Like the cursed villages of some ancient fables, Huj was erased one summer afternoon, its mud-brick huts, its water-wheel well, and its 150-odd families disappearing into the sands. Later, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli general who served as the country’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006, purchased the land to build Havat Shikmim, or Sycamore Ranch, so named for the trees that grew wild there. The remnants of the village mosque, one visitor recorded, were converted into a stable for the general’s thoroughbred horses.
Two years ago on Tuesday, under the cover of a barrage of rockets, 41 Palestinian terrorists tore through the fencing separating Gaza from the land that was once Huj, killing dozens of people, most of them civilians. They occupied the police station, setting off a battle that ended only after tanks and helicopters were called in.
As negotiators meet to hammer out an end to the savage war that followed, the story of how the village of Huj became the Israeli city of Sderot illustrates the unending sorrow and rage that drive the conflict. “Every day,” journalist Lucas Minisini reported earlier this year, “Israelis gather at an observation deck in Sderot to watch the war ravaging the Palestinian enclave.”
The story of Huj-Sderot, though, shows annihilation is not a solution to hatred. To live in peace, Israelis and Palestinians must find ways to share not just land, but a destiny.
Troubled histories
Founded in 1820 by the Ottoman Governor of Gaza, Mustafa Bey, the village of Huj lay between two hills in the Negev desert, at the crossroads of ancient trade routes between Gaza and Beersheba. Like Israel’s Zionist founding patriarchs a century later, Bey populated the village by offering the new Bedouin settlers free land—and setting up a police station, to guarantee security. The new settlers grew figs, grapes, and apricots along with cereals, and tended to herds of sheep, historian Walid Khalidi recorded.
The oldest map of historical Palestine—a floor mosaic now contained in the Church of St George in Jordan’s Madaba—suggests that Huj was in existence from at least 6 BC, one civilisation layering itself over the other. In 1892, interestingly, French explorer Victor Guerin noted the remnants of grey marble columns near the village’s main well, perhaps remnants of an ancient monument.
In 1917, the British Empire defeated the Ottomans and Germans in the third of a year-long series of battles over Gaza, opening the way for the capture of Jerusalem. That year, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised the banker and Conservative politician Lionel Rothschild a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.
The term “national home”, unknown in international law, was deliberately vague. In 1915, the British High Commissioner to Egypt, Henry McMahon—also the author of the controversial border line between Tibet and India—had made a parallel promise to Hussein Bin Ali, the ruler of Mecca, promising Arab independence in his territories. This led the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916, unaware that the United Kingdom, France, and Russia had concluded a secret agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories.
From 1883, Jewish settlers had been arriving in Palestine, buying land from local Arabs to set up agricultural settlements. The movement had the financial support of Baron Edmund de Rothschild, who believed Jewish life in Palestine depended on the foundation of profitable farming. The number of settlers accelerated sharply in the 1930s, in response to growing antisemitism in Europe. The settlement closest to Huj, Doron, was set up in 1941.
The work of the eminent historian Benny Morris shows that the Arab residents of Huj, like many across Palestine, had a friendly relationship with the new settlers. The settlers needed labour, which communities like the one in Huj provided. Indeed, in 1946, the residents of Huj sheltered members of the Zionist militia Haganah in the face of a British military crackdown. And in mid-December 1947, the headman of Huj was murdered by a mob in Gaza, who accused him of being pro-Jewish.
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Friends and enemies
From mid-May 1948, though, Egyptian forces began to advance through Gaza, and Israeli attitudes changed. Even if the residents of villages like Huj had been supportive, their presence was now seen as posing a strategic threat. Troops of Israel’s Negev Brigade—among the formations which fought at Sderot during the 7 October carnage—began a campaign of ethnic cleansing, expelling Arab villagers from regions northeast of Gaza. They soon realised they had a problem: Though villagers fled in the face of force, they returned to their lands once Israeli troops withdrew.
More brutal means began to be used to push Arab villagers into Gaza. The Negev Brigade’s 9th Battalion, Morris records, executed dozens of army-age men at the village of Burayar, and raped a teenage girl. Five men were shot dead after Israeli troops faced resistance in Sumsum, and the village’s grain stores and well were destroyed.
Even Arabs offering to accept Israeli rule, Morris writes, suffered the same fate. The Dar Shurbaji clan in the village of Zarnuqa offered to surrender its weapons in return for being allowed to continue to live on its lands. Late in May 1948, though, Israeli troops bombarded the village with mortars. The Left-wing Israeli party Mapam’s newspaper, Al Hamishmar, reported that “one of the soldiers opened a door and fired a Sten at an old man, an old woman and a child in one burst.”
Then, it was the turn of Huj.
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A bloody legacy
Israel’s intelligence services dismissed fears that embittered refugees would turn into a permanent threat to their new state. The burden would, instead, fall on Arab states, who would have to bear the economic and political costs of refugee flows into their territories, the argument went. To Israel’s intelligence services, it seemed the violence of 1948 had crushed their opponents. “The Arab emigrant did not turn into a fighter, his only interest now is in collecting money,” argues one intelligence analysis discovered by historian Ilan Pappe. “He has resigned himself to the lowest form of life.”
Events have shown this was a catastrophic miscalculation. From 1955, tensions began to rise in Gaza, when a military raid led by Ariel Sharon—then a young military officer—claimed the lives of 38 Palestinians. Through the 1970s, the nationalist organisation al-Fatah conducted a series of terrorist attacks. The group’s eventual failure, in the 1980s, ceded space to the Islamists, represented by Hamas.
As Hamas grew more powerful, Sderot came under relentless attack from home-made rockets—some landing rockets even as President Barack Obama visited the city in 2013.
Israel’s operations since 7 October have demonstrated that force isn’t fixing its problems this time either. Estimates made by the United States, scholar Raphael Cohen writes, suggest Hamas has been able to recruit some 15,000 new personnel since the war began, replacing much of the rank-and-file it has lost. The organisation’s structure has survived the killing of its top leadership, and swathes of the tunnel network it has used to launch attacks still survive.
Leila Seurat, a French expert on Hamas, argues that the organisation is in fact succeeding in drawing Israel into an unwinnable war in Gaza. Far from being a sign of weakness, she suggests, Hamas’ prompt acceptance of US peace proposals is part of a plan to make the organisation invisible, and operate from among the midst of an immiserated, desperate, and angry population.
A few Arabs succeeded in remaining in southern Israel after 1948 and built lives as Israelis. Their descendants included Amer Abu Sabila, who saved a mother and her two children during the 7 October attacks at the cost of his own life. The story shows that the tragedies of 1948 need not be destiny.
The talks in Egypt might lead to the end of the war. But unless Israelis and Arabs can find a way to live together, they are unlikely to mark the beginning of peace. That task might seem impossible, but the alternative is endless killing.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)