Ali Abunimah - One Country

A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse

ALI ABUNIMAH

Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company

NEW YORK

Metropolitan Books

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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Copyright 2006 by Ali Abunimah

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Abunimah, Ali.

One country : a bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse / by Ali Abunimah.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8034-6

ISBN-10: 0-8050-8034-1

1. Arab-Israeli conflict1933------Peace. I. Title.

DS 119.76.A355 2006

956.9405'4-dc22 2006043849

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First Edition 2006

Designed by Adam B. Bohannon

Printed in the United States of America

10 987654321

For Usama Hussein Abu al-Sheikh, and for all the people of Shatila. Your strength and humanity remain my inspiration.

CONTENTS

Map x

Introduction 1

ONE An Impossible Partition

TWO The State of Israel Is Coming to an End

THREE It Could Happen Here 88

FOUR A United, Democratic State in Palestine-Israel 104

five Learning from South Africa 134

SIX Israelis and Palestinians Thinking

the Unthinkable 101

Notes 195

Acknowledgments 219

Index 221

ONE COUNTRY

W hat will it take to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians? Some say we must forget the past. I think we have to start by remembering it. My first memory of Palestine is from a supermarket in London. Before I was old enough to go to school, I remember regularly accompanying my mother to the Safeway in Ealing Broadway. One day we were buying oranges and I pointed at some big, beautiful-looking ones. No, not those, my mother said, they are from Jaffa, they are our oranges. This made no sense to my five-year-old mind. If they were our oranges, why couldnt we have them? My mother explained to me that the citrus groves of Jaffa belonged to Palestinians, to people like us, until the Israelis took them over.

My maternal grandfather, Ali Najjar, was a wealthy man who had inherited land from his father, and acquired more along the way, buying up whatever his brothers wanted to sell. My mothers family came from the village of Lifta, whose sturdy stone houses with their gentle, arched windows were built on steep hillsides just northwest of Jerusalem. The village s history is documented from before Roman times, and in the early twentieth century, as the population grew, houses crept up the hill until they touched the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rumayma.1 It was here that my grandfather built a splendid new house overlooking the valley below, which is where my mother was born in 1939. Recalling it today, she describes six spacious bedrooms, separate dining and living rooms. It was the house of a prosperous family, whose furniture included a piano. It was near a forest, and surrounded by a large garden with fruit trees and every variety of flower. My mother remembers most vividly a red climbing rose, which scaled the height of the wall, and now she explains to me that this is why she planted a climbing rose bush in front of our house in Amman. Her father also had a fine car, a Chevrolet, and a driver who sometimes took her and her sisters to school.

On Jaffa Street, at that time the bustling heart of modern Jerusalem, my grandfather built an imposing building, said to be the first in the area with the advanced convenience of central heating. Many of his tenants were doctors, principally German Jews. My mother recalls regularly visiting one of the tenants, a Dr. Hirsh, who treated her as a child. He was a very kind man, she remembers. He was an old man, not a young doctor. On Jewish holidays my grandparents would send food to Dr. Hirsh, and during Passover, he would send my mothers family matzoh, the unleavened bread that in Jewish tradition symbolizes the flight from Egypt. I liked it, she says, and I finally understand why throughout my own childhood in London and Brussels whenever matzoh would appear in the stores around Passover, she would buy it and we would eat it at home.

One of my mothers strongest childhood memories was of a little girl called Miriam, the daughter of a Jewish furrier and his wife who rented the apartment on the first floor of my grandfathers house. They were very nice days, my mother says. We would come home from school, have lunch, and then go down and play with the neighbors. We played with this little girl all the time. We loved her. And my father loved her too. I wish I knew what happened to her. Miriam had also been born in my grandfathers house.

That happy, comfortable childhood in Rumayma came to an end in early 1948. For my mother, too young to be fully aware of the swirling politics of the Palestine conflict, the change was unexpected. All of a sudden, she started to see guns. One day we were sleeping, she recalls, and we heard gunshots and we ran out to see what was happening.... We were scared and we were crying and I remember my father and my brother carrying guns and shooting from the veranda. Lifta, Rumayma, and the adjacent districts of Sheikh Badr were among the first communities that Palestinians left. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Hostilities there were triggered when the Haganah (the main Jewish militia) killed the owner, who came from the nearby Arab village of Qalunya, of a petrol station in the mixed neighborhood of Romema (Rumayma); thev had suspected him of informing Arab irregulars about the departure of Jewish convoys to Tel Aviv. Qalunya villagers retaliated the next day by throwing a grenade at a Jewish bus. On December 28, 1947, the Stern Gang, a militia led by future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, attacked a coffeehouse in Lifta, spraying it with machine-gun fire and killing, according to the New York Times, five patrons.2 Daily exchanges of fire ensued, and the Haganah and other Jewish militias repeatedly attacked until the raids, as was their intention, caused the evacuation of the Arabs of Lifta and Romema during December 1947 and January 1948. 3

My mother remembers the day she left Lifta and how my grandfather calmed his daughters: Why are you crying? Why should you take anything with you? We are coming back in a few days. It will all be finished. So my grandmother packed only a few clothes and towels for the children,'covered the furniture with sheets, and locked the door. My grandfather, grandmother, their daughtersArifa, Rifa, Nahida, Aida, my mother, Samira, Nawal, and Nailatheir brother, Arif, his wife, Salwa, and the couples baby girl, Orayb, mounted the back of a rented truck and trundled off, never to return. Their first refuge was the home of family friends in the Baka area of southern Jerusalem, until a few months later when the fighting reached them there and along with the rest of the population they fled. My grandfather took his family to Jordan, where most of his descendants still live. My mother recalls the first harsh days of their exile, living in a house made of mud in the village of Sweileh, with none of the modern conveniences of running water and indoor toilets they had been accustomed to in Palestine. Despite the loss of the family home and much of his land, my grandfather still had money in the bank and was able to reestablish himself. But many among the wealthier Palestinians were far less fortunate, losing all their property and even their bank accounts. And for hundreds of thousands of villagers all their wealth consisted of the land and homes they had been forced to leave for teeming refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank.