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Knut Rognes
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>From: MER <MERL@MiddleEast.Org>
>To: "MER" <MERL@MiddleEast.Org>
>Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 08:10:28 +0000
>Subject: Exposing Israel's Original Sins
>Reply-To: MER@MiddleEast.Org
>Organization: MiD-EasT RealitieS
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>MER WEEKEND READING:
>
> EXPOSING ISRAEL'S ORIGINAL SINS
>
> By Gideon Levy
>
> "Correcting a Mistake - Jews and Arabs
> in Palestine/Israel, 1936-1956," by
> Benny Morris, Am Oved Publishers,
> 241 pages, NIS 64
>
>
>Oh, we were so good (and did so many bad things). We were so right (and
>caused so many injustices). We were so beautiful (and our actions resulted
>in so much ugliness). And oh, we were so innocent and spread so many lies -
>lies and half-truths that we told ourselves and the rest of the world.We,
>who were born afterward, weren't told the whole truth; they only taught us
>the good parts, of which there were many. But, after all, there were also
>dark chapters which we heard nothing about. Instead, we were fed lies -
>there's just no other word for it.
>
>They lied when they told us that the Arabs of Lod and Ramle "asked to leave
>their cities" (the head of the history department of the Israel Defense
>Forces). They lied when they told us that the murderous Kibiya operation was
>carried out by "enraged residents" (David Ben-Gurion). They lied when they
>told us that all the "infiltrators" were bloodthirsty terrorists, that all
>the Arab states wanted to destroy us and that we were the only ones who
>simply wanted peace all the time.
>
>They lied; oh, how they lied. We didn't hear a thing about the horrific
>massacre in Safsaf; and not a syllable was uttered about the deportation
>plans.
>
>The Arabs were always the bad guys. We were the absolute righteous, or the
>exclusive victims - or so we were told. Perhaps they didn't want to spoil it
>for us; perhaps they didn't want to ruin it for themselves. The huge
>celebration of a nation without a country that came to a country without a
>nation, settled it, caused its barren wilderness to blossom and established
>a glorious state - with exemplary, impeccable morality - should have been
>complete. As large, true and deserving as it may be, however, this
>celebration cannot be complete without recounting its entire history.
>Historical mud-slinging
>The time for telling the whole truth is well upon us. Over the past 12 years
>or so - and much to the distress of the "old" historians, whose enterprises
>are developing cracks - a number of "new" historians have taken up the
>challenge.
>
>The rage with which the old historians are responding to the new historical
>enterprise is, perhaps, the entire story: If they had questioned their
>truths, which are beginning to crumble before their denying, repressive
>eyes, it is doubtful whether they would be so angry. After all, if they are
>so sure of themselves, why are they reacting so vociferously and making such
>a fuss? History, as the saying goes, will be the judge ... won't it?
>
>As the doubts begin to surface, with Yitzhak Rabin, the banisher of the
>Arabs of Lod and Ramle, admitting his deeds even before the historian who
>tried to ignore and cover them up did, it is easy to understand the
>mud-slinging campaign that the old historians are waging against their new
>colleagues. With nowhere else to turn, this is their last resort. With no
>other sanctuary available, patriotism, as per usual, becomes the safe
>harbor.
>
>Benny Morris certainly has a large stake in the new historical enterprise,
>even if it would have been better if he had let others determine that, "The
>turning point ... came in 1988, heralded, inter alia, in the first article
>in this compilation" (page 12). Morris' two earlier books - "Israel's Border
>Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to
>the Suez War" (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993), and "The Birth of the
>Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1948" (Cambridge Middle East Library,
>1987) - are foundations for an understanding of the roots of the
>Israeli-Arab conflict.
>
>If you want to understand the Palestinian uprising in the territories, go to
>these two books. If you want to understand why a settlement is impossible
>without a solution to the refugee problem, go to Morris. All the
>early-warning signs appear in his works. They show how our relationship with
>the Arabs began. Everything that followed, up until this very day, is
>anchored in their - and particularly our - original sins, which Morris and
>his colleagues have exposed.
>
>Don't get me wrong. Among his colleagues, the new historians, Morris is
>certainly the least political and most Zionistic. His name doesn't appear on
>the protest petitions of the extreme left, and he defines himself as a
>Zionist, without reservations. He is more concerned with his historical
>findings than he is with their political and moral implications. Sometimes,
>his findings appear to cause him a certain discomfort, but you won't catch
>him voicing unequivocal moral assessments of his revelations, as chilling as
>they may be, particularly not to anyone who didn't know an Avraham (or
>Ibrahim) of those days.
