Losing Israel (15 page)

Taking down the picture for me to photograph, Tomer, the kibbutz archivist, told me that Shatta was the site of a biblical settlement: kibbutzniks had found ancient coins, which were now in a Tel Aviv museum. I wondered about my mother’s memory of broken pottery. How old might it have been after all? Tristram also had little doubt that Shatta – or Shutta, as he spells it – was the site of biblical ‘Beith Ha-shittah’, mentioned in Judges 7:22.

The archive photograph of the village shows that parts of it were ruinous in 1933, but a good half of it was intact. ‘When the village was destroyed,’ Saul told his interviewer in the late 1970s, ‘one building remained – a big house which we used as a barn. All the cows were kept in this house, and on the roof we built a wooden hut, where we lived.’ No doubt this was the
beit ha-sheikh
of my mother’s memory. But two years before that photograph was taken, Shatta was not in ruins, nor uninhabited: it was very far from being ‘an old, abandoned Arab village’. In 1931 it had been thriving, and its residents did not conveniently get up one day and walk away, leaving it empty. Shatta was deliberately depopulated. It was not depopulated as a result of war or conflict, nor for strategic military or political reasons – it was depopulated in order for Kibbutz Beit Hashita to have its land.

It was in New York, by chance, that I found out the history of Shatta, when I was visiting my brother, who lives in the East Village. It was May, and already hot and sticky, and the parks were full of children and dogs. In some streets, I heard more Hebrew than English – there was an enclave of Israeli expatriates living there, and there were Israeli restaurants, shops, a humus cafe. I went into one Middle East import store to look at the tins of olives and pickles, as I always do – to see if they’d been canned in the Beit Hashita factory. They had. And in the cramped basement of a second-hand bookshop, I browsed the Middle East section as I always do, though I already had so much to read, too much to read. There seemed no end to the research I could do.

The usual books were there, the two extremes of interpretation sitting uneasily side by side: Ilan Pappe’s
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
, and Joan Peters’s
From Time Immemorial
. In his memoir,
Palestine, a Personal Story
, Karl Sabbagh describes
From Time Immemorial
as ‘a wildly inaccurate account of the history of Palestine and one of the most comprehensively demolished non-fiction books of recent years’; decades earlier, Peters’s Zionist apologia had deeply moved me, and reinforced my misapprehensions.
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A little further along from Pappe and Peters there was an unprepossessing scholarly paperback, published, like Peters’s book, in 1984. Neither its rather dull factual title –
The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939
– nor its cheap gloss cover, showing a dark, blue-washed detail of a Mandate-era map, were particularly striking. But the index was different. In the index I found Shatta. Not a footnote, not a passing reference, but many references: a discussion.

Unlike the history of Kibbutz Beit Hashita, which is available in
Kibbutz Makom
, Shatta’s history is largely hidden, and you have to glean it and reconstruct it from fragments, passing remarks, remnants and asides. Nevertheless, Shatta was important: what happened there caused a stand-off between the British colonial authority and the Jewish Agency, the Israeli government-in-waiting – a stand-off from which the Jewish Agency had to back down. Shatta was in fact a test case for the British Mandate.

The outrages of 1948 and their aftermath, increasingly documented and discussed, have long since displaced the less obvious outrages of land transfers in the 1930s. Walid Khalidi’s
All That Remains
is the definitive compendium of the 418 villages depopulated in 1948, but his criteria for inclusion are rigorous: it lists only those settled (not seasonal) villages that were inhabited at the start of the war and which lay within the 1949 ceasefire lines, and it therefore excludes Shatta. The village gets a single passing mention, in relation only to Al Murassas, which is described by Khalidi as being located four kilometres from Beit Hashita, ‘established in 1935 on land purchased from the village of Shatta’.
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But Beit Hashita wasn’t established on land purchased
from
the village of Shatta – the village itself was purchased.

