The Idea of Israel (6 page)

According to this narrative, terror began in earnest after 1917 in the wake of the Balfour Declaration, when Palestinian leaders and activists organised popular protests against the pro-Zionist policy of the new British rulers of the land. In 1920 and 1921, these protests, especially in urban centres such as Jerusalem and Jaffa, turned violent as a result of either Zionist provocation, as in the case of Jerusalem in April 1920, or a Palestinian rage directed towards Jewish areas, as occurred in Jaffa in May 1921. These skirmishes were depicted as the first waves of Palestinian terrorism, a motiveless and unwarranted violence against innocent settlers. This kind of violence turned the Palestinians into terrorists during a period when none of them clearly understood Zionism but when many were nevertheless outraged by the notion that Britain had promised their homeland to foreign settlers.

Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni was the leader of the Palestinians during the Mandatory period, and under his leadership, when Palestinian protests took a more systematic form in 1929, he too was described as a terrorist. Al-Husayni was pulled between two poles, trying to navigate between on the one hand, a wish to keep a cordial relationship with the Mandatory powers, and on the other, the fierce internal opposition that demanded more active resistance against the pro-Zionist policies of the British Mandatory government. He and other leaders soon realised that the implementation of the Zionist dream
of a Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably bring about partial or even total dispossession of the indigenous population. Despite the fact that these leaders represented a decisive majority of the population (almost 70 per cent in 1929), they were ill equipped to confront the twin forces of British imperialism and Zionist colonialism.
²⁶

The ultimate Palestinian ‘terrorist’ of the Mandatory period was Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who operated in the early 1930s. A Syrian preacher exiled to Palestine after taking part in the Syrian revolt against the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon in 1925, he became an inspiring religious leader who motivated young, mainly unemployed dwellers of shanty towns around Haifa to take up arms against Jewish settlers and British soldiers. His actions and some of his preaching – he did not write much – would later inspire the military wing of Hamas, which is called the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Battalions. Furthermore, these fighters decided to name the main, though primitive, weapon that they used against Israel the Qassam rocket. It is hardly surprising that, early on, Israeli scholarship described al-Qassam as a terrorist.
²⁷

Israeli and Zionist historiography were no kinder towards the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, a popular uprising that took the British authorities in Palestine three years to quell and for which Britain called in the Royal Air Force and resorted to a repertoire of collective punishments as brutal as those the Israeli army would use years later in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during its nearly fifty years of occupation. This was a complex resistance that included strikes, petitions, and guerrilla warfare, as well as attacks on some of the Jewish colonies and neighbourhoods in the mixed towns of Palestine.

In Israel, this revolt usually appeared as a chapter in the history of Palestinian terrorism.
²⁸
In both Palestinian and less biased historiography, it appeared as the first, and in many ways, one of the few, successful popular revolts of the Palestinians that achieved some significant political gains, notably the British White Paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration and land purchase. This new British policy, together with the emergence of Nazism in Europe, led to a Jewish Zionist revolt against the British Empire. It was a heroic deed against all odds in Israeli historiography, amounting to
terrorism in the eyes of not only the Mandatory government of the day but subsequently, leaders of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were regarded as personae non gratae in the United Kingdom because of their terrorist past in Palestine.

An episode in the life of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, in which he cooperated with the Nazi regime in Germany, succeeded in further demonising the Palestinians and facilitating a depiction of him as not merely a terrorist but also a Nazi. Al-Husayni had been expelled by the British for his role in the Arab Revolt in 1937, which forced him to seek new allies, and pushed him into the hands of both the Nazis and the Fascists. He resided in Berlin during the Second World War and served the Nazi propaganda machine. To this day, this episode has made it easy for Israeli historiography to add Nazism and terrorism to its characterisation of the Palestinian resistance to Zionism, and to avoid a more serious and complex deconstruction of al-Husayni’s activities.
²⁹

The Palestinian rejection of the United Nations partition resolution of 29 November 1947 was regarded as an act of terrorism as well – more significant than previous acts, and genocidal besides, since it intended to destroy the Jewish community in Palestine altogether. This viewpoint is reiterated in the introduction to Benny Morris’s recent mainstream historiography
1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War
.
³⁰
Morris, a neo-Zionist historian, looks at 1948 within the ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm: as a war between Islam and the West. In order to prove this, he quotes from public statements by Arab leaders such as the Saudi king, Ibn Saud; representatives of the religious establishment; and spokesmen for popular Islamic movements, the Muslim Brotherhood foremost among them. In Morris’s eyes the war was, for the Muslims, a jihad.

Morris’s earlier work,
Israel’s Border Wars
, did more justice to the Palestinian resistance, questioning the depiction of Palestinian infiltrators in the 1950s as terrorists.
³¹
In fact, these were Palestinian refugees who attempted to enter the Jewish state to retrieve lost herds, uncollected crops, and abandoned properties. Very few came for revenge. In the mid-1950s, this energy was channelled into the
fedayeen movement, which was at first encouraged and organised by Muslim Brotherhood branches in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but later turned into an independent national movement committed to recovery from the trauma of the 1948 Nakba. From these beginnings, Fatah emerged in the late 1950s. As the principal independent national movement, it eventually took over the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the PLO – the less genuine and more cynical organisation created by the Arab world in 1964 to redeem Palestine. The takeover occurred in 1968 following the failure of the pan-Arab effort to defeat Israel in the war of June 1967.

Under the rubric of ‘terrorism’, Israeli historiography lumped together the sporadic and desperate acts of expelled Palestinians with the guerrilla warfare of Fatah. This was presented as a direct continuation of the Palestinian terror in the pre-state period. A summary of this point of view can be found in English in, for instance, a book by the pro-Zionist novelist and essayist Jillian Becker, who relied heavily on Israeli sources and perspectives.
³²
It is certainly true that some Palestinian actions were directed against innocent citizens in Israel; the worst instance of this was an attack on an ordinary passenger bus on 17 March 1954, in which eleven passengers were murdered. A serious historiographer would no doubt regard such an act as terrorism, but would not characterise an entire national movement as a ‘terrorist organisation’ because of individual acts such as these.

By 1954, Israeli retaliation policy against the more innocent infiltrations was well known: to shoot on sight any Palestinian attempting to enter or return to Palestine. Around five thousand people lost their lives in these infiltrations, and yet it was they who were depicted as terrorists. State policies of any kind, even as brutal as shooting on sight, are not mentioned in Israel apart from the aforementioned work by Benny Morris.
³³
The idea that Palestinian resistance on Israel’s borders was pure terrorism was used by the Israeli government in 1956 to justify the collusion with Britain and France on the confrontation over the Suez Canal. Updated historiography, especially that provided by Avi Shlaim, has revealed that the principal objective of this operation was a wish to topple Gamal Abdul Nasser,
who was a thorn in the side of Britain (because of his nationalisation of the Suez Canal), of France (because of his support of the FLN), and of Israel (because of his attempts to radicalise Arab states that were somewhat favourable to Israel, including Lebanon and the Hashemite regimes of Jordan and Iraq).
³⁴

The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967 by Israel and the defeat of the pan-Arab military forces sharpened the focus of the Palestinian national movement. Between 1967 and 1974, under the influence of Third World revolutionary theories, armed struggle came to be deemed the exclusive means of ending the Israeli occupation and even of achieving the liberation of Palestine as a whole. In practice, the movement was engaged in an abortive attempt to organise a popular revolt against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a more successful effort to attract world opinion to the plight of the Palestinians.

