GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 4 ● Number 3 ● Summer 2002—The Al-Aqsa Intifada NUR MASALHA Nur Masalha is senior lecturer and director of the Holy Land Research Project at St Mary’s College, University of Surrey, England.
he first United States ambassador to Israel, James McDonald, told of a conversation he had with the president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, during which Weizmann spoke in “messianic” terms about the 1948 Palestinian exodus as a “miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks”. McDonald said that not one of Israel’s “big three”—Weizmann, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett—and no responsible Zionist leader had anticipated such a “miraculous clearing of the land”. 1 The available evidence (based on mountains of Israeli archival documents), however, shows that the big three had all enthusiastically endorsed the concept of “transferring” the Palestinians in the 1937–48 period and had anticipated the mass flight of Palestinian refugees in 1948, referred to by Palestinians as the nakba (catastrophe). Palestinian demography and the land issue were at the heart of the Zionist transfer mind-set and secret transfer plans of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1947, the indigenous Palestinians were the overwhelming majority in the country and owned much of the land. The Jewish community (mainly European settlers) was about a third of the total population and owned, after fifty years of land purchases, only 6 per cent of the land. In the 1930s and 1940s, the general endorsement of transfer (in different forms: voluntary, agreed and compulsory) was designed to achieve two crucial objectives: (1) to clear the land for Jewish settlers and would-be immigrants, and (2) to establish an ethnocratic and fairly homogenous Jewish state. During the same period key leaders of Labour Zionism, such as Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency, strongly believed that Zionism would not succeed in setting up a homogenous Jewish state and fulfilling its imperative of absorbing the expected influx of Jewish immigrants from Europe if the indigenous inhabitants were allowed to remain. The “nationalist socialist” ideology of Ben-Gurion and other leading figures of Labour Zionism, which from the 1930s into the 1970s dominated first the Yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine) and then the state of Israel, was a form of integral “tribal and volkisch” nationalism borrowed from central and eastern Europe. Labour Zionism rejected both Marxism and liberal forms of universalism, along with individual rights and class struggle. Instead, it gave precedence to the realisation of an “organic nationalist” settler project: the establishment in Palestine of an ethnic settler state. In this project, socialism was deployed both as a useful “mobilising myth” and an essential tool for collective (Jewish) control of the land. Although largely secular, Labour Zionism instrumentally emphasised Jewish religion and ethnicity, promoted the cult and myths of ancient history and biblical battles, revived a seemingly dead language, built up a powerful, Spartan army, surrounded its Yishuv with an “Iron Wall” and waged a bitter struggle for political independence and territorial expansion throughout the land. Zionist “nationalist socialists” repudiated liberal individualism and were suspicious of bourgeois liberal democracy. This illiberal settler–colonial, Spartan legacy of Labour Zionism continued after the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. With no social perspectives or ideological directions beyond a volkisch nationalism based on abstract “historical rights to the whole land of Israel”, the mould set in the pre-state period did not change, and the Labour leadership was unable to cope with the consequences of the 1967 war. It continued with new settlements and territorial expansion, and tried to test the Zionist method of “creating facts on the ground”. Unable to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism, Labour Zionism inevitably pursued its settler colonialism in the occupied territories. “Land redemption” (geolat adama in Hebrew), “land conquest” (kibbush adama), settler colonisation, demographic transformation, the Judaisation of Palestine and Jewish statehood have been the permanent themes of political Zionism. Jewish nation-building, ever expanding settlements, territorial ambitions and the effective use of the myths/legends and epics of the Bible went hand in hand. Zionists claim that events described in the Old Testament establish the right of twentieth-century Jews to found an ethnic Jewish state in Palestine. Contrary to the archaeological and historical evidence, the view that the Bible provides Jews with a title-deed to the “whole Land of Israel” and morally legitimises the creation of the state of Israel and its “ethnic cleansing” policies towards the native Palestinians is still pervasive in Jewish Zionist circles. In modern times, the “Land of Israel” has been invested with far-reaching historical, geopolitical and ideological connotations in Israeli rhetoric and scholarship. The reconstruction of the past by Zionist authors has often reflected their own political and religious ideologies. Zionist authors and biblical scholars have based the historical claims of modern Zionism to Eretz-Yisrael on biblical (mythical) narratives. In his seminal work, Keith Whitelam has examined the political implications of the terminology of biblical and Holy Land scholarship in this area and has shown how the naming of the land implied control and possession of the land. “Palestine” has no intrinsic meaning of its own, no history of its own, providing a mere background for the history of Israel. Commensurate with the lack of history is the absence of the inhabitants of the land. The history of