestinian Arabs who became refugees between 1947 and 1949 were victims of a deliberate, carefully implemented Jewish ethnic cleansing plan to de-Arabise the new Jewish state. By contrast, Benny Morris, a defender of the Zionist project and founding ideology, though one of the first Israeli historians to document the flight of Palestinian refugees, attributes the cause of that flight to war (later, he acknowledged that it was a form of ethnic cleansing, although extraordinarily he defended this as being preferable to genocide). But Khalidi’s book,
All That Remains
, gives a detailed account of the history, population and remains of each of the villages emptied between 1947 and 1949, and cumulatively, the scale and extent of that depopulation is shocking to read.

By now there are about five million Palestinian refugees – those who fled the newly established Jewish state in 1948, and their descendants. Unlike in Syria and Lebanon, Jordan granted citizenship to most of its Palestinian refugees, but some one and a half million still live in refugee camps, now urban ghettos, throughout the Middle East.

And those who fled east from the Jezreel Valley because of ‘Operation Gideon’, those who fled Al Murassas and Yubla, and the other nearby villages – where did they go? According to Saul, a member of Kibbutz Beit Hashita, they fled to Irbid, in northern Jordan, vanishing practically overnight immediately after Israeli statehood was declared.

Saul’s account of 1948 appears in a collection of interviews about Beit Hashita conducted in the late 1970s and published in
Kibbutz Makom: Report from an Israeli Kibbutz,
by the sociologist Amia Lieblich. My mother had sent me the English edition of this book years before, and I’d hardly looked at it, and then forgotten I even had it. But when I got home from Israel this time, I took it down from the shelf, blew off the dust, and read all that had been there, available for me to discover long before, had I been interested, had it occurred to me to even look.

Kibbutz Makom
was published in Hebrew and English editions in 1982. On the flyleaf of my mother’s copy is an inscription to her in the neat Hebrew handwriting of her stepmother: ‘To Anat, from the place of your birth, for your birthday – from your father and Shlomite, Beit Hashita, 1982.’

In the early 1980s, before the first Intifada changed Western attitudes to Israel definitively, interest in the kibbutz experiment – particularly as it pertained to the communal raising of children – was still high, but Lieblich’s interviews reveal many of the tensions and difficulties. ‘Kibbutz Makom’ – meaning ‘place’ – is a pseudonym, as are all the names of the interviewees, but in my mother’s copy, Shlomite had pencilled in the true names, including that of my grandfather.