During those years, the armed struggle resorted to every possible tactic: terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and direct military confrontation with the superior army of Israel. Terrorism was manifested mainly in the hijacking of airplanes, a speciality of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the DFLP, led by Naif Hawatmeh) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the PFLP, led by George Habash). Here, for the first time, several Palestinian groups linked up directly with what the professional literature would define unhesitatingly as pure terrorist groups, including the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Japanese Red Army, but also with other liberation movements, such as ETA and the IRA. These were, however, short-term associations. The 1972 murder by three members of the Red Army of twenty-six (some say twenty-four) passengers at Ben Gurion Airport (then still known as Lod Airport) was the most notorious operation of that kind – unquestionably an act of pure terrorism. There were also growing tensions between the PLO and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on whose territory the units had trained and operated, and as a result of that deterioration, ending with the massacre of several thousand Palestinians by the Jordanians in September 1970, the PLO moved to Lebanon. These developments marked the end of that revolutionary moment.

The guerrilla operations included attempts to infiltrate the occupied West Bank in order to organise popular resistance there. After 1970, there were similar operations based in Lebanon, which targeted civilians in Israel for purposes of kidnap and negotiation. Quite often these ended in disaster, including the murder of civilians, either because of an aggressive Israeli salvage action despite prudence having dictated further negotiations, or because of the callousness of the kidnappers. One infamous operation took place at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, where eleven Israeli athletes were killed. Another took place in Ma’alot, where a school was taken; during the salvage operation, twenty-two students were killed. It must be said that today Israeli scholars do refer to Ma’alot as a failed salvage operation but nonetheless present it as a classic case study of Palestinian barbarity and terrorism.

Another chapter of the guerrilla efforts was a war of attrition that went on until September 1970, in which the PLO bombarded Israeli settlements in the Jordan valley. After the Munich operation, the Mossad initiated its own campaign of terror, with names such as Operation Wrath of God (killing PLO personnel in Europe) and Operation Spring of Youth (the assassination of PLO leaders in Beirut in 1973). The most famous of the Israeli retaliation operations took place at Karameh in 1968, a confrontation that the Israelis called
Mivtza Tofet
(Operation Hell), which triggered unexpectedly fierce Palestinian and Jordanian resistance.

Judging by the balance sheet, Palestinian actions were a failure – not one square inch was liberated. But some change was achieved: the PLO became the sole and authentic liberation movement, even though losing the battle of liberation while winning the struggle for legitimacy did transform its strategy. In the mid-1970s, the organisation developed what its commanders called the stages plan: a realistic political strategy that accepted the failure of a pure military solution and opted for a diplomatic effort and resolution of the conflict with Israel.

Israel, however, did not reciprocate this pragmatism. On the ground, the occupied territories became a mega-prison under strict military rule – which in many ways continues to this day. The Israeli
discourse of peace was soon exposed as an attempt to conceal the vast Judaisation of the Palestinian territories while confining the Palestinian population to the rest of the territories. With time, the Palestinians would be offered to turn these circumscribed areas into a state and to declare the conflict at an end, which they would refuse to do.

Nor was pragmatism manifested in the continued depiction of the PLO as a mammoth terrorist organisation, at least prior to the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993. The PLO and Israel were employing all kinds of means, including actions that would be defined by scholars as terrorism whether executed by states or by non-state actors. (See, for instance, the scholarly description of the PLO, terrorism, and Oslo in the entry ‘PLO’ on the popular Israeli website Ynet, an offshoot of the widely read daily paper
Yedioth Ahronoth
.)

Since the beginning of the occupation, Palestinian paramilitary activity included attacks on three different kinds of targets: the military, the settlers, and civilian targets inside Israel. The latter began in earnest only after the failure of the first uprising, the First Intifada, which erupted in 1987. There are few academic analyses of the First Intifada in Israel, but there are journalistic assessments that have appeared as books and that represent mainstream perception. Although the uprising consisted mainly of stone throwing and mass demonstrations, and occasionally even successful short-term takeovers of villages and neighbourhoods, the more popular books still summed it up as another chapter of terrorism.
³⁵