I always thought that Nadine's version was correct.
You are in the majority there. I'm not sure which part you want me to document, so I'll start with Nadine's farce about the Palestinians fleeing due to commands from Arab leaders.
en.monde-diplomatique.fr
The Expulsion of the Palestinians Re-examined
Fifty years ago the UN decided to partition Palestine
into two states, one Arab, one Jewish. The ensuing
Arab-Israeli war ended with Israel expanding its
share of the land by a third, while what remained to
the Arabs was occupied by Egypt and Jordan.
Several thousand Palestinians fled their homes,
becoming the refugees at the heart of the conflict.
Israel has always denied that they were expelled,
either forcibly or as a matter of policy. Israel's "new
historians" have been re-examining that denial and
have put an end to a number of myths.
by Dominique Vidal
"Only a few acknowledged that the father's story
of return, redemption and liberation was also a
story of conquest, displacement, oppression and
death."
Yaron Ezrachi, "Rubber Bullets"
Between the partition plan for Palestine adopted by the General Assembly of
the United Nations on 29 November 1947 and the 1949 ceasefire that ended
the Arab-Israeli war, begun by the invasion of 15 May 1948, several hundred
thousand Palestinians abandoned their homes in territory that ended up
occupied by Israel (1).
Palestinian and Arab historians have always maintained that this was an
expulsion. The vast majority of the refugees (estimated at between 700,000
and 900,000) were, they say, forced to leave, first, as a result of clashes
between Israelis and Palestinians, and then by the Arab-Israeli war, in which a
political-military strategy of expulsion had been marked by several massacres.
This position was stated as far back as 1961, by Walid Khalidi, in his essay
"Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" (2) and has recently
been restated by Elias Sanbar in "Palestine 1948. L'Expulsion" (3).
Mainstream Israeli historians, on the other hand, have always claimed that the
refugees (numbering, in their estimation, 500,000 at most) mostly left
voluntarily, responding to calls from their leaders assuring them of a prompt
return after victory. They deny that the Jewish Agency (and subsequently the
Israeli government) had planned the exodus. Furthermore, they maintain that
the few (and regrettable) massacres that occurred - particularly the Deir
Yassin massacre of 9 April 1948 - were the work of extremist soldiers
associated with Menachem Begin's Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir's Lehi.
However, by the 1950s this version was already beginning to be contested by
leading Israeli figures associated with the Communist Party and with elements
of the Zionist left (notably Mapam). Later, in the mid-1980s, they were joined
in their critique by a number of historians who described themselves as
revisionist historians: Simha Flapan, Tom Segev, Avi Schlaim, Ilan Pappe and
Benny Morris. It was Morris's book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem", that first prompted public concern (4) . Leaving aside differences of
subject, methodology and viewpoint, what unites these historians is that they
are bent on unpicking Israel's national myths (5). They have focused
particularly on the myths of the first Arab-Israeli war, contributing (albeit
partially, as we shall see), to establishing the truth about the Palestinian
exodus. And in the process they have incurred the wrath of Israel's orthodox
historians (6).
This research activity was originally stimulated by two separate sets of events.
First, the opening of Israeli archives, both state and private, covering the
period in question. Here it is worth noting that the historians appear to have
ignored almost entirely both the archives of the Arab countries (not that these
are notable for their accessibility) and oral history potential among Palestinians
themselves, where considerable work has been done by other historians. As
the Palestinian historian, Nur Masalha, rightly says: "History and
historiography ought not necessarily be written, exclusively or mainly, by the
victors (7)".
Second, this delving into Israel's archives would perhaps not have borne such
fruit if the following ten years had not been marked by the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 1982 and by the outbreak of the intifada in 1987. Both these
events accentuated the split between the nationalist camp and the peace
movement in Israel itself. As it turned out, the "new historians" were
uncovering the origins of the Palestinian problem at precisely the moment that
the whole question of Palestine was returning to centre stage.