Palestine and its inhabitants in general is subsumed and silenced by the concern with, and in the search for, ancient Israel.2 The ‘Empty Land’ The myth of “a land without a people” is not just an infamous fragment of early Zionist propaganda: it is ubiquitous in much of the Israeli historiography of nation-building. A few weeks after the 1967 War, Israel’s leading novelist, Amos Oz, drew attention to the deep-seated inclination among Israelis to see Palestine as a country without its indigenous inhabitants: When I was a child, some of my teachers taught me that after our Temple was destroyed and we were banished from our country, strangers came into what was our heritage and defiled it. The desert-born Arabs laid the land waste and let the terraces on the hillsides go to ruin. Their flocks destroyed the beautiful forests. When our first pioneers came to the land to rebuild it and to redeem it from desolation, they found an abandoned wasteland. True, a few backward, uncouth nomads wandered in it.3 Even in the 1990s, Israeli leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud prime minister 1996–9) were still propagating the myth of an underpopulated, desolate and inhospitable land to justify the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and obliviousness to the fate of its native inhabitants.4 Moreover, this (mythical) continuum between the ancient and the modern means this is a difficult land, one that resists agriculture and that can only be “redeemed” and made to yield up its produce by the extraordinary effort of Jewish immigrants and Zionist pioneers. It mattered little that in reality most of Palestine, other than the Negev, was no desert but an intensely and successfully cultivated fertile land. For the Zionist settler who is coming “to redeem the land”, the indigenous people earmarked for dispossession are usually invisible. They are simultaneously divested of their human and national reality and classed as a marginal non-entity. Furthermore, Zionism, like all European settler colonial movements, had to demonise and dehumanise the indigenous people in its path in order to legitimise their displacement and dispossession. Thus, the Palestinians were depicted as “conniving”, “dishonest”, “lazy”, “treacherous”, “liars”, “murderous” and “Nazis”. Indeed, Zionist historiography provides ample evidence suggesting that from the very beginning of the Yishuv in Palestine the attitude of most Zionist groups towards the native Arab population ranged from a mixture of indifference and patronising racial superiority to outright denial of its national rights, the goal being to uproot and transfer it to neighbouring countries. Leading figures such as Israel Zangwill, a prominent Anglo-Jewish writer, close lieutenant of Theodor Herzl (the founder of political Zionism) and advocate of the transfer solution, worked relentlessly to propagate the slogan that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Another use of the same myth of an empty country was made in 1914 by Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Congress and the first president of the state of Israel: In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country? The owners of the country [the Ottoman Turks?] must, therefore, be persuaded and convinced that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves.5 Disposable People Neither Zangwill nor Weizmann intended these demographic assessments in a literal fashion. They did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European white supremacy that then held sway. In this connection, a comment by Weizmann to Arthur Ruppin, head of the colonisation department of the Jewish Agency, is particularly revealing. When asked by Ruppin about the Palestinian Arabs and how he (Weizmann) obtained the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Weizmann replied: “The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value.”6 Such pronouncements by Weizmann, Zangwill and other leading Zionists planted in the Zionist mind the racist notion of an empty territory—empty not necessarily in the sense of an actual absence of inhabitants, but rather in the sense of a “civilisational barrenness” justifying Zionist colonisation and obliviousness to the fate of the native population and its eventual removal. In my previous works,7 which are largely based on Hebrew and Israeli archival sources, I have dealt with the evolution of the theme of “population transfer”—a euphemism denoting the organised removal of the Arab population of Palestine to neighbouring or distant countries. I have shown that this concept—delicately described by its proponents as “population exchange”, “Arab return to Arabia”, “emigration”, “resettlement” and “rehabilitation” of the Palestinians in Arab countries, etc.—was deeply rooted in mainstream Zionist thinking and in the Yishuv as a solution to Zionist land and political problems. Although the desire among Zionist leaders to “solve” the “Arab question” through transfer remained constant until 1948, the envisaged modalities of transfer changed over the years according to circumstances. From the mid-1930s onwards a series of specific plans, generally involving Transjordan, Syria and Iraq, were produced by the Yishuv’s transfer committees and senior officials. The justifications used in defence of the transfer plans in the 1930s and 1940s formed the cornerstone of the subsequent argumentation for transfer, particularly in the proposals put forward after 1948 and in the wake of the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. After 1967, Zionist territorial maximalists and proponents of transfer continued to assert, often publicly, that there was nothing immoral about the idea. They asserted that the Palestinians were not a distinct people but merely “Arabs”, an “Arab population”, or an “Arab community” that happened to reside in the land of