Tom Hull: Raja Shehadeh: Strangers in the House

Aziz Shehadeh was a prominent lawyer in Jaffa up to 1948, when Britain relinquished control of Palestine and Israel was born. He was an Anglican Christian. His wife's family was well to do, owning a hotel in Jaffa, and a summer house in Ramallah. Like most residents of Jaffa, they fled under fire by the Irgun. In their case, they were able to go to the summer house in Ramallah instead of having to flee to a refugee camp. (The British shipped a great many residents of Jaffa to refugee camps in Beirut, which have since had particularly sad stories.) Raja Shehadeh was born into this Ramallah exile. He grew up much like his father, but also different -- a generation difference marked by exile and occupation. He followed his father into law, studying in Beirut and London before returning to work in his father's law practice in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. Both father and son are notable, in their own rather distinct ways, for the moderation of their political views -- in particular for their strong belief in the essential rule of law. I'll return to the father's own efforts to promote peace, but first we need to pay some attention to the son's efforts to promote the rule of law.

Although not central to this book, it seems to me that Raja Shehadeh has done two especially noteworthy things during the period of this book. One is to have patiently and meticulously documented the everyday overhead of Israel's occupation on the West Bank. The other is how he, again patiently and meticulously, has worked out the legal underpinnings of the occupation (aside from its much more famous extralegal operations). That neither of these were done in a conventional political framework only adds to their impact -- in particular, it doesn't allow them to be easily ignored. This is not the same as saying that he comes to no political conclusions, but he is clearly outside and well distanced from the dominant political frameworks. What he does ask is that we take the rule of law as a fundamental requirement for any civilized society, and he does a very effective job of showing how the rule of law has been subverted by the politics of occupation (and, for that matter, of resistance).

Given recent events, one particular description seems especially worth quoting at length. This came from an interview with a young man, Khalid, whose had been detained and whose mother had hired him to help out. From pp. 153-154:

"After my arrest," Khalid told me, "I was blindfolded, thrown into a jeep, and brought to the Tegart [Israeli prison, originally built by the British]. It was late at night. I was brought before interrogators who concentrated their blows on my face and chest. I was asked to confess. I said I had nothing to confess. But they said they knew everything about me. I said if this was the case why are you asking. They did not like this and continued to beat me until the early hours of the morning when I was returned to my cell. I then heard an electric motor, which I eventually realied was turned on every morning at daybreak. This became my way to keep track of time, because my cell did not get any light. Part of the strategy was to disorient me by depriving me of sleep and food.

"'If you don't want to confess,' I was told, 'we will keep you here until you change your mind.' But they didn't know who they were dealing with. Judging by the times I heard the motor turned on, two days and two nights had passed before I was given food. Then they shoved me into a dirty toilet with shit smeared on the walls and floor and there I was made to eat my miserly meal. I did, anyway, because I was very hungry. I had hardly finished when I was taken to another room and subjected to a cold shower. While still wet I was put under a fan. I tried not to shiver; I did not want to give them the pleasure of seeing me suffer. But I could not control my body. It shivered, like a leaf, as it had never done before."

"'Now will you talk?' they said.

"'What about?' I answered.

"'You think you are too smart for us,' they said, 'we shall see who will have his way at the end.' They dragged me to a corridor where other prisoners were handcuffed and hung by the hands to a peg in the wall with a coarse stinky burlap bag placed over their heads. I joined their line and became another suffering body denied light and clean air, concerned only with the excruciating pain in my limbs. At one point I called the guard and asked to use the toilet. I got no response. Eventually I could not control my kidneys and the urine trickled down my dirty trousers making me stink. When it splashed on the floor I was slapped and cursed and called a filthy animal."

At this point Khalid turned to me and asked: "How long have I been at the Tegart?"

"Eighteen days," I said.

"It feels like months. After the first week I lost count. I had thought I was in for months. But you say it's only been eighteen days?"