In a recent article in the "Revue d'études palestiniennes" (8), Ilan Pappe, one
of the pioneers of this "new historiography", has stressed the importance of
the dialogue that was unfolding in that period between Israelis and
Palestinians. It developed, he says, "basically among academics. Surprising as
it may seem, it was thanks to this dialogue that most Israeli researchers who
were working on their country's history and who had no links to the radical
political organisations, became aware of the version of history held by their
Palestinian counterparts. They became aware of the fundamental contradiction
between Zionist national ambitions and their enactment at the expense of the
local population in Palestine."
To this we might add that the manipulation of history for political ends is not
an exclusively Israeli domain: most often it goes hand in hand with nationalism.
What lessons have the revisionist historians drawn from their diligent
working-through of the archives? As regards the broad picture of the balance
of power between Jews and Arabs in both 1947 and 1948, their results
contradict the generally-held picture of a weak and poorly armed Jewish
community in Palestine threatened with extermination by a highly armed and
united Arab world - David versus Goliath. Quite the contrary. The revisionists
concur in pointing to the many advantages enjoyed by the nascent Jewish
state over its enemies: the decomposition of Palestinian society; the divisions
in the Arab world and the inferiority of their armed forces (in terms of
numbers, training and weaponry, and hence impact); the strategic advantage
enjoyed by Israel as a result of its agreement with King Abdullah of
Transjordan (in exchange for the West Bank, he undertook not to attack the
territory allocated to Israel by the UN); British support for this compromise,
together with the joint support of the United States and the Soviet Union; the
sympathy of world public opinion and so forth.
This all helps to explain the devastating effectiveness of the Jewish offensives
of spring 1948. It also sheds new light on the context in which the mass
departure of Palestinians took place. The exodus was divided into two
broadly equal waves: one before and one after the decisive turning-point of
the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 and the intervention of
the armies of the neighbouring Arab states on the following day. One can
agree that the flight of thousands of well-to-do Palestinians during the first few
weeks following the adoption of the UN partition plan - particularly from
Haifa and Jaffa - was essentially voluntary. The question is what was the truth
of the departures that happened subsequently?
In the opening pages of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", Benny Morris offers the outlines of an overall answer: using a map that shows the 369 Arab towns and villages in Israel (within its 1949 borders), he lists, area by area, the reasons for the departure of the local population (9). In 45 cases he admits that he does not know. The inhabitants of the other 228 localities left under attack by Jewish troops, and in 41 cases they were expelled by military force. In 90 other localities, the Palestinians were in a state of panic following the fall of a neighbouring town or village, or for fear of an enemy attack, or because of rumours circulated by the Jewish army - particularly after the 9 April 1948 massacre of 250 inhabitants of Deir Yassin, where the news of the killings swept the country like wildfire.
By contrast, he found only six cases of departures at the instigation of local Arab authorities. "There is no evidence to show that the Arab states and the AHC wanted a mass exodus or issued blanket orders or appeals to the Palestinians to flee their homes (though in certain areas the inhabitants of specific villages were ordered by Arab commanders or the AHC to leave, mainly for strategic reasons)." ("The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", p. 129). On the contrary, anyone who fled was actually threatened with "severe punishment". As for the broadcasts by Arab radio stations allegedly calling on people to flee, a detailed listening to recordings of their programmes of that period shows that the claims were invented for pure propaganda.
Military operations marked by atrocities
In "1948 and After" Benny Morris examines the first phase of the exodus and
produces a detailed analysis of a source that he considers basically reliable: a
report prepared by the intelligence services of the Israeli army, dated 30 June
1948 and entitled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period
1/12/1947-1/6/1948". This document sets at 391,000 the number of
Palestinians who had already left the territory that was by then in the hands of
Israel, and evaluates the various factors that had prompted their decisions to leave. "At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations." To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to "fears" and "a crisis of confidence" affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases...
In short, as Morris puts it, this report "undermines the traditional official Israeli
'explanation' of a mass flight ordered or 'invited' by the Arab leadership".
