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She knew that the Israeli army, in whose officers' training corps program she now served, was strong. But in a community where people were still walking around with numbers on their arms, Dalia believed, "one had to take sick fantasies seriously."
Hussein had surmised that without an alliance with Nasser, Jordan would be more vulnerable, on the one hand, to an attack from Israel or, on the other, from Palestinians within his own kingdom who would equate any inaction with betraying the Arab cause. Now
An aggressive armed force was able to oust that people from their country and reduce them to refugees on the borders of their homeland. Today the forces of aggression impede the Arab people's established right of return and life in their homeland. . . . I may ask how far any government is able to control the feelings of more than one million Palestinians who, for twenty years, the international community—whose responsibility herein is inescapable—has failed to secure their return to their homeland. The UN General Assembly, merely confirms that right, at every session.
"We are prepared, our sons are prepared, our army is prepared, and the entire Arab nation is prepared." A broadcast from the Voice of Cairo dared Israel to strike: "We challenge you, Eshkol, to try all your weapons. Put them to the test, they will spell Israel's death and annihilation."
in the words of fellow revolutionary Bassam Abu-Sharif, the attacks demonstrated "that the Palestinian spirit was not crushed . . . that the Palestinian people would never give up, that they would fight with whatever came to hand, by whatever means they could, to recover their dignity and their lost lands, to get justice."
The next month, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" in exchange for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." The resolution called for Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, the Golan
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For most Palestinians in 1967, however, 242 didn't go nearly far enough; their dream still lay in the fight to return to their homes in Palestine.
Habash, who would soon become a permanent fixture on the list of Israel's top enemies, would spark revulsion in Dalia for years to come. For many Palestinians at the time, Habash was a courageous rebel, willing to fight for his people's fundamental rights by any means necessary.
On the other hand, many soldiers returned to the kibbutz disturbed by the feeling of having become, in the words of one Sabra, "just machines for killing. Everyone's face is set in a snarl and there's a deep growl coming from your belly. You want to kill and kill. You've got to understand what things like that did to us. We hated and hated."
"It's an absolutely lousy feeling being in a conquering army," one soldier told Oz. "It's a horrible job, really horrible.
The irony was that Bashir was trying to shield Dalia from the eyes of her own army, of which she was now a part.
"And I started expressing my understanding of their sense of exile," Dalia recalled. "And that I could understand their longing for their home. I could understand their longing for Falastin through my longing to Zion, to Israel. And their exile I could understand from my own exile. I had something in my collective experience and through which I could understand their recent experience."
"Israel first came to the imagination of the Western occupying powers for two reasons," he told Dalia. "And what are they?" she asked in reply, now feeling her own skepticism grow. "First, to get rid of you in Europe. Second, to rule the East through this government and to keep down the whole Arab world.
The Nazis killed the Jews. And we hate them. But why should we pay for what they did? Our people welcomed the Jewish people during the Ottoman Empire. They came to us running away from the Europeans and we welcomed them with all that we had. We took care of them.
But now because you want to live in a safe place, other people live in pain.
Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land.
And on the other hand, we were conversing of things that seemed totally mutually exclusive. That my life here is at their expense, and if they want to realize their dream, it's at my expense."
Each had chosen to reside within the contradiction: They were enemies, and they were friends.
The battle of Karama, though in many ways a military defeat, would go down as one of the great symbolic victories in the history of the Palestinian resistance, further enhancing Fatah's image within Jordan. Now King Hussein would find it even more difficult to pressure the guerrillas. On the contrary, in the aftermath of Karama he declared, "We are all fedayeen."
Many Palestinians believed their attacks were against not Israeli civilians, but rather "soldiers in civilian clothing" in a "colonial settler regime" that could be mobilized against them in a moment's notice. This was war, the Palestinian rebels believed, and their attacks represented their only recourse to bringing attention to their cause.
The DFLP leadership also objected to the rhetoric of "pushing the Jews into the sea" and began to see their struggle as against not Jews, but Zionism. They advocated for coexistence between Arabs and Jews within a single state, where no one would be forced to move. Some within the DFLP even began to talk of Arab and Jewish states existing side by side. Even among some of the radical factions of the Palestinian resistance, the idea of coexistence was gaining ground.
If national interest comes before our common humanity," Dalia said, "then there is no hope for redemption, there is no hope for healing, there is no hope for transformation, there is no hope for anything!"
Dalia would conclude later—that Bashir had confirmed a prejudice inherent to many Israelis: Arabs kill Jews simply because they are Jews.
In September 1972, as Bashir began serving his time, eight Palestinian gunmen snuck into the Olympic village at Munich, shooting two Israeli athletes dead and capturing nine more. In a subsequent shoot-out at a military base with German police, fourteen people died, including all of the Israeli hostages.
