The Files and the Vote

Somewhere in Palestine, in the late 1930s and all through the 1940s, a young man would come walking into an Arab village with a notebook in his pocket.

He always had a reason for being there. He was out walking in the hills. He was a student, come to look at the crumbling old buildings on the hill. He was making maps. He was polite, and friendly, and interested in absolutely everything.

And because of the way a Palestinian village treats a guest, he was fed, and given tea, and given a bed for the night, and given an answer to every single question he asked.

He asked a lot of questions.

How many houses are there? How many young men? Which families are the important ones, and which families have fallen out with each other? Did anybody from this village fight in the revolt? Is the soil good? How many fruit trees? Where does your water come from? How many roads come into the village, and how wide are they, and could a lorry drive up one of them?

Then he thanked everybody, and went home, and wrote it all down.

The village files

He was not doing this on his own. There were many young men like him, and all of them were sending their notebooks to the same place.

Zionist leaders had put together a team whose work was gathering secrets, and this was the biggest thing that team ever did. They called it the Village Files.

By the middle of the 1940s there was a thick folder for almost every Arab village in Palestine. Photographs taken from aeroplanes. Maps drawn by hand. Lists of names. Notes on which men in the village would probably fight.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé went through those folders and worked out what they were really for.

They were not about finding out where places were. Every single folder was answering the same question.

If we have to take this village one day, how would we do it, and which men would have to be dealt with first?

Now here is the saddest part of it.

Think about where all those answers came from.

They came from kindness.

A family sat a stranger down at their table and fed him. He thanked them, and walked away, and wrote down how many sons they had.

Ten years later that same page was still in a drawer. Then one morning somebody took it out, read it, and sent soldiers up the road into that village.

The war years

While that quiet work went on in the villages, the rest of the world was burning.

For the Jews of Europe, the Second World War meant the Holocaust. That is the name for what Nazi Germany did to them. Six million Jewish people were murdered. Whole Jewish towns that had stood for eight hundred years were wiped off the map in a year and a half.

The Nazis took Jewish families away to camps and killed them there. The few who came out alive in 1945 walked out with no family left, no home to go back to, and not one country on earth willing to let them in.

There is a word for people like that. People who have run from something terrible, and have nowhere to go, and nothing to go back to, are called refugees.

Hold on to that word. It runs all the way through the rest of this book, and before the end of it, it will belong to somebody else.

Now remember the White Paper from the end of the last chapter, the one that limited how many Jewish settlers were allowed into Palestine. It began in 1939, at the exact moment when getting into Palestine had become a matter of staying alive.

So ships packed with people running for their lives sailed into Haifa, and Britain turned them around and sent them away again.

One of those ships was called the Patria.

In November 1940 she sat in Haifa harbour with about 1,800 Jewish refugees on board, and the British were getting ready to ship them off to an island thousands of miles away, near Africa.

The Haganah decided to stop it. The plan was to set off a small bomb, break the ship’s engines, and leave her stuck in the harbour, so that nobody could be sent anywhere.

The bomb was far too big.

The Patria sank in about fifteen minutes. Around 260 refugees drowned. They had escaped the Nazis, crossed a whole continent, reached the shore of the country they had spent years trying to reach, and died in sight of it.

There is no clean version of this story. Even the people trying to save them ended up drowning them.

New York, 1942

In May 1942, hundreds of Zionist leaders met at the Biltmore Hotel in New York.

Two things changed in that room, and both of them changed everything.

The first was what they asked for. For forty years they had used soft, careful words. A national home in Palestine. Not a country. Just a home.

At the Biltmore Hotel, Ben-Gurion pushed the soft words aside and said it out loud, in public. Palestine should become a Jewish state. And how many Jewish settlers were allowed in should be decided by the Jewish Agency, not by Britain.

The Jewish Agency is worth knowing about. It was the Zionist movement’s own organisation inside Palestine, and by now it did nearly everything a government does. It collected money. It bought land. It ran schools. It spoke for the Jewish community whenever Britain wanted to talk to somebody.