I'm not sure when this occurred (late '70s or early '80s seems likely), but it reads like yesterday's newspapers. We hear much these days about how U.S. MPs in Iraq were inadequately trained, but from this it sounds like they hadn't missed a trick. One of the more peculiar things about the U.S. occupation of Iraq is how, as the occupation sours and we are ever more desperate for good will from Arabs, Bush has moved even more stringly to embrace Sharon. Any remotely sober analysis of Israel's occupation techniques must by now conclude that brutal policies of dominance have undermined Israel's security and welfare while spoiling its few victories. So the notion that the U.S. has anything to learn from Israel is delusional.

My father listed the names of forty Palestinians from different parts of the occupied territories. He believed that these forty dignitaties should convene and declare the establishment of the provisional government of the state of Palestine. They would declare their willingness to sign a peace treaty with the state of Israel on the grounds of mutual recognition and the immediate cessation of all acts of hostility. Negotiations would then immediately begin to resolve all aspects of the Palestinian problem. This would silence the Arab states, which never saved us from the disasters that befell us. If this was the will of the largest concentration of Palestinians, what was left for others to say? We, the Palestinaisn, who lost our lands in 1948 and remained in this part of Palestine despite the misery and deprivation. We, who were now resolved to come to terms with our history and to determine our future life in peace and reconciliation with our bitterest enemy. What right would any of the Arab states have to denounce such an action taken by the Palestinians themselves?

The legal foundation for the initiative would be United Nations Resolution 181, which had called for the partition of Palestine into two states: one for the Arabs and another for the Jews. This was how my father thought the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis would end.

It was a simple plan, one that he had worked out in full and believed must be implemented immediately if it were to succeed. The two Israelis carried his proposal and wrote their own memorandum, which they presented to the Israeli coalition government headed by Levi Eshkol.

[ . . . ]

But in 1967 he was 55 years old. While others were paralyzed with fear, he was clear headed. He saw this misfortune as a repeat of an earlier round. In 1948 he had abandoned his fate to the Arab armies and ended up on the other side of the border having lost everything, defeated and destitute. Once again he had counted on the Arab armies to fight his war in 1967, and again the result was defeat as well as the occupation of the rest of Palestine. Now was the time, he thought, for the Palestinians to draw the correct conclusions, to take their fate in their own hands.

Those who did not want a Palestinian state, he believed, included the Arab countries. They wanted to keep the Palestinians in bondage and continue to have the threat of war as a justification for not making long-overdue political changes within their own countries. He knew the odds were not in favor of the Palestinians' actions. He predicted that this defeat would be followed by stirred emotions and bravado. And then people would wait for the next round of war, which would decidedly be another futile war, because he now believed that war was not the way Palestinians would achieve their national aspirations.

He also believed that Israel must be concerned about the prospect of controlling the million Palestinians now under its jurisdiction. He did not think that there would be any meaningful resistance by the Palestinians in the West Bank, but Israeli apprehensions of possible civil disobedience -- or worse, street fighting in the narrow lanes of the old Palestinian cities -- could be used as a factor to persuade Israel to agree to the final politial resolution he was now proposing. For all these reasons time was of the essence. It had to happen now if it were to happen at all.

He seemed to have found an answer that satisfied him and he did not look back. He was a decisive man who hated hesitation. He was brave to the point of recklessness. He took no precautions. He published several articles in local and international journals statin gthat the only resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was through the peaceful establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. He made himself available to journalists and gave interviews to the many who flocked to our house. But most important, he drafted the declaration for the establishment of the Palestinian state, which he circulated to other Palestinian leaders in the area and then presented to the Israeli leadership. He knew that if he could garner enough support for his ideas among both Palestinians and Israelis, history could be changed. He believed this was a unique opportunity.

But the Israeli government leaders to whom the plan was presented didn't even respond. They just let it pass. They, and we, missed another opportunity for peace.