Many Palestinians agreed. They believed, twenty-four years after the 1948 war, that Israel was occupying their lands and homes and that desperate times required desperate measures: No one would pay any attention to their struggle unless they forced their way onto the international stage. "Humans must change the world, they must do something, they must kill if needs be," Habash had declared. "To kill, even if that means we in our turn become inhuman."
In the eighteen years following the Israeli occupation in June 1967, an estimated 250,000 Palestinians—or 40 percent of the adult male population—had seen the inside of an Israeli jail.
In 1974 Arafat addressed the United Nations in New York, to the fury of Israel and thousands of American demonstrators, but to a standing ovation in the General Assembly, where he offered his dream of the "Palestine of tomorrow," whereby Arab and Jew would live side by side in a secular, democratic state. The Palestinian movement began to show signs of deep divisions over whether to accept the UN resolution recognizing Israel, which meant a possible end to the dream of return. Bashir and his fellow inmates debated these issues without rest. For Bashir, there could never be compromise on the
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Is it either us or them? Dalia thought. Either I live in their house while they are refugees, or they live in my house while I become a fugitive? There must be another possibility. But what is it?
Indeed, he maintained his innocence but added, years later: "We have suffered many massacres. Dawayma. Kufr Qassam. Deir Yassin. In the face of these massacres and dispossessions, if anyone thought that the Palestinians would react as Jesus Christ would have, he is wrong. If I didn't have this deep conviction to the bone marrow in the necessity of hating the occupation, I wouldn't deserve to be a Palestinian."
Eventually she decided, "His reaction will not determine mine. I have free choice to think, I have free choice to act, in accordance with my understanding and my conscience."
The house in Ramla would become a preschool for the Arab children of Israel.
Five days into the intifada, however, a new group emerged from the same Gaza refugee camp that had spawned the uprising. It would be called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. Its leader, a crippled, bearded, middle-aged man named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had fled with his family from the village of al-Jora in 1948; the village was later destroyed and the Israeli city of Ashkelon built on its rubble.
Israel, wanting to weaken Arafat, had initially encouraged the growth of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, whose members had established Hamas.
Israel's UN ambassador, a young politician named Benjamin Netanyahu, replied that the deportations were "totally legal" and that the United Nations Security Council could not be a fair arbiter because it "condones any violence on the Arab side, while condemning all Israeli countermeasures."
Yitzhak Rabin, who, on the eve of Bashir's deportation, had recognized the "despair" of Palestinian refugees. "As a soldier, I feel that these people have fought with a courage that deserves respect,"
"They deserve to have an entity. Not the PLO, not a state, but a separate entity." Rabin believed that Israel could not agree to the Palestinians' central political demand—recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and to Yasser Arafat as their leader. To do so, Rabin argued, would require Israelis to compromise on the right of return for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and that, the defense minister argued, would be "national suicide."
"One does not stand by when such a thing is happening to other people. It's an un-Jewish attitude."
For you, every viable solution will always be lacking in justice. In a peace plan, everybody will have to do with less than they deserve."
Bashir was not happy. If the Palestinians accepted 242, he knew, they would have to accept Israel's right to exist.
To me Zion is an expression of my very ancient longing, for me it's a word that symbolizes a harbor for my people and our collective expression here. And for him, it's a regime of terror.
Because for him if Zionism is a reign of terror, then terrorism is an appropriate answer!"
"And I say that I cannot afford to fight one wrong with another wrong. It doesn't lead anywhere!"
All that I wish is for you and me to struggle together with all of the peace and freedom loving people for the establishment of a democratic popular state. And to struggle together to bring the idea of the Dalia child care center to life.
One of the mansions, estimated to cost $2 million, was built for Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, who would later succeed Arafat as the leader of the Palestinians.
and profiteers," one Gazan would say. "Our fighters have been killed, our thinkers assassinated, and all we have left are the profiteers."
The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, did little to blunt such criticism. If anything, the image of a longtime enemy of the state onstage with the two Israeli leaders only fueled the attacks.
Dalia believed that Israel had to give up the settlements in those lands and that thousands of Jews would have to move. Even though this was part of what she, too, considered the biblical land of Israel, for centuries it had also been home to other people.
Hard as it was, Dalia believed, each side in this conflict had to give up something precious.
Nobody will return us from the dead dark pit. Here, neither the joy of victory nor songs of praise will help. So sing only for peace, don't whisper a prayer, it's better to sing a song for peace with a great shout!
Bill Clinton lost his temper. "You have lost many chances," the president told Arafat, echoing former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban's slogan that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. "First in 1948 . . . now you are destroying yourselves in 2000. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything. These things have consequences. Failure will mean the end of the peace process. Let hell break loose and live with the consequences. You won't have a Palestinian state and you won't have friendships with anyone. You will be alone in the region."
