Israeli and Palestinian mark Six-day War: memories of a kibbutz and a refugee camp

National Catholic Reporter, June 6, 1997 by Neve Gordon, Jihad Hamad

June 6 marks the 30th anniversary of the Six-Day War in the Middle East. A decisive Israeli victory over several neighboring Arab countries resulted in, among other things, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

One ironic twist finds an Israeli Neve Gordon, and a Palestinian, Jihad Hamad, both attending Notre Dame University. To mark the anniversary and throw light on the Middle East situation, the two got together and shared memories of their very different lives, which in turn illustrate the very different fates of two peoples back home.

This feature was arranged by Gordon, a doctoral candidate in the department of government at the University of Notre Dame.

Gordon

On June 6, 1967, the first shells fell on the kibbutz, killing one of our members. I was just over two years old, and it is my mother's recollections that I now rely on. She was with us in the shelter, caring for the children my age, and still has vivid memories of the sound of bombs hitting the ground.

Hamad

A few months after the war, I was born in Beit Hanun, a refugee camp just North of Gaza city--not in a hospital like Israelis, but at home with a midwife. I am a sandwich kid, a robust sandwich with eight brothers and three sisters. We lived as an extended family, 25 people in a small house. I shared a bedroom with four brothers. We had a small orchard, and until the outbreak of the intifada my father worked as a tailor.

At the age of 5, I went to the Beit Hanun elementary school, built by the United Nations shortly after the occupation. I was the best student in my class, and my mother vowed that if I continued to get good grades, she would kill a goat at the end of each school year and give the meat to the poor people of our village in thanksgiving.

My first political memory is from when I was about 8. I was playing outside, above Wadi Beit Hanun, a valley that stretches across the Gaza strip. Suddenly I heard loud explosions and shots. Frightened, I ran home. Later, after the Israeli military imposed a curfew, it became clear that what I had heard was a clash between soldiers and the Palestinian resistance group Guevara Gaza, named after Che Guevara.

I can't say I really understood that we were living under occupation. Children were not allowed to go outside, and I remember a sense of animosity toward Israeli soldiers, but the full significance of these memories came later. The older people did not talk about the occupation those years, and therefore I can't recall to what extent my parents were politically aware.

Gordon

When I was 10, we moved to BeerSheva, a city located in the Israeli Negev, about 75 miles from Jihad's village, Beit Hanun. My father had accepted a teaching position at Ben-Gurion University.

Despite the fact that no other Arabs worked inside Israel, during the early 1970s the word Palestinian was almost totally erased from our vocabulary. For instance, we referred to work that Palestinians did as "Arab work." I was only aware of the word Arab. Former Prime Minister Golda Meir had denied the existence of a Palestinian people. Yitzhak Shamir and Arik Sharon followed suit, maintaining this position through the 1980s.

Replacing the particular word Palestinian with the generic term Arab was indicative of the attitude prevalent in Israeli society: Arabs were our enemies and belonged to a different species. Over the years I came to see that degrading "Arabs" was a necessary component of Israel's draconian policies. It desensitized Israelis and helped justify the state's treatment of "Arabs."

In 1978, the peace process with Egypt was in progress and my father began teaching a series of seminars called Education For Peace. University students visited our apartment regularly, and during this period I first met Palestinians. Not Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the territories occupied in 1967, but Palestinians who lived inside Israel and held Israeli citizenship. At the time, I did not know the difference.

Most Palestinian university students were working as elementary and high school teachers. I can still remember them describing the interference of the Shabak (Israeli secret service) in their daily life and work. For example, it was common knowledge that the Shabak "influenced" decisions concerning the promotion of Palestinian teachers. Any teacher politically active was putting his job on the line.

I first became aware of the occupied territories as a distinct entity in 10th grade. A group of friends, all about 15 years old, had joined the organization Peace Now. Every few months we went to the West Bank to demonstrate, particularly against the establishment of new settlements. We discussed political problems relating to land even while I remained blind to the plight of the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories. I now realize that the demonstrations were directed against the Israeli government, and did not highlight the predicament of the Palestinians. On a beautiful ridge overlooking Nablus, I remember shouting "money for the neighborhoods and not for the settlements," meaning that money should be allocated to the impoverished Jewish neighborhoods within Israel rather than to Jewish settlements in the territories.