>
>He hasn't written ideological articles either. As assiduous a researcher,
>and as hard-working an in-the-field reporter (Morris began his professional
>life as a journalist) as he was, he presents the story and leaves us to draw
>most of the conclusions.
>
>Morris' conclusions, one can safely assume, are a lot more forgiving than
>one would expect, and in this, lies his strength: Despite the claims leveled
>against the new historians, Morris does not home in on a target before
>embarking on his research. Neither does he hesitate to present findings that
>contradict or weaken his basic theories. For Morris, the experience
>determines the consciousness, and not vice-versa. A small ideologist and a
>significant historian - that's Morris in a nutshell.
>
>His new book, "Correcting a Mistake," is a collection of articles that come
>together to form a gripping, infuriating collage of injustices committed
>between 1936-1956 by the Jewish community of Palestine, and thereafter, the
>state, against the native Palestinians.
>
> No contrition
>
>This time, in contrast to his other books, Morris doesn't focus on one
>particular issue. Contrary to the connotations stemming from the name of the
>book, this is not an expression of contrition. Morris doesn't present new
>findings to sweeten the previous bitter pills he asked us to swallow. Quite
>the opposite: Regrettably, the opening of the archives, which had been
>closed for some 50 years, and the exposure of new material has shed more
>light on the picture, which Morris had painted, in shadow, and which now,
>stirs up more fury than he first imagined.
>
>"The Deportations of the Hiram Operation: Correcting a Mistake" is the title
>of the article from which the collection takes its name. "Sometimes a
>historian must correct a mistake," Morris writes, and the reader is riveted.
>Perhaps it never happened? Perhaps there were no deportations or massacres?
>Perhaps Morris was wrong and everything was done by the book?
>
>Not a chance! Over a decade after the publication of "The Birth of the
>Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1948," Morris reveals that he did, indeed,
>make a mistake, but errors and omissions accepted. He believed Major General
>(res.) Moshe Carmel and other sources, who told him that no deportation
>orders were issued during the course of Operation Hiram, to be the dirtiest
>there was.
>
>And now, the IDF archives have been opened and there we find a cable dated
>October 31, 1948, signed by Major General Carmel and addressed to all the
>division and district commanders under his command: "Do all you can to
>immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile
>elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be
>helped to leave the areas that have been conquered."
>
>Perhaps this was the right thing to do; perhaps there was no alternative.
>But why lie all these years? Why didn't they say: "Righteousness encountered
>righteousness; a victim encountered a victim; and this was the inevitable
>result. We had to deport them. It was either them or us." It's a lot more
>convincing than lying about it. The only thing is, Carmel's deportation
>order isn't the whole truth which Morris reveals in "Correcting a Mistake."
>
>Apparently, Carmel's troops carried out massacres in no less than 10 (!)
>villages in the north of the country. They would gather the men of these
>villages in the square, choose a few of them, sometimes dozens, stand them
>up against a wall and shoot them. Because the IDF has kept the relevant
>document under wraps, we know nothing about these massacres. We can only
>hope that this nonsense, this outrageous practice of keeping things
>confidential, passes from the world and that 52 years on, we will eventually
>learn everything - where we went wrong and the evil things we did.
>
> Blood-chilling testimonies
>
>In any event, Morris presents a number of blood-chilling testimonies, first
>hand, about the massacres carried out during Operation Hiram, the numbers of
>which are different to and far more serious than any other operation. No, he
>doesn't say that Carmel ordered the massacres; who knows, perhaps there's
>another confidential document that does, and Morris will have to correct
>another mistake. But, he deduces - based on the large number of incidents in
>this particular operation, their similar nature, and the fact that no one
>was punished in their wake - that the commanders understood Carmel's orders
>to be a stamp of approval for acts of murder that would make the residents
>of the villages flee.
>
>Up until a short while ago, one could have run into the pleasant-mannered
>Carmel, who served as a government minister on behalf of the now-defunct
>Achdut Ha'avoda and Ma'arach parties, sitting in the Beit Ariella municipal
>library in Tel Aviv, seven days a week, and browsing through the newspapers
>like one of the pensioners. He was also among the very good people who did a
>number of very bad things.