Israel. Closely linked to this idea of the non-existence of the Palestinians as a nation and their non-attachment to the particular soil of Palestine was the idea of their belonging to an Arab nation with vast territories and many countries. As Ben-Gurion put it in 1929, “Jerusalem is not the same thing to the Arabs as it is to the Jews. The Arab people inhabit many great lands.”8 And if the Palestinians did not constitute a distinct, separate nation, had little attachment to Jerusalem, were not an integral part of the country and were without historical ties to it, then they could be transferred to other Arab countries without undue prejudice. Similarly, if the Palestinians were merely a marginal, local segment of a larger population of Arabs, then they were not a major party to the conflicts with Israel; therefore, Israeli efforts to deal over their heads were justified. Despite their propaganda slogans of an underpopulated land, of Palestine’s “civilisational barrenness” and of their making “the desert bloom”, all of which were issued partly for external consumption, the Zionists from the outset were well aware that not only were there people on the land, but that they were there in large numbers. Zangwill, who had visited Palestine in 1897 and come face-to-face with the demographic reality of the country, himself acknowledged in a 1905 speech to a Zionist group in Manchester that “Palestine proper had already its inhabitants. The pashalik [province] of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25 per cent of them Jews”.9 Abundant references to the Palestinian population in early Zionist texts show clearly that from the beginning of the Zionist settlement in Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs were far from being an unseen or hidden presence. Thus, Yitzhak Epstein, an early settler leader who arrived in Palestine from Russia in 1886, warned not only of the moral implications of the Zionist colonisation but also of the political dangers inherent in the enterprise. In 1907, at a time when Zionist land purchases in the Galilee were stirring opposition among Palestinian peasants forced off land sold by absentee landlords, Epstein wrote an article entitled “The Hidden Question” in which he strongly criticised the methods by which Zionists had purchased Arab land. In his view, these methods entailing dispossession of Arab farmers were bound to cause political confrontation in the future. Reflected in the Zionist establishment’s angry response to Epstein’s article are two principal features of mainstream Zionist thought: the belief that Jewish acquisition of land took precedence over moral considerations, and the advocacy of a physically separate, exclusionist and literally “pure” Jewish Yishuv. “If we want Hebrew redemption 100 per cent, then we must have a 100 per cent Hebrew settlement, a 100 per cent Hebrew farm, and a 100 per cent Hebrew port,” declared Ben-Gurion at a meeting of the Va’ad Lemumi, the Yishuv’s National Council, on 5 May 1936.10 Transfer Ben-Gurion was an enthusiastic and committed advocate of the transfer “solution”. The importance he attached not merely to transfer but forced transfer is seen in his diary entry for 12 July 1937: “The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had [an Arab-free Galilee], even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple.”11 He elaborated on the idea in his “Lines for Zionist Policy” on 15 October 1941: We have to examine, first, if this transfer is practical, and secondly, if it is necessary. It is impossible to imagine general evacuation without compulsion, and brutal compulsion ... The possibility of a large-scale transfer of a population by force was demonstrated, when the Greeks and the Turks were transferred [after the First World War]. In the present war [the Second World War] the idea of transferring a population is gaining more sympathy as a practical and the most secure means of solving the dangerous and painful problem of national minorities.12 Ben-Gurion went on to suggest a Zionist-inspired campaign in England and the United States that would aim at influencing Arab countries, especially Syria and Iraq, to collaborate with the Jewish Yishuv in implementing the transfer of Palestinians in return for economic gains. Ben-Gurion entered the 1948 war with a mind-set and premeditation to expel Palestinians. On 19 December 1947, he advised that the Haganah, the Jewish pre-state army, “adopt the method of aggressive defence; with every [Arab] attack we must be prepared to respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the [Arab] place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place”.13 In the pre-1948 period, the transfer concept was embraced by the highest levels of Zionist leadership, representing almost the entire political spectrum. Nearly all the founding fathers of the Israeli state advocated transfer in one form or another, including Theodor Herzl, Leon Motzkin, Nahman Syrkin, Menahem Ussishkin, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Tabenkin, Avraham Granovsky, Israel Zangwill, Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, Pinhas Rutenberg, Aaron Aaronson, Zeev Jabotinsky and Berl Katznelson. Supporters of “voluntary” transfer included Arthur Ruppin, a co-founder of Brit Shalom, a movement advocating binationalism and equal rights for Arabs and Jews; moderate leaders of Mapai (later the Labour party) such as Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) and Eli’ezer Kaplan, Israel’s first finance minister; and leaders of the Histadrut (Jewish Labour Federation of Palestine) such as Golda Meir and David Remez. But perhaps the most consistent, extreme and obsessive advocate of compulsory transfer was Yosef Weitz, director of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and head of the Israeli government’s official Transfer Committee of 1948. Weitz was at