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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Israel: Rethinking 1948 So, I just finished reading Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and I have to say it is one powerful book. Pappe is a Jewish Israeli historian, professor of Political Science at Haifa University, Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva, and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. A leading member of the Israeli "new historian" movement, he has published numerous books questioning the traditional Zionist narrative of the creation and development of the State of Israel. This particular book, while solidly based in archival research, is conceived and written as a polemic, explicitly designed to challenge Israelis' understandings of how their nation came into being and to assign a high degree of historical culpability to the Zionist leadership for the current state of Mideast politics. Pappe takes aim at one of the central themes of Israeli history: that of perpetual Jewish victimization. In particular, he directly attacks the received wisdom on the 1948 War of Independence: that Israel's Arab neighbors, motivated by an irrational desire to drive the Jews into the sea, invaded the Zionist state as soon as it declared its independence, only to be thwarted by the plucky and resourceful Zionists who not only defended themselves successfully from the aggression but were even able to expand their territory in the face of adversity. The truth, he says, is quite different. In fact, he contends, under the direction of Zionist leader David Ben Gurion and a small group of close advisors, the Hagana began a coordinated ethnic cleansing campaign in December 1947, which succeeded in expelling some 200,000 Palestinians from their homes prior to the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948. Faced with a growing refugee problem, and pressure from civil society in their own countries, Arab leaders sent defensive forces into those areas of Palestine reserved for the Palestinian State under the United Nations' partition plan. These forces, generally weak, uncoordinated, and ineffective, hoped to help Palestinian villagers organize local militias to defend themselves against the ongoing cleansing operations organized by the Hagana and its associated militias (the Stern Gang and the Irgun). The only Arab forces to enjoy any success whatsoever, however, were those of the Hashemite kingdom operating on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Despite repeated efforts to conduct expulsion operations in those areas, the Zionists were unable to make effective inroads there, and the Jordanians then absorbed the West Bank into their kingdom. The core argument of the book rests on the characterization of Hagana activities through 1948 as an ethnic cleansing operation. Previous historians have reached similar conclusions, most notably the Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose groundbreaking Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (first published in 1989 and revised and updated in 2004) was the first to assert a degree of Israeli responsibility for the creation of nearly a million Palestinian refugees during the war for independence. In the revised edition, Morris contended Ben Gurion was aware of, and approved in advance, the cleansing operations conducted by the Hagana military. Palestinian historians have also produced oral histories of Israeli ethnic cleansing during 1948, and Pappe's research suggests those oral histories match the archival record closely. Pappe, however, goes further than previous Israeli historians in his characterizations of the ethnic cleansing campaign. In particular, he attempts to refute Morris's assertion that no cleansing operations occurred prior to the declaration of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948. Basing himself on Hagana archival sources, and the diaries of Ben Gurion and Yossef Weitze, Pappe reconstructs the activities of a group he calls the Consultancy. Composed of about eleven of Israel's founding fathers, including Ben Gurion, Weitze, Yigal Allon, and Yigael Yadin, the Consultancy according to Pappe planned and oversaw a systematic campaign both to drive Palestinians out of the Jewish State and to expand the boundaries of that state beyond the 52% of Mandatory Palestine assigned to it by the UN to the more than 70% of the territory Israel occupied by the end of the 1948 War. Pappe insists on characterizing Zionist actions in 1948 as ethnic cleansing, and he does so in order to denounce them as a crime against humanity. His purpose is to undermine Israel's moral legitimacy in order, and this is key, to put the Palestinian refugee question back on the table as an issue Israel must address in any future lasting peace settlement. A running theme throughout the book is to compare Serbian ethnic cleansing operations during the 1990s Balkans wars with Zionist actions against Palestinians in 1948. The book does have flaws. The copy editing in particular was very spotty, and while one can always read through typographical errors in a text it is more serious when footnotes are not always aligned properly. Here also, there are minor errors and more serious ones. For example, the reader can make sense of Chapter 7, where footnote four precedes 2 and 3 (p. 147), but it gets more confusing with mistakes such as the one in footnote 26 on p. 19. This note, purportedly citing an interview conducted "many years" after Moshe Pasternak joined the Zionist intelligence services after 1940, in fact refers to a document in Hagana archives dated December 1, 1939. Now, there are any number of reasonable explanations for how such an error could occur in the footnotes of a history book, ranging from sloppy recordkeeping by the historian through sloppy copyediting at the publisher all the way down to deliberate sabotage in the printshop. Deliberate fabrication, while possible, is highly unlikely, given how easily a reader could discover the mistake. Nevertheless, the existence of such mistakes -- and there are in fact several of them, especially in the early chapters of the book -- does detract from the work's credibility. This is particularly unfortunate given the very extraordinary revision Pappe proposes for Israeli historiography. In the end, though, the sheer diversity of sources Pappe cites strongly suggests a successful systematic campaign by the Zionists to expel Palestinians from their homes and to appropriate their property. When one reads Herzl's 1895 declaration in his diary "We shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country," or Ben Gurion's similar statement in 1947 that "there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent," (both quotes on p. 250); when one reads chapter after chapter citing official orders to Hagana units to cleanse specific villages within specific geographic regions within a specific time frame, in many cases with the units reporting back -- again documented in the Hagana archives -- that they successfully carried out their mission; when one reads Menachem Begin proudly declaring how he deliberately inflated the number of dead at Deir Yassin, and publicized the false number in scores of Palestinian villages in order to strike fear and encourage them to leave ... after a while the weight of the evidence piles up, and you come to the realization that something happened in 1948, and Arab aggression certainly can't explain all of it. I would not say this book is the definitive treatment of 1948. Personally, I would like to see a lot more social history of the Palestinians prior to 1948, and I'd like to see a more detailed military history of the 1948 war. Nevertheless, the charge of ethnic cleansing -- inflammatory as it is -- stands eloquently presented, and it requires a serious response. The evidence is strong, though not yet conclusive, that the Zionists committed a vast crime against humanity in 1948. At the very least, Israel needs to take seriously its obligations to the descendants of those expelled from the country during the War of Independence
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More inconvenient truths that can get you a new label. I don't think studying this history is a crime anywhere yet.
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. – Tacitus
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