Shatta was settled and well established when Tristram roamed the area with his growing collection of birds’ eggs and skins, and when Mark Twain rode sneering along the pilgrim route to Beirut. In the nineteenth century the Shatta railway station, now incorporated into the prison, was one of the valley stops on the short Haifa branch-line of the Ottoman Empire’s great north-south railway. The Hejaz railway used to serve the huge expanse of land from Medina in the far south to Damascus in the north, and at Dara, a little south of Damascus, the branch line cut west to Beit She’an, and then through the Jezreel Valley to Afula (where another local line branched off south to Nablus), and on to Haifa at the coast. During the Mandate period there were stops all along the branch line through the valley, and the railway and its bridges were a frequent target for Jewish underground groups fighting against British colonial rule, both before and after the Second World War.

The building inside the prison, and the prison’s name, is all that now remains of Shatta, because in 1931 the two hundred and fifty-five villagers had the village sold from under them by Raja Ra’is, a wealthy landowner who lived in Haifa. The buyer was the Palestine Land Development Company, an organisation that made purchases on behalf of the Jewish National Fund; in turn, the Jewish National Fund passed the land on to the founding group of Beit Hashita. But they had to wait, encamped at Ein Harod, for some years before the land sale could go through, my grandfather among them, because when it came to the attention of the British authorities, the sale of the village was blocked.

I stood in that basement bookshop in New York reading Stein’s
Land Question in Palestine
with growing disbelief. I was shocked to find the story of Shatta. The language was plain, factual, technical, but the implications of Stein’s discussion appalled me.

The story of the village is woven right through the story of land sales in the 1920s and 1930s in Stein’s book. In 1919, two Haifa families had owned most of Shatta, but in 1931, in anticipation of the sale, a member of one family, Raja Ra’is, had bought a large share of village land from Anis Abyad, a member of the other family, thereby planning to augment his profits. But the land was ‘encumbered’ with tenants, and this meant that the seller would be obligated to pay compensation to those whom the sale dispossessed. The sellers could avoid paying such compensation if the land was free of tenants before the sale went through, and Ra’is intended to dispossess his more than two hundred tenants in Shatta, before selling the land into Jewish ownership. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for the residents of Shatta, his timing was bad, as it coincided with the outcome of the British investigation into the 1929 Arab revolt, which left the colonial authority more sensitive to the problem of Arab peasants losing the land they farmed.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Arab organisations and powerful individuals lobbied for restrictions on the sale of Arab-owned land to Jews, and against increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, which was augmenting the demand and market for such sales. In counterpoint, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish quasi-government in Palestine, lobbied the Mandatory authorities and the British Government for increasing the Jewish immigration allowance, and against the restrictions on land sales. Those restrictions on immigration were seen, by sympathisers, as a terrible repudiation of Jewish suffering, particularly after Germany’s Jews were stripped of citizenship. But the buying up of land for Jewish settlement had the most immediate and terrible effect on the Arab fellahin: they lost their livelihoods and their homes, so that others might have them.

The planned sale of Shatta land, and the intended dispossession of its tenants, caused a row between the British Mandatory authority and the Jewish Agency. The Jewish Agency was informed that if it did not prevent the eviction of Shatta’s tenants, recent recommendations on restrictions in land transfers between Arabs and Jews would be implemented by the British authorities. Under this pressure, Chaim Weizmann, head of the Jewish Agency, had to capitulate, though he disclaimed Jewish responsibility for the intended dispossession of Shatta’s tenants, and blamed the Arab landowner, Raja Ra’is.

In the end, there was a compromise: an arrangement was made for the two hundred and fifty-five inhabitants of the village to be resettled elsewhere and Shatta, conveniently ‘disencumbered’ and transformed into the empty Arab village of Saul’s description, could be sold into Jewish ownership. The purchase went ahead in April 1931, but the British census of Palestine in that year recorded the village’s population as it was before the village was sold: two hundred and fifty Muslims, three Christians and two Jews.

The black-and-white photograph of Shatta that I had seen hanging in the entryway to the kibbutz archive does indeed depict an empty village in 1933, but the villagers did not abandon it – it was they who were abandoned. This is what Beit Hashita was founded on. The kibbutz, an idealistic community with an ideology of self-sufficiency and communist equality, of workers owning the means of production, of worker empowerment, was made possible by dispossessing more than two hundred peasant workers.