It was not a government. It was ready to become one.

The second was who they asked. For forty years they had done all their asking in London. From this meeting onwards, they did it in Washington, the capital of the United States.

That mattered, because the world was changing. Britain was worn out and losing its empire, while America was becoming the most powerful country on earth.

Turning to ask Washington instead of London did more for the Zionist plan than anything else in this entire story.

Then, in 1943, an American general travelled around Palestine, met Ben-Gurion, and wrote a report for the President about what he believed the Zionists were really after.

He listed three things.

One. A Jewish state ruling all of Palestine, and all of Transjordan, the country we now call Jordan.

Two. The Arabs who lived there moved out and sent somewhere else.

Three. Jewish companies controlling the money and the trade across the whole region.

An American general wrote that down in 1943. Nobody did anything about it. It went into a drawer, like the others.

And the Palestinians?

You may have noticed that the Palestinians have almost disappeared from this chapter. That is not an accident of the telling. It is what those years were actually like for them.

They were still bleeding from the revolt. Their leaders were scattered in other countries. Their fighters were dead, or in prison, or hiding. Their guns had been taken away years ago and never came back.

Ordinary life went on, and in some ways it got better. The British army was fighting a world war and needed everything, so there was work, and wages, and the ports and workshops were busier than they had been in years. Thousands of Palestinian men even joined the British army themselves and fought in that war.

But a people is not only its wages. In 1946 the Palestinian leaders tried to put their national committee back together, and it never really worked. The men who could have rebuilt it were dead or far away, and the ones who were left spent their time arguing with each other.

So while one side spent these years building an army, collecting weapons and filling folders with the names of villages, the other side spent them trying to stand up again.

They did not manage it in time.

Britain becomes the enemy

After the war, Britain found itself hated by everybody in Palestine at the same time.

Palestinians hated Britain for Balfour’s letter and for crushing the revolt. Jews now hated Britain too, because the White Paper was keeping the survivors of the Holocaust out of Palestine.

So the armed Jewish groups turned their guns on the British. They worked in secret, hiding among ordinary people, which is why everybody called them the underground. For two years, Palestine was the most dangerous place in the world to be a British soldier.

22 July 1946. The biggest hotel in Jerusalem, the King David, was not really a hotel any more. Britain had taken over a whole wing of it and filled it with offices. That was where Britain ran Palestine from.

That morning, men from the Irgun rolled big metal milk containers into the kitchens in the basement. The containers were full of explosive.

The blast brought the entire wing down. Ninety-one people were killed. They were British, and Arab, and Jewish. Most of them were not soldiers at all. They were office workers, typists, waiters and kitchen staff.

The Irgun said it had telephoned a warning and that the British ignored it. Britain said no warning arrived in time to be any use. People are still arguing about it. Ninety-one people are still dead.

The man who gave the order was the Irgun’s commander, Menachem Begin. Britain printed his face on posters all over the country, offered a large reward to anybody who caught him, and printed three words above his photograph.

WANTED FOR MURDER.

The Irgun had its own badge, and it says plainly what they wanted. A hand holding up a rifle, over a map.

Look at the map, though. It is not Palestine. It is Palestine and the whole of Jordan next door, all of it coloured in as land to be taken.

Under the map were two words in Hebrew. Rak Kach. It means Only Thus. Only this way. Only by force.

Thirty-one years after those posters went up, Menachem Begin was the Prime Minister of Israel. The year after that he was given the Nobel Peace Prize, which is the most famous prize in the world for people who end wars.

And there was far more of this than most people know. Britain’s own records for these last years count more than 500 armed attacks on British targets. Police stations bombed. Officers shot in the street. Bombs posted through the letterboxes of British officials in London.

12 January 1947. There was a third armed Jewish group, smaller and harder than the other two. It was called Lehi, and the British called it the Stern Gang.

