Making war is easier than making peace
From beside a wrecked tank on the surprisingly green hill you could look down and see the line of the border, with its fence and watchtower. We’d driven the coast road south from Beirut with Bassam, our Palestinian guide, through PLO and militia checkpoints and were now looking at Israel, the land taken from his parents by invaders.
Five days later, we were by the same fence, under the same watchtower, gazing back up to those hills, wondering if we could see the tank and listening to Shaul, our Israeli guide, talking about the defence of his new country.
That was 1978: 30 years into the state of Israel and now, unbelievably, 40 years ago. And callow though I was, it struck me then how similar the Jews and the Palestinians were. In Beirut, where the PLO had its headquarters, our delegation had met clever, educated, passionate and disputatious people. We met them again in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And each pressed upon us their own version of how they had come to be there and why the other side was wrong.
We went up to the Golan Heights, Syrian territory first occupied by Israel after the 1967 Six Day War. It symbolised Israeli insecurity: a reminder of the times when Syrian artillery sat on the high ground and shelled Israeli villages in Galilee.
And therefore a reminder too of the time in 1948 when the Five Arab Armies tried to crush the newly independent and minuscule Jewish state, and were seen off by citizens-in-arms, some of whom were survivors of the Holocaust. Why would a world with so many Arab countries not permit even a small Jewish one?
In Beirut we visited several Palestinian refugee camps, most notably one called Bourj elBarajneh. I half expected tents or prefab huts, a perimeter fence and Red Cross and United Nations lorries bringing in provisions. Not even close. Even then Bourj was actually a rather filthy concrete suburb, with some open drains and nightmarish spiders’ webs of electric cables running everywhere a few feet above head height. It was a permanent city playing at being temporary.
I heard a radio report from Bourj recently. The children of the children I saw 40 years ago are now growing up there and being told, as their parents were, that they are Palestinians, not Lebanese, and will one day return to their ‘‘homes’’.
In 1948 some 720,000 people were classified as Palestinian refugees. Now it is about five million. In Gaza the population, including refugees, was some 280,000 in 1948. Now it is getting on for two million, crammed into an area about 32 miles long by about seven miles wide. Other Palestinian refugee camps dot the Arab world as they have done for seven decades.
There is no parallel for this. It’s as though all the millions of Germans, Ukrainians, Czechs and Poles displaced by World War II had, instead of becoming citizens of their new countries, stayed for ever in the camps established for them, waiting to return, and multiplied. The Palestinians now call their displacement the Nakba, or ‘‘Catastrophe’’, and it has been marked since 1998 on May 15, the day after Israel declared independence in 1948.
Two rights, then. First, the right of the persecuted Jewish people to a homeland. Where would that be but in some part of the historic land of the Jews: yearned for, learnt about in scriptures and synagogues over the centuries? Second, the right of the Palestinian people who, due to no fault of theirs, were forced to leave their homes and become citizens of nowhere.
A pattern was established: the wars from 1948 to 1973, occasioned mostly by Arab refusal to recognise the young state, were followed by the occupation of even more Palestinian land by the victorious Israelis.
In 1978 I was a precocious twostate-solution boy. We visited the West Bank, took tea with the urbane mayor of Ramallah, and could imagine a Palestinian state there and linked to Gaza. It wouldn’t be perfect for everybody but it was surely better than the alternatives where one side tried to rule the other or was itself thrown back into the sea.
When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, this vision seemed at last tangible. The Palestinian Authority was