My mother, like so many members of kibbutzim that were established before 1948, always stresses that these settlements were not built on stolen land, that the land was bought and paid for. That is my mother’s story about Beit Hashita: the kibbutz was not a thief or a trespasser; its land was bought legally. But the legal argument provides no moral defence. Even if it was the wealthy Arab landowners and the Jewish Agency who colluded in the dispossession of Shatta’s tenants, and even if the sale conformed to British colonial law, for an ideological community of social and political brotherhood, it was unethical and decidedly hypocritical, and the members of the new kibbutz, my grandfather included, were complicit in a moral crime.

Thirteen years after that sale went through, in 1944, when the British authorities in Palestine revised their estimates of the population and land ownership, only four dunams of Shatta’s land were still Arab-owned, and its population of 590 was entirely Jewish, comprising the members of Kibbutz Beit Hashita. My mother was by then three years old, and her mother had already left the kibbutz and gone south to work by the Dead Sea. My grandfather, Yair, was in the army, based on the Mediterranean coast at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, near the Roman ruins of Caesarea.

On the second floor of the kibbutz archive, the walls are lined with rows and rows of dark wooden drawers, like a massive columbarium. There is a drawer for each kibbutz member who has died, containing a file of papers, photographs, and their
yiskor
or memorial book. To one side there is a memorial to the members who were killed in the many years of conflict since the founding of the kibbutz – the Lebanon War in 1982, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Six Day War in 1967, the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the War of Independence in 1948. Prominent in the memorial are the eleven who ‘fell’ in 1973. This was the largest number of deaths, as a proportion of the population, of any village or town during that conflict, a conflict the country almost lost, and which left a terrible scar of insecurity after the giddy success of the Six Day War.

When I visited, it was very still in the archive, and cool after the heat outside. Standing before that memorial, it struck me that it was not after all strange that as a child and teenager I had never wondered about my grandfather’s scar, about his having been attacked by Arabs. It had been not only part of my accepted childhood landscape, but part of everyone’s landscape there too: a history of conflict and fear, of attack and defence. With all those years of accumulated trauma, it was not very surprising that no one talked about it unless asked: the violence was normalised, unremarkable.

In his own accounts, published in his
yiskor
book, my grandfather Yair is humorous and self-deprecating about his experiences of danger and conflict. He describes his antics in the Palmach, the strike-force created by the Haganah, the Jewish army, during the Second World War, and labouring at the salt works in Atlit and Sdom, on the Dead Sea. He recounts walking all the way back from Jerusalem to the kibbutz, nearly getting lost, and nearly getting shot, and tells a story of guarding the railway line in 1948 at Beit Yosef, a nearby kibbutz, where he dug in as instructed. Dedicated and committed, he waited and watched for several days only to discover, when his commander eventually remembered he was there, that the war in that area had ended on the first day.

Before joining the Palmach he’d been a member of the Palestine Police Auxiliaries, originally employed by the British to guard the Jewish settlements, the kibbutzim and the co-operative farms against Arab attack. Under the tutelage of the controversial Colonel Orde Wingate, a British maverick, the Police Auxiliaries had been developed during the Arab uprising of 1936 into a strike force against bandits and insurgents: they mounted attacks, first on Arab settlements, and then across the northern border into Syria and Lebanon. They were not merely a defence organisation – they went on the offensive, too. When, during the Second World War, the Palmach was formed, only a limited number of kibbutzniks could join, and my grandfather had been one of them: he was in the sea cadets division, the Palyam.

Secretly the Palyam helped land illegal immigrants and refugees, smuggling them through the naval blockade when the British had placed limits on Jewish immigration. Later they helped to illicitly disembark camp survivors. My grandfather was in his twenties at the time. Mid-war, it must have had a fevered intensity, their risk-taking – but they were young, tough idealists, setting out from the tumbled ruins of Caesarea in small boats to lay mines or beach immigrant ships, wading the refugees ashore in the warm purple evenings, the lights from the young town of Tel Aviv perhaps visible to the south, of Acre and Haifa to the north. Closer yet lay Atlit, where the refugees who were caught were held in British detention camps. At the end of the war the Palmach was officially disbanded by the British authorities, but it was incorporated into the Haganah, the Jewish army that sometimes worked with and sometimes against the British, and would become the Israel Defence Force of the Jewish state.