That morning, Lehi men stole a lorry, filled it with explosives, drove it up to the main British police building in Haifa, and set it off. Four policemen were killed, two of them British and two of them Arabs.

On the day, the news said about 60 people were hurt. The real number turned out to be 142. Windows were blown out in streets far away.

Historians say that this was the first time in history anybody deliberately used a lorry full of explosives as a weapon in a city.

It did not stay pointed at the British for long. Within a year, lorries like that one were being driven into the middle of Arab towns. You will see what they did in the next chapter.

1 March 1947. By now the Irgun had become very confident, and one attack shows it better than any other.

In Jerusalem there was a club where British officers went to relax when they were off duty. A van smashed through the barbed wire fence around it and pulled up at the front door. A guard walked over and asked the men to show their pass. They shot him. Machine guns opened fire from outside so that nobody could move. Then three men carried heavy bags of explosive in through the door, set them down inside, and walked out again.

Seventeen British officers were killed, and twenty-seven more were wounded.

The Irgun said it had done this because of the refugee ships, because Britain was dragging survivors of the Holocaust off boats at Haifa and sending them away again. That is the Irgun’s own reason for its own attack, so take it as that. But the anger behind it was real, and you have just read what happened to the Patria.

Then something happened in London that shows how far things had gone.

Winston Churchill stood up in the British parliament and said the attack was wrong.

Churchill had been on the Zionists’ side his entire life. Thirty years of it, loudly, defending Balfour’s letter again and again, even when it made him unpopular. And here he was, calling this a betrayal.

When you lose a friend like that, you have lost the argument in London.

In July, Britain hanged three Irgun men. The Irgun answered by taking two British soldiers prisoner. They held them in an underground room for two weeks, and then hanged them both in a grove of trees near Netanya. Before leaving, they tied explosives to the bodies, so that the British officer who came to cut the first man down was hurt by the blast.

Those two men are buried in a British war cemetery in Palestine. Their graves are still there.

Britain hit back with raids all over the country and arrested about 25 of the top men from the Irgun and Lehi. It changed nothing at all.

But those two bodies in the trees broke something in Britain. Back home, crowds attacked Jewish shops in British cities. And in London the government sat down and added everything up. The money. The empire falling apart everywhere else. The fact that two years after the war, people in Britain were still only allowed a fixed amount of bread each week.

And it decided it had finished with Palestine.

In February 1947, Britain announced that it was handing Palestine over to the United Nations.

The United Nations, or UN, was brand new. It had been set up in 1945, just after the world war ended, as a place where all the countries of the world could come together and settle their arguments by talking and voting instead of fighting. Britain had just handed it the hardest argument it owned.

Britain’s own explanation was read out in cinemas, and it did not pretend to be noble. Britain would not spend any more British lives, it said, on a country where everything it had done had earned it nothing but hatred from the Jews and bitter anger from the Arabs.

That was the official reason. Both sides hate us, and it is not worth the funerals.

Notice what Britain did not say. It did not say it would fix what it had broken. Britain had made the promise, taken the country, crushed the revolt, trained one side’s army and taken the other side’s guns away. Then it walked out of the room and left everybody else holding it.

Two sides, and they were nothing like equal

So what had the UN actually been handed? Two peoples living in one country. Here is what each of them had.

On one side, about 630,000 Jews. One person in every three. They owned six or seven percent of the land.

But look at what they had built. A whole country inside the country, finished and ready to be switched on. Something very close to their own parliament, where their leaders met and made decisions. Their own tax collectors. Schools, hospitals, universities, banks, factories, newspapers. And an army, the Haganah, with tens of thousands of trained fighters, and the Irgun and Lehi standing beside it.

On the other side, about 1.3 million Palestinians. Two people in every three. They owned or farmed most of the land.

And they had almost nothing else. No government. No money of their own. No army. No aeroplanes. Nowhere to make weapons. Their leaders were dead, or living in other countries, ever since the revolt was crushed eight years before. Their best fighters were lying in graves up in the hills.