the centre of Zionist land-purchasing activities for decades. His intimate knowledge of and involvement in land purchase made him sharply aware of its limitations. As late as 1947, after half a century of tireless efforts, the collective holdings of the JNF—which constituted about half of the Yishuv total—amounted to a mere 3.5 per cent of the land area of Palestine. A summary of Weitz’s political beliefs is provided by his diary entry for 20 December 1940: Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country … After the Arabs are transferred, the country will be wide open for us; with the Arabs staying the country will remain narrow and restricted ... There is no room for compromise on this point ... land purchasing ... will not bring about the state ... The only way is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries, all of them, except perhaps Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Old Jerusalem. Not a single village or a single tribe must be left. And the transfer must be done through their absorption in Iraq and Syria and even in Transjordan. For that goal, money will be found—even a lot of money. And only then will the country be able to absorb millions of Jews ... there is no other solution.14 In 1930, against the background of the 1929 disturbances in Palestine, Weizmann, then president of both the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency Executive, actively began promoting ideas of Arab transfer in private discussions with British officials and ministers. He presented the colonial secretary, Lord Passfield, with an official, albeit secret, proposal for the transfer of Palestinian peasants to Transjordan whereby a loan of one million Palestinian pounds would be raised from Jewish financial sources for the resettlement operation. Lord Passfield rejected the proposal. However, the justification Weizmann used in its defence formed the basis of subsequent Zionist transfer arguments. Weizmann asserted that there was nothing immoral about the concept of transfer; that the transfer of Greek and Turkish populations in the early 1920s provided a precedent for a similar measure regarding the Palestinians; and that the uprooting and transportation of Palestinians to Transjordan, Iraq, Syria or any other part of the vast Arab world would merely constitute a relocation from one Arab district to another. Above all, for Weizmann and other Jewish Agency leaders, transfer was a systematic procedure, requiring preparation, money and a great deal of organisation, which needed to be planned by strategic thinkers and technical experts. The Transfer Committees While the desire among the Zionist leadership to be rid of the “Arab demographic problem” remained constant until 1948, the extent of the preoccupation with, and the envisaged modalities of, transfer changed over the years according to circumstances. Thus, the wishful and rather naive belief in Zionism’s early years that the Palestinians could be “spirited across the border”, in Herzl’s words, or that they would simply “fold their tents and slip away”, to use Zangwill’s formulation, soon gave way to more realistic assessments. Between 1937 and 1948 extensive secret discussions of transfer were held in the Zionist movement’s highest bodies, including the Zionist Agency Executive, the Twentieth Zionist Congress, the World Convention of Ihud Po’alei Tzion (the top forum of the dominant Zionist world labour movement), and various official and semi-official transfer committees. From the mid-1930s onwards the transfer solution became central to the assessments of the Jewish Agency (then effectively the government of the Yishuv). The Jewish Agency produced a series of specific plans, generally involving Transjordan, Syria or Iraq. Some of these plans were drafted by three “Transfer Committees”. The first two committees, set up by the Yishuv leadership, operated between 1937 and 1944; the third was officially appointed by the Israeli cabinet in August 1948. As of the late 1930s, some of these transfer plans included proposals for agrarian legislation, citizenship restriction and various taxes designed to encourage Palestinians to transfer “voluntarily”. However, in the 1930s and early 1940s, Zionist transfer proposals and plans remained largely confined to private and secret talks with British (and occasionally American) senior officials. The Zionist leadership generally refrained from airing the highly sensitive proposals in public. (On one occasion, Weizmann, in a secret meeting with the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Meiski, in February 1941, proposed transferring one million Palestinians to Iraq in order to settle Polish Jews in their place.) More importantly, however, during the Mandate period, for reasons of political expediency, the Zionists calculated that such proposals could not be effected without Britain’s active support and even actual British implementation. Moreover, the Zionist leadership was tireless in trying to shape the proposals of the Royal (Peel) Commission of 1937, which proposed a partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It has generally escaped the attention of historians that the most significant transfer proposal submitted to the commission—the one destined to shape the outcome of its findings—was put forward by the Jewish Agency in a secret memorandum containing a specific paragraph on Arab transfer to Transjordan. The 1948 Exodus There is plenty of evidence to suggest that as early as the beginning of 1948 Ben-Gurion’s advisers counselled him to wage a total war against the Palestinians, and that he entered the 1948 war with the intention of expelling Palestinians: ● Plan Dalet: a straightforward document, this Haganah plan of early March 1948 was in many ways a blueprint for the expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible. It constituted an