Neither, as he points out, "does [the report] uphold the traditional Arab
explanation of the exodus - that the Jews, with premeditation and in a
centralised fashion, had systematically waged a campaign aimed at the
wholesale expulsion of the native Palestinian population." However, he says
that "the circumstances of the second half of the exodus" - which he estimates
as having involved between 300,000 and 400,000 people - "are a different
story."
One example of this second phase was the expulsion of Arabs living in Lydda
(present-day Lod) and Ramleh. On 12 July 1948, within the framework of
Operation Dani, a skirmish with Jordanian armoured forces served as a
pretext for a violent backlash, with 250 killed, some of whom were unarmed
prisoners. This was followed by a forced evacuation characterised by
summary executions and looting and involving upwards of 70,000 Palestinian
civilians - almost 10% of the total exodus of 1947- 49. Similar scenarios were
enacted, as Morris shows, in central Galilee, Upper Galilee and the northern
Negev, as well as in the post-war expulsion of the Palestinians of Al Majdal
(Ashkelon). Most of these operations (with the exception of the latter) were
marked by atrocities - a fact which led Aharon Zisling, the minister of
agriculture, to tell the Israeli cabinet on 17 November 1948: "I couldn't sleep
all night. I felt that things that were going on were hurting my soul, the soul of
my family and all of us here (...) Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and
my entire being has been shaken (10)."
The Israeli government of the time pursued a policy of non- compromise, in
order to prevent the return of the refugees "at any price" (as Ben Gurion
himself put it), despite the fact that the UN General Assembly had been calling
for this since 11 December 1948. Their villages were either destroyed or
occupied by Jewish immigrants, and their lands were shared out between the
surrounding kibbutzim. The law on "abandoned properties" - which was
designed to make possible the seizure of any land belonging to persons who
were "absent" - "legalised" this project of general confiscation as of December
1948. Almost 400 Arab villages were thus either wiped off the map or
Judaised, as were most of the Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a
report drawn up in 1952, Israel had thus succeeded in expropriating 73,000
rooms in abandoned houses, 7,800 shops, workshops and warehouses, 5
million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and - most important of all -
300,000 hectares of land (11).
In "1948 and After" (chapter 4), Benny Morris deals at greater length with the
role played by Yosef Weitz, who was at the time director of the Jewish
National Fund's Lands Department. This man of noted Zionist convictions
confided to his diary on 20 December 1940: "It must be clear that there is no
room in the country for both people (...) the only solution is a Land of Israel,
at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for
compromise. (...) There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the
neighbouring countries(...) Not one village must be left, not one (bedouin)
tribe."
Seven years later, Weitz found himself in a position to put this radical
programme into effect. Already, in January 1948, he was orchestrating the
expulsion of Palestinians from various parts of the country. In April he
proposed - and obtained - the creation of "a body which would direct the
Yishuv's war with the aim of evicting as many Arabs as possible". This body
was unofficial at first, but was formalised at the end of August 1948 into the
"Transfer Committee" which supervised the destruction of abandoned Arab
villages and/or their repopulation with recent Jewish immigrants, in order to
make any return of the refugees impossible. Its role was extended, in July, to
take in the creation of Jewish settlements in the border areas.
Israel's battle to bar the return of Palestinian exiles was also pursued on the
diplomatic front. Here, as Henry Laurens noted in a review of the revisionist
historians (12), "the opening- up, and the use, of the archives made it possible
to revise a number of previously-held positions. Contrary to the widely held
view, the Arab leaders were prepared for compromise." As soon as the war
ended, the Arab leadership was trying, within the context of the Lausanne
Conference, to arrive at a general settlement based on Arab acceptance of
the UN partition plan (Ilan Pappe gives a detailed account of their efforts
(13)), in exchange for Israeli acceptance of a right of return for the refugees.
Despite international pressure - with the United States to the fore - this
enterprise was to founder on the intransigence of the Israeli authorities,
particularly once the Jewish state had been admitted to the United Nations.
