Former Indian intelligence official Vappala Balachandran writes about the long road of betrayal of the Palestinians that began with an agreement in 1919 and continues to this day.
It was depressing to read the National Catholic Register (US) report that Bethlehem has cancelled the Christmas festivities this year because of the Gaza War. Hanna Hanania, the Christian Mayor of Bethlehem, was quoted as saying: “Bethlehem, as any other Palestinian city, is mourning and sad...We cannot celebrate while we are in this situation.”
Bethlehem is a unique city which celebrates Christmas thrice according to the centuries-old ‘Ottoman Status Quo’ (1757) which recognised the practice of different churches. While the Catholics and those following the Gregorian calendar hold midnight mass on December 25, the Orthodox Church begins its celebrations on January 6, and the Armenian Church on January 18.
Historians say that Palestine, including Jerusalem, witnessed the longest period of peace during the 401 years of Ottoman rule from 1516 to 1917, the year the British Mandate started. Even the Jewish Virtual Library admits that the rule under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent had “stimulated Jewish immigration”.
That was also the reason why even Christian Palestinians rose in revolt when Jewish migrants started pushing away others after 1948. George Habash, a Palestinian Christian physician, took up arms in 1948 when his family was driven out of his hometown Lidda. It resulted in the death of his sister during the Lidda Death March when 50-70,000 Palestinian Arabs were chased away by Israeli troops.
Habash then established a Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), distinct from Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). PFLP organised the first airline hijacking by Palestinian terrorist organisations in the 20th century. That was on July 23, 1968, when the Rome-Tel Aviv Israeli EL AL 426 flight was forced to divert to Algiers. In 1970, PFLP hijacked four airliners bound for New York City and one for London. That became sensational.
The 1960s-70s were the era of glamorous women hijackers and terrorists. The first to be noticed was 25-year-old Leila Khalid, a victim of the 1948 expulsion from Haifa. The other was Patty Hearst, daughter of billionaire newspaper magnate Randolf Hearst in California, who was abducted in 1974 by the Left-Radical Symbionese Army and forced to take part in a bank robbery.
Leila was part of the August 1969 hijacking of Rome-Tel Aviv TWA 840 which was diverted to Damascus. As her photo with kaffiyeh with an AK-47 was pasted all over the world, she underwent plastic surgery on her face to prepare for another hijacking.
On September 6, 1970, she took part in another hijacking of EL AL flight (219) Amsterdam- New York which was diverted to London where she was arrested. However, she was released by Britain on October 1. In 1973, she published her autobiography ‘My People Shall Live’ with a foreword by Lt. General Sir John Glubb, who is better known as the legendary ‘Glub Pasha’.
Sometime in 1973, I was asked by our central intelligence agencies to meet the Israeli Consul General (CG) at Bombay. I was then Deputy Commissioner of Bombay Special Branch, in charge of all security matters in the city including the watch over groups like PLO, PFLP, Abu Nidal, and others like the Japanese Red Army, Italian Red Guards, and German Baader Meinhof. In those days, we had no full diplomatic relations with Israel and their only presence was in Bombay at the consulate level.
My first introduction to Israel was a book gifted by the CG on Jerusalem jointly written by Teddy Kollek, mayor of that city from 1965 to 1993 and Moshe Pearlman, a diplomat. Later, during a visit to Jerusalem, I bought Kollek’s second book ‘Twelve Walks in the World’s Holiest City’ (1990) which beautifully describes its 4,000-year history and how it is a place of pilgrimage of the three great religions which exist cheek by jowl: the Western Wall for the Jews, the Church of Holy Sepulchre for the Christians, and the Dome of the Rock for the Muslims.
However, I was disappointed when I found that in 1993 Joost Hiltermann, noted Foreign Affairs columnist, had criticised Kollek for being responsible for initiating a process to erase historical Palestinian presence in Jerusalem on June 10, 1967, by introducing the ‘bulldozer culture’ with the removal of 100 families living in the Moghrabi (Morocco) quarter of the Old City for generations.
Later, I realised that this was not surprising to anyone who has read the history of betrayal of Palestinians beginning with the January 3, 1919 agreement, avowedly on Palestine, between Cham Weizmann, one of the founders of Israel and Emir Faisal, the future King of Iraq, son of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca. Although this was presented at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, it was clear that Faisal was only interested in being made the king in return for his revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Palestinians were the losers.
(The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. Views expressed are personal.)