Dan [Bavely, one of the two Israelis mentioned above] wrote a book called Missed Opportunities and Dreams. Talking to Dan helped me see the events of that time in their proper historical perspective. I told him that I didn't believe my father was a politician. He was instead a visionary. A politician assesses events and takes what actions he thinks he can get away with. How could my father have possibly thought he could get away with this one?

Dan disagreed: "Aziz was a strategist. He was shrewd and meticulous and had thought of every angle: the legal, the political, the economic."

"But do you really believe it could have worked?" I asked.

"Yes," he said emphatically.

"And what about the PLO?"

"It was not until 1968 that the organization came into prominence, after the battle of Karameh. At the time your father made his proposal, the PLO was not in the picture."

"And Jordan?"

"Jordan wanted the whole thing back. In Israel we had no interest in returning the territories to Jordan."

"Was East Jerusalem to be included in the Palestinian state?"

Jerusalem was not a problem then. Everything that you hear now about Jerusalem and the way it is presented as a central issue that is among the most difficult to resolve did not feature then. Yes, Jerusalem was part of the deal."

I said, "You were willing to agree to a full Palestinian state."

"A full Palestinian state."

Obviously, this proposal didn't fail only on the Palestinian side. In particular, it was just a matter of days until Israel annexed East Jerusalem. It's harder to read just what the situation with Jordan was. In 1947-48 Israeli leaders negotiated with King Abdullah of Jordan to cede large parts of the West Bank rather than allow them to become part of an independent Palestinian state (Golda Meir, who soon replaced Eshkol as Prime Minister, was personally involved in those negotiations), and the "Jordan option" remained a favorite of Shimon Peres (also a prominent figure in the Israeli government of the time) until King Hussein eventually killed the idea. The coalition government also included people like Menachem Begin, whose idea of Israel's proper borders didn't stop at the Jordan River.

Still, the prediction that time was of the essence -- that such a proposal had to be moved on quickly in order to make it successful -- was clearly correct. One thing that I think that proposals like this do is to show, by their very reasonableness, that Israel's oft-stated desire for peace was less than met the ear. Israel accepted the initial U.N. partition proposal, but didn't implement its proposed borders, and rejected every subsequent mediation proposal -- going so far as to assassinate the U.N.'s first mediator. It's easy now to fault the Arab committee's rejection of partition, but it should be recalled that the rejection took place before the nakba -- the refugee crisis -- at a time when many Arabs lived in areas allocated to the Jewish partitions; also that Britain itself did nothing to implement the U.N. partition boundaries, and conspired to bring Transjordan into the West Bank. Israel consistently refused to negotiate peace treaties following the U.N. brokered armistice agreements. Over the next 20 years Israel provoked many border disputes, especially with Syria, as well as attacking positions in Gaza and the West Bank (e.g., the Sharon-led attack on Qibya in 1953, generally cited as his first major atrocity). Israel waged aggressive wars in 1956 and 1967, and has continued to occupy territory seized in 1967 to today. One can cite many more examples, especially regarding the Palestinians.

It is worth noting that even under the many insults and injustices of military rule in the occupied territories, it took 20 years before the Palestinians inside the West Bank and Gaza raised a significant level of resistance. Therefore, it's hard to see that there would have been a problem forming a Palestinian state in 1967 that would have recognized Israel, and it's clear that that would have undercut any anti-Israel positions among Arabs elsewhere. There would still have been the refugee crisis to resolve, and that would have been thorny, but it doesn't appear to have been a precondition. It is likely that the resolution then, as now, would have been for the refugees to move to the Palestinian state, and that would have been easier done then, with much less longlasting damage. Moreover, with the Palestinians happy, about all that Egypt and Syria could have done was to sue for peace, with Israel returning the conquered lands in exchange for demilitarization and normalization of relations. On the other hand, what did Israel gain by ignoring this proposal? More wars, much hatred, a legacy of imperialism, and a thoroughly militarized society increasingly dominated by religious maniacs, increasingly ostracized by the rest of the world.

posted 2004-05-22