>
>Terrible things were done after the War of Independence, too; for example,
>in the town of Majdal in 1950. At that stage, Israel was already quite sure
>of itself - big, but not big enough, as far as it was concerned.
>
>Some 10,000 Palestinians lived in Majdal before the war and, in October
>1948, thousands more refugees from nearby villages joined them. Majdal fell
>in November and most of its residents and refugees fled wherever they could,
>leaving some 3,000 inhabitants, mostly women and the elderly. Orders in
>Hebrew and Yiddish were posted in the streets of the town, warning the
>soldiers to be aware of "undesirable" behavior on the part of the town's
>residents. "As was customary in such instances," the Israeli intelligence
>officer wrote, "the behavior of the population was obsequious and
>adulatory."
>
>Majdal was too close to Gaza for Israel's liking. In December 1948, IDF
>soldiers "swept through" the town and deported some 500 of its remaining
>inhabitants. In 1949, Yigal Allon demanded "to transfer all the Arab
>inhabitants." Ben- Gurion objected. An inter-ministerial committee for the
>"transfer of Arabs from place to place" - yes, we had one of those as well -
>decided to thin out the population somewhat; another ministerial committee -
>"on abandoned property" - decided to settle Majdal with Jews.
>
>>From committee to committee, Majdal was "Judaized," until, with 2,500
Jewish
>residents, it became known as Migdal-Ad.
>
>In December 1949, more Arabs were deported so as to vacate a few more houses
>- "abandoned property" - for a few more discharged soldiers. The IDF made
>the life of those Arab who remained a misery, hoping they'd get the message.
>The new commanding officer of the Southern Command, Moshe Dayan, rekindled
>the ideas of his predecessor, Yigal Allon.
>
>"I hope that perhaps in the coming years, there will be another opportunity
>to transfer these Arabs [170,000 Israeli Arabs - G.L.] out of the Land of
>Israel," he said at a meeting of the Mapai faction, outlining its ideas
>while in uniform. Dayan backed up his words with actions: He submitted a
>detailed proposal for "the evacuation of the Arab inhabitants of the town of
>Majdal." The chief of staff agreed and Ben-Gurion authorized the plan. The
>government was circumvented, the Histadrut labor federation objected, and
>Rabin informed the residents.
>
>The transfer began at the beginning of 1950, although the "official
>operation" took off in June. There were still those who spoke of dispersing
>the Arabs around the country; in the end, they were deported to Gaza. They
>were loaded onto trucks and dropped off at the border - "deliveries," as
>they were termed. Just to remind you again, the state already existed. The
>last delivery of 229 people left for Gaza on October 21; the Egyptians
>didn't bat an eyelid.
>
>Back in Israel, the officials pondered over how to distribute the
>"abandoned" houses, most of which went to individuals who had some political
>clout. In 1956, Migdal-Ad changed its name to Ashkelon. To this very day,
>the former residents of Majdal live in the shacks and shanties of the
>refugee camps in Gaza.
>
>How many Israelis know this story? How many have heard it before? How many
>have ever thought of the refugees on whose destroyed homes the city of
>Ashkelon was founded?
>
> 'Tearful assassin'
>
>But the most enlightening and probably most significant document presented
>in the book is the journal of concerned-citizen Yosef Nachmani, perhaps the
>original tearful assassin, certainly not the last.
>
>For 40 years, Nachmani spearheaded the Zionist enterprise in the Land of
>Israel - a high-ranking member of the pre-independence underground, Haganah;
>the director of the offices of the Jewish National Fund in Tiberias; and the
>man responsible for purchasing and settling land throughout the Galilee and
>Jezreel Valley regions.
>
>Nachmani's beliefs underwent numerous upheavals all through his life: At
>first, he supported the transfer; then, he sobered up. At first, he was in
>favor of adopting a harsh approach; then, his conscience started eating away
>at him. At first, he dispossessed; then, he denounced. At first, he fired;
>then, he cried.
>
>But above all, he was a fascinating observer. At least one particular
>portion of his journal requires repeating here: " ... the acts of cruelty
>committed by our soldiers. After they went into Safsaf, the village and its
>people raised a white flag. They separated the men from the women, tied the
>hands of some 50 to 60 peasants and shot and killed them, burying them in a
>single hole. They also raped a number of the women from the village.