ideological–strategic anchor and basis for the destruction of Arab localities and expulsion of their inhabitants by Jewish commanders. In conformity with Plan Dalet, the Haganah cleared various areas completely of Arab villages. ● The general endorsement of transfer schemes and the attempt to promote them secretly by mainstream Labour leaders, some of whom played a decisive role in the 1948 war, highlight the ideological intent that made the 1948 refugee exodus possible. Ben-Gurion in particular emerges as both an obsessive advocate of compulsory transfer in the late 1930s and the great expeller of the Palestinians in 1948.15 In 1948 there was no need for any cabinet decision to drive the Palestinians out. Ben-Gurion and senior Zionist military commanders, such as Yigal Allon, Moshe Carmel, Yigael Yadin, Moshe Dayan, Moshe Kalman and Yitzhak Rabin, played a key role in the expulsions. Everyone, at every level of military and political decision-making, understood that the objective was a Jewish state without a large Arab minority. Lydda and Ramle From the territory occupied by the Israelis in 1948–9 about 90 per cent of the Palestinians were driven out, many by psychological warfare and/or military pressure. A very large number of Palestinians were expelled at gunpoint. A major instance of “outright expulsion” is the widely documented case of the twin towns of Lydda and Ramle in July 1948. More than sixty thousand Palestinians were expelled, accounting for nearly 10 per cent of the total exodus. Ben-Gurion and three senior army officers were directly involved: Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan. Shortly before the capture of the towns, Ben-Gurion met with his army chiefs. Allon, commander of the Palmach, the Haganah’s elite military force, asked Ben-Gurion, “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion answered (or according to one version, gestured with his hand), “Expel them.” This was immediately communicated to the army headquarters and the expulsion implemented.16 Morris writes: At 13.30 hours on 12 July ... Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin … issued the following order: “1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit Nabala ... Implement immediately.” A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighbouring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning ... On 12 and 13 July, Yiftah and Kiryati brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50–60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns.17 In the case of Nazareth, Ben-Gurion arrived only after its capture. On seeing so many Palestinians remaining in situ, he angrily asked the local commander, “Why are there so many Arabs? Why didn’t you expel them?”18 The Haganah and Deir Yassin In the period between the mid-1930s and 1948, the Zionist leadership had embraced the concept of transfer while quietly pondering the question of whether there was a “more humane way” of expelling the indigenous Palestinians. The 1948 war proved that engineering mass evacuation was not possible without perpetrating a large number of atrocities. Indeed, the most striking result of recent historical research is that the discourse has shifted away from the orthodox Zionist interpretation of the Deir Yassin massacre as “exceptional”. The focus of study is no longer so much on the terrorism carried out by the Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang) irregular units before and during the 1948 war, but on the conduct of the mainstream Haganah/Palmach and Israel Defence Forces (IDF). At issue are the roles and involvement of the Haganah and the Israeli army in the numerous atrocities carried out in 1948. Sharif Kanaana of Birzeit University places the massacre of Deir Yassin and the evacuation of Arab West Jerusalem in 1948 within the framework of what he terms the Zionists’ “maxi-massacre pattern” in their conquest of large Palestinian cities: Jewish attacks produced demoralisation and exodus; a nearby massacre would result in panic and further flight, greatly facilitating the occupation of the Arab city and its surrounding towns and villages.19 According to Israeli military historian Arieh Yitzhaki, about ten major massacres (of more than fifty victims each) and about one hundred smaller massacres were committed by Jewish forces in 1948–9. Yitzhaki argues that these massacres, large and small, had a devastating impact on the Palestinian population by inducing and precipitating the Palestinian exodus. Yitzhaki suggests that almost in every village there were murders. Another Israeli historian, Uri Milstein, corroborates Yitzhaki’s assessment and goes even further to suggest that each battle in 1948 ended with a massacre: “In all Israel’s wars, massacres were committed but I have no doubt that the War of Independence was the dirtiest of them all.”20 Deir Yassin was the site of the most notorious massacre of Palestinian civilians in 1948—a massacre which became the single most important contributory factor to the 1948 exodus. On 9 April, between 120 and 254 unarmed villagers were murdered, including women, the elderly and children. (The number of those massacred at Deir Yassin is subject to dispute. The widely accepted death toll has been that reported in the New York Times of 13 April 1948: 254 persons.) There were also cases of rape and mutilation. Most Israeli writers today have no difficulty in acknowledging the occurrence of the Deir Yassin massacre and its effect, if not its intention, of precipitating the exodus. However, most of these writers take refuge in the fact that the massacre was committed by “dissidents” of the Irgun (then commanded by Menahem Begin) and Lehi (then co-commanded by Yitzhak Shamir), thus exonerating Ben-Gurion’s Haganah, the mainstream Zionist military force. Recently published Hebrew material, however, shows that: ● in January 1948, the mukhtar (head