Injustice in three dimensions

A GOOD PIECE
By Robert Fisk

"....and when I peer through the eyepieces, I perceive two facts: that the peasants stand out in three-dimension against the fertile fields and trees of Ottoman Palestine; and that this ancient province was not the "barren" land which Israeli song and legend makes it out to be.....

For Gabby, too, there was no need to be brain-washed about Zionism. His fellow youth leaders were "role models" and he worked happily in the early 1960s with his very young wife at Kibbutz Nachshonim, whose economic future rested on the successful farming of a large and very fertile valley which, a few years earlier, had belonged to Palestinians. Gabby has since written to me about his story so, beside his letter, I pull out more of his picture cards and insert them in my wooden Perfecscope. There are Palestinian Arab fishermen off a distant Haifa, women in Palestinian traditional dress in a Hebron orchard, others in headscarves barley harvesting near Bethlehem, a procession of Arab Christians at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There are a few photographs of bearded Palestinian Jews, including an ageing rabbi; members of a Jewish population which, in the 1900s, represented less than 10 per cent of the population. But the three-dimensional greyness of these pictures in my Perfecscope cast a disturbing, tragic light across the landscapes. The middle-aged Arab women would live to hear of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, though only the children, staring innocently at the camera, would – in middle age, of course – live to experience the Palestinian exile and the creation of the Israel to which Gabby journeyed.

In a deeply moving letter to his granddaughter, he describes his own partial conversion when, after being long convinced that "we Jews had arrived where we belonged", he had to drive a tractor out of his kibbutz, turning right at the gate and dumbing rubbish in a pile of garbage down the road. "I decided to turn left and take the tractor towards the border – a route that was rarely taken, and somewhat forbidden, by anyone in the kibbutz. Within a couple of miles I came across two groups of white stone buildings and mature eucalyptus and fig trees, blown apart and empty – once the cool and no doubt beautiful homes of Palestinians... How could I not stop and think about this major dislocation right on my very doorstep... I became a ghost in a ghost town that no one ever spoke about."

This wasn't the only reason Gabby left Israel. There was "the growing existential feeling that I couldn't live a life where everything was predicted in advance". But the visit to the abandoned village remained central to his experience. "It reveals how small things lead to other things," he told me this week. "It was a realisation in such a stark manner, the Arab homes all blown up and me alone, seeing that. I'd never been there before."

So I looked once more at that lost world of Gabby's, and all the figures stretching away 3D across the fields and hills. Their fate was already set in drawing rooms in London, decided by the coming war which would finally take down those tiny Turkish flags in the pictures. Underwood and Underwood – and Gabby – gave me the 3D ghosts of the Palestinians. Of course, he had to turn left at the gate to find them."