Despite this extraordinary accumulation of evidence, Benny Morris concludes
in his first book that "the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by
design, Jewish or Arab." ("The Birth...", p. 286) His second book offers a
more considered approach, in which he recognises that the Palestinian exodus
was "a cumulative process, there were interlocking causes, and there was a
main precipitator, a coup de grace, in the form of Haganah, Irgun and IDF
assault in each locality". ("1948...", p. 32). This shift of position does not,
however, prevent him from continuing to resist any notion of a Jewish
expulsion plan, and to exonerate David Ben Gurion, president of the Jewish
Agency and subsequently prime minister and defence minister of the
newly-created Israeli state.
As Norman G. Finkelstein has highlighted, in a textual study that is as brilliant
as it is polemical (14), this twin denial by Benny Morris seems at first sight to
contradict what Morris says himself. After all, he himself tells us that "the
essence of the [Dalet] plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile
forces out of the interior of the prospective territory of the Jewish State,
establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish
population and securing the Jewish State's future borders before, and in
anticipation of, the Arab invasion." ("The Birth...", p. 62) And he also
recognises that Plan D, while it did not give carte blanche for an expulsion of
civilians, was nevertheless "a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for
expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders" for whom it
provided "post facto a formal persuasive covering note to explain their
actions" (p. 63). Benny Morris contrives to make two seemingly contradictory
statements within two pages of each other, namely that "Plan D was not a
political blueprint for the expulsion of Palestine's Arabs" and that "from the
beginning of April, there are clear traces of an expulsion policy on both
national and local levels". ("The Birth...", pp. 62 and 64)
The same is true as regards the responsibility or otherwise of David Ben
Gurion. Morris makes clear that the prime minister was the originator of the
Dalet Plan. In July 1948 we find Ben Gurion again, giving the order for the
operations in Lydda and Ramleh: "Expel them!" he told Yigal Allon and
Yitzhak Rabin - a section censored out of Rabin's memoirs, but published
thirty years later in the "New York Times" (15). This order, Morris tells us,
had not been debated within the Israeli government. In fact, some days
previously the Mapam, partner of the ruling Mapai, had obtained from the
prime minister an instruction explicitly forbidding the military to carry out
expulsion measures... Ben Gurion later attacked the hypocrisy of this Marxist
Zionist party for condemning "activities" in which its own militants, Palmah
troops and kibbutzniks alike, had also taken part.
In Nazareth, General Chaim Laskov decided to take the official instruction
literally. One story has Ben Gurion arriving there, discovering the local
population still in situ, and declaring angrily "What are they doing here?" (16)
Also in July, but this time in Haifa, we have Ben Gurion as the man behind the
scenes in the operation for the "de-localisation" of the 3,500 Arabs still
remaining in the town, followed by the partial destruction of the former Arab
quarter.
In short, as Morris himself points out, power at that period of Israel's history
resided with Ben Gurion and with him alone. All issues, whether military or
civilian, were decided with him, often without the slightest consultation with
the government, let alone with the parties that comprised it. In such a situation,
the absence from the archives of any formal parliamentary or governmental
decision to expel the Palestinians proves nothing. As Morris himself admits,
"Ben Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders;
he preferred that his generals 'understand' what he wanted done. He wished
to avoid going down in history as the 'great expeller'" ("The Birth...", pp.
292-3).
The fact that the founder of the State of Israel took advantage of the
impressive extent of his powers and worked towards the maximum
enlargement of the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the United
Nations, and towards reducing its Arab population to a minimum, is a matter
of historical fact. Morris devoted an important article (17) to Ben Gurion's
long-term support for the transfer project. As he writes in his preface to
"1948 and After...", "Already from 1937 we find Ben Gurion (and most of the
other Zionist leaders) supporting a 'transfer' solution to the 'Arab problem'
(...) Come 1948, and the confusions and deplacement of war |