man) of Deir Yassin and other village notables had reached a non-aggression agreement with the Haganah and the neighbouring Jewish settlements of Giva’t Shaul and Montefiori; ● the Irgun’s assault on the village on 9 April had the full backing of the Haganah commander of Jerusalem, David Shaltiel. The latter not only chose to break his agreement with the villagers, but also provided rifles and ammunition for the Irgunists; ● the Haganah contributed to the assault on the village by providing artillery cover; ● a Haganah intelligence officer in Jerusalem, Meir Pa’il, was dispatched to Deir Yassin to assess the effectiveness and performance of the Irgun forces.21 Although the actual murders of the non-combatant villagers were carried out by the Irgun and Lehi, the Haganah must share responsibility for the slaughter. More significantly, the recently published Israeli material shows that Deir Yassin was only one of many massacres carried out by Jewish forces (mainly the Haganah and the IDF) in 1948. Recent research proves that the Palestinians were less prone to evacuate their towns and villages in the second half of the war. Hence the numerous massacres committed from June 1948 onwards, all of which were geared at forcing mass evacuation. In 1948, al-Dawayma, situated in the western Hebron hills, was a very large village, with a population of some 3,500 people. Like Deir Yassin, al-Dawayma was unarmed. It was captured on 29 October 1948 without a fight. The massacre of between eighty and one hundred villagers was carried out at the end of October 1948, not in the heat of the battle but after the Israeli army had clearly emerged victorious in the war. The testimony of Israeli soldiers present during the atrocities establishes that IDF troops under Moshe Dayan entered the village and liquidated civilians, throwing their victims into pits. “The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead.” The remaining Arabs were then shut up in houses “without food and water” as the village was systematically razed. “One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house ... and blow up the house ... One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clear the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.” A variety of evidences indicate that the atrocities were committed in and around the village, including at the mosque and in a nearby cave, that houses with old people locked inside were blown up, and that there were several cases of the rape and shooting of women.22 Clearing the Galilee The evidence surrounding the Galilee expulsions shows clearly the existence of a pattern of actions characterised by a series of massacres deigned to intimidate the population into flight. On 29–31 October 1948, the Israeli army, in a large military campaign named Operation Hiram, conquered the last significant Arab-held pocket of the Galilee. According to new Israeli archival material uncovered by Benny Morris, commanding officers issued expulsion directives: “There was a central directive by Northern Command to clear the conquered pocket of its Arab inhabitants.”23 Moreover the operation was “characterised by a series of atrocities against the Arab civilian population”.24 On 6 November 1948, Yosef Nahmani, director of the Jewish National Fund office in the eastern Galilee between 1935 and 1965, toured the newly conquered areas. He was accompanied by Immanuel Fried of Israel’s minority affairs ministry, who briefed him on “the cruel acts of our soldiers”, which Nahmani recorded in his diary: In Safsaf, after ... the inhabitants had raised a white flag, the [soldiers] collected and separated the men and women, tied the hands of fifty–sixty fellahin [peasants] and shot and killed them and buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women ... At Eilabun and Farradiya the soldiers had been greeted with white flags and rich food, and afterwards had ordered the villagers to leave, with their women and children. When the [villagers] had begun to argue ... [the soldiers] had opened fire and after some thirty people were killed, had begun to lead the rest [towards Lebanon]. Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? ... Is there is no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than such methods?25 The following is only a partial inventory of other IDF massacres committed in the Galilee in 1948: Safsaf, Jish, Sa’sa’, Saliha, ‘Eilabun, Majd al-Kurum, Deir al-Asad, al-Bi’ene, Nasr al-Din, ‘Ayn Zaytun, al-Tantura, Lydda, Tel Gezer, Khisas, Qisarya, Kabri and Abu Shusha. Erasing Villages In August 1948, a de facto “Transfer Committee” was officially (though secretly) appointed by the Israeli cabinet to plan the Palestinian refugees’ organised resettlement in the Arab states. The three-member committee was composed of Ezra Danin, a former senior Haganah intelligence officer and a senior foreign ministry adviser on Arab affairs since July 1948; Zalman Lifschitz, the prime minister’s adviser on land matters; and Yosef Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund’s land settlement department, as head of the committee. The main Israeli propaganda lines regarding the Palestinian refugees and some of the myths of 1948 were cooked up by members of this official Transfer Committee. Besides doing everything possible to reduce the Palestinian population in Israel, Weitz and his colleagues sought in October 1948 to amplify and consolidate the demographic transformation of Palestine by: ● preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes and villages; ● destroying Arab villages; ● settling Jews in Arab villages and towns and distributing Arab lands among Jewish settlements; ● extricating Jews from Iraq and Syria; ● seeking ways to ensure the absorption of Palestinian refugees in Arab countries and launching a propaganda campaign to discourage Arab return. Apparently, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion approved of these proposals, although he recommended that all the Palestinian refugees be resettled in one Arab country, preferably Iraq, rather than be dispersed among the neighbouring states. Ben-Gurion was also opposed to resettling the refugees in neighbouring Transjordan. An abundance of archival documents shows a strong correlation between the Zionist transfer solution and the 1948 Palestinian nakba. By the end of the 1948 war, hundreds of villages had been completely depopulated and their houses blown up or bulldozed. The main objective was to prevent the return of refugees to their homes, but the destruction also helped to perpetuate the Zionist myth that Palestine was virtually empty territory before the Jews entered. An exhaustive study by a team of Palestinian field researchers and academics under the direction of Walid Khalidi details the destruction of 418 villages falling inside the 1949 armistice lines. The study gives the circumstances of each village’s occupation and depopulation, and a description of what remains. Khalidi’s team visited all except fourteen sites, made comprehensive reports and took photographs. The result is both a monumental study and a kind of memoriam. It is an acknowledgement of the enormous suffering of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.26 Of the 418 depopulated villages, 293 (70 per cent) were totally destroyed, and ninety (22 per cent) were largely destroyed. Seven survived, including ‘Ayn Karim (west of Jerusalem), but were taken by Israeli settlers. While an observant traveller can still see some evidence of these villages, in the main all that is left is a scattering of stones and rubble. Legalising Expropriation Israel created a system of laws to legalise and support its massive seizure of refugee property. The Absentee Property Law, first promulgated in 1948, stated that any Arab who left his normal residence between 29 November 1947 and 1 September 1948 to go to areas outside Palestine, or to areas within Palestine that were occupied by Arab military forces, would be considered “absentee”, his land and property subject to confiscation. Violent confrontations with border “infiltrators”, often refugees in search of food and property, became the norm throughout the early 1950s. Jews, many of them new immigrants from Arab countries, were settled in homes and neighbourhoods belonging to Palestinian refugees. Subsequent policies adopted by the Jewish state—military and diplomatic, legal and political—were aimed at consolidating the power and ethnic domination of Israel’s Jewish majority. A key element in this effort was the prevention of the return of Palestinian refugees—residing inside and outside the borders of the new state—to their ancestral homes and properties. This objective has served until today as a guiding premise underlying subsequent Israeli policy concerning Palestinian refugees. The outcome of the 1948 war left Israel in control of over five million acres of Palestinian land. After the war, the Israeli state took over the land of three-quarters of a million refugees, who were barred from returning, while the remaining Palestinian minority was subjected to laws and regulations that effectively deprived it of most of its land. The entire massive drive to take over Palestinian (refugee and non-refugee) land has been conducted according to strict legality. Between 1948 and the early 1990s, Israel enacted some thirty statutes that transferred land from private Arab to state (Jewish) ownership. At the United Nations, Israel denied the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and villages, opposing in particular UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. Responsibility and Redress The 1948 Palestinian catastrophe was the culmination of over half a century of often secret Zionist plans and, ultimately, brute force. The extensive evidence shows a strong correlation between transfer discussions, their practical application in 1948 and the Palestinian nakba. The primary responsibility for the displacement and dispossession of three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees in 1948 lies with the Zionist–Jewish leadership, not least David Ben-Gurion. Since the late 1980s, the work of several Israeli “new historians”, such as Benny Morris, Simha Flapan, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim (see footnote 15), has contributed to demolishing some of the long-held Israeli and Western misconceptions surrounding Israel’s birth. Containing remarkable revelations based on Hebrew archival material, their studies throw new light on the conduct of the Labour Zionist founding fathers of the Israeli state. At the same time the Israeli establishment has done everything it can to quash these early buds of Israeli self-awareness and recognition of Israel’s role in the Palestinian catastrophe. Departments of Middle Eastern studies in Israeli universities and mainstream academics in Israel have continued to erase the Palestinian nakba as a historical event. The moral responsibility for the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe has, of course, major ramifications for the refugee question, including the issues of compensation, restitution of property and the “right of return”. The Palestinian refugee problem has remained at the centre of the Arab–Israeli conflict since 1948. It was mainly the refugees themselves who opposed schemes to resettle them in Arab countries. In general, Palestinians and Arabs refused to discuss an overall solution of the Arab–Israeli conflict before Israel declared that it accepted the repatriation of refugees, in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 1948. The resolution states that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date”. To Zionist Israelis, on the other hand, the Palestinian right of return appears to