>Alongside the wood, he [probably an eye-witness by the name of Freedman -
>G.L.] saw a few dead women, among them one who was holding her dead child in
>her arms ...
>
>"In Salha, which raised a white flag, they carried out a real massacre,
>killing men and women, about 60 to 70 people. Where did they find such a
>degree of cruelty like that of the Nazis? They learned from them."
>
>Bosnia? Kosovo? Chechniya? Rwanda? No, not at all; right here, and not that
>long ago.
>
>Morris, as calculated as ever, concludes: "The fundamental change in the
>thoughts and actions of Nachmani between 1947-1949 leaves the observer with
>a sense of paradox and admiration and gives him a key to understanding
>Zionism and its success. Zionism has always had two faces: a constructive,
>moral, compromising and considerate aspect; and a destructive, selfish,
>militant, chauvinistic-racist one. Both are sincere and real ... The
>simultaneous existence of these two facets was one of the most significant
>keys to the success of Zionism" - shooting and weeping.
>
>But, there were also incidents in which they shot - oh, and how they shot -
>and didn't weep at all. And lied. This is the picture that emerges from the
>chapter about the Israeli press at the time of the Kibiya affair, which
>expresses the dark side of the then already five-year-old state: no longer a
>community struggling to establish a country, but an orderly, victorious
>state, thought of as a democracy, with David Ben-Gurion, who lies,
>poker-faced, and its press, which brazenly conceals scandalous information
>from its readers and even lies knowingly - all for the glory of the State of
>Israel.
>
>"First of all, the facts," as Morris writes. On the night of October 12-13,
>1953, a group of infiltrators crossed the border into Israel, reached Yehud
>and threw a grenade into the home of the Kanias family. The mother and her
>two young children were killed. Retribution was two days in coming: Soldiers
>from the IDF commando unit (Unit 101) raided Kibiya, going from house to
>house, throwing in grenades and shooting indiscriminately. The result: 60
>dead, most of them women and children.
>
>The Israeli leaders did not make mention of most of these facts to the
>public, but worse still - a thousands times worse - neither did the Israeli
>press. The Mapai newspaper, Ha'dor, tried, at first, not to refrain from
>reporting a thing about the massacre; the other newspapers offered partial
>and even blatantly false versions of the story.
>
>Morris, on the article in Ma'ariv by the legendary Azriel Carlibach: "There
>is hardly one sentence among Carlibach's words that does not defile, distort
>or twist the truth, either explicitly or implicitly; whereas the words of
>Radio Ramallah, as quoted in the Hebrew press, were almost all the simple
>truth."
>
>Most of the press - aside from Kol Ha'am, and later Ha'aretz and Al
>Hamishmar, all of which expressed reservations - reported that the Kibiya
>killers weren't IDF conscripts, but rather outraged residents that went out
>to seek vengeance. Unit 101 or outraged residents? The press and then prime
>minister David Ben-Gurion knew, Morris writes, that this was a
>propaganda-like lie.
>
>I read this chapter twice - once, before the outbreak of the "Al-Aqsa
>Intifada"; and then again, a short while thereafter. After my first reading,
>I was incensed by the Israeli press of old - a collaborator and distorter -
>and I took pride in the long way it has come since then.
>
>After my second reading, and in the wake of the way in which the new
>Intifada has been covered by sections of the Israeli media, I was faced with
>the following question: Have we really changed, or perhaps, in testing
>times, does the Israeli press return to its bad old place of being the
>state's trumpet, just as it was in Kibiya, just as Morris describes? Then,
>the press inflamed passions by giving prominence to the Israeli victims
>(relatively few) and playing down the Arab ones (tenfold more), greatly
>enhancing the Israelis' sense of being the victim, the exclusive sufferers.
>
>So, is there anything new under the sun?
>
>The things that Morris writes about the Kibiya press hold true, in part, for
>the press of the past few days: "As a whole, the press approached the Kibiya
>operation as an enlisted press, justifying, no matter what, government
>policy and the actions of the IDF ... The feeling was that if the entire
>world was denouncing [Israel], then the press here must unite, to beautify
>and repel the criticism."
>
>Some things never change.
>
>Isn't it best for us to know about all these things? Isn't it important for
>us to know about all these things, particularly now, in such difficult
>times? That's where it all started. That's how it all began
>
> Ha'aretz © - 3 November 2000
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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