These were not two equal teams.

Anybody who tells you this was a fair fight is not telling you the truth.

Thirty-three votes

In the summer of 1947 the UN sent a team of men to Palestine to look around and decide what should happen to it. They stayed five weeks.

The Palestinian leaders refused to meet them, and their reason was a proud one. We should not have to stand in front of strangers and beg for the right to our own country.

It was a principle, and they paid dearly for it. Those five weeks were spent listening carefully to one side, and hardly hearing the other at all.

The team went home and said Palestine should be cut in two.

And on 29 November 1947, the countries of the world gathered to vote on it.

33 voted in favour. 13 voted against. 10 refused to vote at all.

Now look at who those votes belonged to.

Every single Arab country voted no. So did every Muslim country, from Turkey to Iran to Pakistan to Afghanistan. So did India.

America and the Soviet Union were the two most powerful countries on earth, and in those years they disagreed with each other about almost everything. They both voted yes.

And Britain, which had started all of this, refused to vote either way.

Here is what those 33 votes decided.

The Jewish state would get about 56 percent of Palestine. The Arab state would get whatever was left. You will sometimes see that written as 55 rather than 56, depending on how you count the empty desert at the bottom. Either way, it is more than half.

And Jerusalem would belong to nobody at all. The city, with Bethlehem beside it, would be taken out of both states and run by the UN itself.

Read that line again, because for Muslims it is the heaviest one in the whole plan. Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since Umar ibn al-Khattab walked into it peacefully in the year 637. Al-Aqsa stands inside it, the first qiblah, one of the three sacred mosques. Now a room full of countries on the other side of the world had voted to take that city out of Arab hands and give it to a committee.

Nobody asked the people who lived there.

Now hold that 56 percent next to the numbers from the last section.

One person in three. Seven percent of the land. And they were given the bigger and far better share of the country, including nearly the whole coastline and the good farming valleys.

And inside those new borders there would be about 400,000 Arabs living alongside about 500,000 Jews. So the “Jewish state” would start life with almost half of its people being Palestinians.

In public, Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leaders said yes to the plan.

In private, several of them wrote down what they really thought. These borders were only a beginning. There would be more later.

The Palestinians said no, and so did every Arab country. Their reason was simple.

Nobody in New York owns Palestine. So nobody in New York can give away more than half of it. And certainly not to people who had mostly arrived in the last twenty-five years.

A vote in a hall thousands of miles away does not change whose family has farmed a hillside in Galilee for six hundred years.

People still ask whether the Palestinians should have said yes. The honest answer is that it is a hard question.

Some Palestinians today believe refusing was a disaster, and that half a country is better than none at all. Others answer that saying yes would have meant signing your own name to giving away more than half your homeland, leaving nearly half your people as outsiders inside somebody else’s country, and handing Jerusalem to strangers on top of it.

Both of those are serious arguments. You do not have to decide today.

The night the shooting started

When the result came through, people danced in the streets of Jewish towns all over Palestine. After the Holocaust, after everything that had been done to them, there was going to be a country of their own at last.

That happiness was real, and it deserves respect.

In Palestinian towns, nobody danced.

Families sat in their houses and worked out what the radio had just told them. A room full of strangers on the other side of the world had drawn a line straight through their country.

Their own town might be on the wrong side of that line. The land outside the window. The olive trees. The school. The ground where their grandparents were buried. All of it might belong to somebody else’s country by the summer.

And Jerusalem, with Al-Aqsa inside it, had been handed to foreigners.

The very next morning, 30 November 1947, the shooting started. Both sides, within hours.

Nobody waited for May. Nobody waited for the British to go home.

The war for Palestine began the day after the vote.

No Arab army arrived for another six months.

And during those six months, before a single Arab soldier had crossed the border, around 300,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes.

By the end of the whole Nakba, that number would reach about 750,000.

So nearly half of it had already happened before the Arab armies turned up at all.

That is the part of the story most people have never been told.