entail nothing less than the reversal of Zionism. The official Israeli position has always been that there can be no return of the refugees to Israeli territories, and that the only solution to the problem is their resettlement in the Arab states or elsewhere. Since 1949, Israel has consistently rejected a return of the 1948 refugees to their homes and villages; it has always refused to accept responsibility for the refugees and views them as the responsibility of the Arab countries in which they reside. A comprehensive and durable settlement of the Arab–Israeli conflict will depend on addressing the refugee problem seriously. For over five decades, the right of return has been central to the Palestinians’ struggle against dispossession and expulsion from their ancestral homeland and to their struggle for national reconstitution. Only by understanding the centrality of the nakba that befell the Palestinian people in 1948 is it possible to understand the Palestinians’ sense of the right of return. The wrong done to the Palestinians can only be righted through an acknowledgement of their right to return to their homeland or their right to restitution of property. The Palestinian refugees should be given a free choice between repatriation and/or compensation, in line with the international consensus enshrined in UN Resolution 194. The trauma of the nakba remains central to present-day Palestinian society (in the same way that the Holocaust has been central to Israeli and Jewish society). Today, the aspirations and hopes of millions of Palestinian refugees (in the diaspora, in the West Bank and Gaza and even some 250,000 “internal refugees” in Israel) are linked to the catastrophe of 1948. Any genuine reconciliation between the two peoples (peace between peoples as opposed to a political settlement achieved by leaders) can only begin when Israel takes responsibility for having created the Palestinian refugee problem. Holocaust denial is abhorrent; in some European countries it is a crime. Israel’s denial of responsibility for the Palestinian nakba is also abhorrent. An official apology by Israel would be a very useful first step. But this would not be sufficient. Taking responsibility also means accepting responsibility for compensation, including restitution of property and monetary reparations. Endnotes 1. James MacDonald, My Mission in Israel, 1948–1951 (London: Gollancz, 1951), pp. 160–1. 2. Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 40–5. 3. Amos Oz, “The Meaning of Homeland”, New Outlook 31, no. 1 (January 1988), p. 22, reproducing an article originally published in the daily Davar in 1967. 4. Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations (London: Bantam Press, 1993), pp. 39–40. 5. Chaim Weizman, speech delivered at a meeting of the French Zionist Federation, Paris, 28 March 1914, reproduced in Barnet Litvinoff, ed., The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 1, series B, paper 24 (Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1983), pp. 115–16. 6. See Yosef Heller, The Struggle for the State: Zionist Policy, 1936–48 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Centre, 1984), p. 140. 7. Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); A Land without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997); Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, 1967–2000 (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 8. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 39. 9. Israel Zangwill, Speeches, Articles and Letters (London: Soncino Press, 1937), p. 210. 10. David Ben-Gurion, Zichronot (Memoirs), vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1971–2), p. 163. 11. Ibid., vol. 4 (1974), pp. 297–9. 12. See Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, pp. 128–9, 166 n. 9. 13. David Ben-Gurion, Yoman hamilhamah (War diary), vol.1 (Tel Aviv: Misrad Habitahon Publications, 1982), p. 58. 14. Yosef Weitz, Diary (in Hebrew), A246/7 (Jerusalem: Central Zionist Archives), pp. 1090–1. 15. See my Expulsion of the Palestinians and the work of several Israeli revisionist historians, including Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986); Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992); Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 16. Benny Morris, “Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948”, Middle East Journal 40, no. 1 (winter 1986), p. 91. 17. Benny Morris, 1948 and After (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 2. 18. Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion (in Hebrew), vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1977), p. 776. 19. Sharif Kanaana, Still on Vacation! The Eviction of the Palestinians in 1948 (Jerusalem: SHAML [Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Centre], 1992), p. 108. 20. See Guy Erlich, “Not Only Deir Yassin” (in Hebrew), Ha’ir, 6 May 1992. 21. For further details, see Nur-eldeen Masalha, “On Recent Hebrew and Israeli Sources for the Palestinian Exodus, 1947–49”, Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (autumn 1988), pp. 122–3. 22. Ibid., pp. 127–30. See also Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, pp. 222–3, and Walid Khalidi, Deir Yassin: Friday, 9 April 1948 [in Arabic] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999). 23. Benny Morris, “Operation Hiram Revisited: A Correction”, Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 2 (winter 1999), p. 70. 24. Benny Morris, “Falsifying the Record: A Fresh Look at Zionist Documentation of 1948”, Journal of Palestine Studies 24, no. 3 (spring 1995), p. 55. 25. Quoted in Morris, “Operation Hiram Revisited”, p. 73. 26. Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). |
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Palestinian Nakba: Zionism, ‘Transfer’ and the 1948 Exodus
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