by Jo Roberts
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left Israel during the war. This is stark historical fact. But within Israel, the telling of how and why this happened is contested. Nations have creation stories, a univocal, unifying narrative that holds the polis together. So much of how we understand what it means to be American, or Filipino, or Iranian, comes from the stories we tell ourselves about our history as a people. As Susan Sontag put it, “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened.”[25] These shared histories may be intersected, or dissected, by other shared histories: of a religious tradition, or an ethnic group, for example. But at its root, the shared history of a nation is sunk deep in a place, the lived experience of a particular piece of land.
Such founding myths are essential to the coalescence of a national identity, especially in its early years. This is particularly true in a case like Israel, whose new citizens came from highly diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Only when a nation is well established, its survival assured, and its identity secure, can it afford different voices the space to present other narratives. For first-generation Israelis, their stories about the 1948 War centred around the experience of their “David versus Goliath” victory against Arab invaders, even though the numbers don’t bear that out. The displacement of Palestinian Arabs didn’t have a place in that story. If anything, what was remembered was that they ran away.
Winning election after election, David Ben-Gurion and his Labour Zionist successors governed Israel uninterrupted for thirty years. All of them had lived through the war. Their socialist brand of Zionism formed the national ethos in those first decades of Israel’s existence. “The Zionist narrative, at its zenith, was accepted as self-evident,” writes Israeli sociologist Michael Feige. “Although it was challenged by anti-Zionists, certain [religious] Jewish communities, and even within the Zionist camp itself … the national narrative was understood as ‘objective history,’ and was taken at face value as irrefutable truth by most Israeli Jews.”[26]
It’s instructive to look at how the narrative of 1948 was portrayed in Israeli high-school textbooks at the time. Elie Podeh has studied history and memory in the Israeli educational system, and he examines how textbooks function both as village storytellers and as “supreme historical court” in the shaping and instilling of a shared national identity. According to Podeh, textbooks written in those early decades presented a straightforward account of the war in which Israeli forces bore no responsibility for causing the refugee problem.[27] Discussing the departure of the Palestinians, one book “euphemistically used the terms ‘left,’ ‘departed,’ ‘abandoned,’ ‘deserted’ and ‘fled’” — words which are loaded with the victors’ thinly veiled contempt for the defeated. “The Arabs began fleeing the country’s towns and villages several weeks before the official end of the British Mandate,” says a textbook from 1960. “The Arab population’s spirit was broken and the result was a mass, panic-stricken flight. This process was accelerated by vicious, hate-filled Arab propaganda that stuck terror into the hearts of its listeners and served to pour oil on troubled waters. The Arabs were deceived by their foolish leaders into believing that they would soon return home triumphantly, drive the Jews away and seize their property as the just fruits of war.” One 1948 textbook teaches that the Jews even “bid their neighbours to stay,” but “the Arabs preferred to leave.”
Podeh points out that these books were largely written by European Jews whose frame of reference was shaped by the Holocaust. For them, Arab violence was refracted through the lens of anti-Jewish pogroms, and any other understandings became invisible.
By the late 1980s that early hegemony was beginning to crack. The old guard of the Yishuv, and indeed of the War of Independence, were growing older; the thirty-year dominance of Labour Zionism had been broken by the election of Menachem Begin and the right-wing Zionism of the Likud party, which signalled a seismic shift in Israel, both politically and socially. Israel, now well-established as a state, had less need of the univocal narratives that had helped forge its national identity.
In 1988, Benny Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem challenged the official version of his nation’s history. Morris was one of a small cadre of second-generation Jewish-Israeli scholars, soon to be known as the “New Historians,” whose archival research had led them to a very different understanding of the 1948 War. From detailed examination of documents in the Israeli state archives, Morris concluded that “the refugee problem was caused by attacks by Jewish forces on Arab villages and towns and by the inhabitants’ fear of such attacks, compounded by expulsions, atrocities and rumours of atrocities.”[28] For a society still nurturing the narrative of evacuation orders by Arab leaders and fleeing Palestinian Arabs being asked to remain by Jewish forces, this was anathema. This groundbreaking new history was highly controversial, and it opened up a debate in Israel well beyond the walls of academia.
By the mid-1990s, these debates had made their presence felt in a new generation of history textbooks. Perhaps, too, in those years, there was a spirit of open-mindedness, reflecting Israeli hopes for the burgeoning Oslo peace process. The unified quality of the earlier books was gone — these new books differ dramatically in content. Some omit the issue of the 1948 refugees altogether, some continue in the tradition of their predecessors, some specifically refer to the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs. The concept of Arabs running away seems to be a hard one to dispel: even a more progressive 1995 junior-high-school textbook states that “Some [Arabs] ran away before the arrival of the Jews to the village or to the Arab neighbourhood in the city, and some were expelled by the occupying force.”[29] But it also states that “more than 600,000 Arabs were uprooted from their places in the country,” and that “during the battles many of the country’s Arabs were expelled.” This is no small thing. These words can be seen as incendiary. If other voices are allowed to narrate Israel’s founding, does that give them a claim to shape its future?
The New Historians’ perspective is still not an accepted part of mainstream discourse. Indeed, these stories are so polarized, so mutually exclusive, that simply using the word “Nakba” rather than “the War of Independence” positions you ideologically, as I discovered. I was talking with an old Palmach friend of Miki Cohen’s, a former Israeli ambassador. He was friendly, happy to meet with me, until I mentioned that I was interested in narratives of both the War of Independence and of the Nakba. “Nakba — this is not about Israel, this is about the Palestinians. You should be talking to Palestinians.” But these are two understandings of the same event that occurred on this territory, surely? I countered. “No, they’re not.” There was a contained rage in his voice. He flatly refused to acknowledge that two peoples living in the same land could have different stories, and he refused to have his name associated with such a project. “Nakba schmakba,” said the former ambassador. “The Jews came back to their homeland. We were landlords; we left; we returned. Anyone who wanted to stay, stayed. Anyone who wanted to fight, fought. Anyone who wanted to run away, ran away. And that’s that.”
The word “expulsion” is also a loaded one, as I found out when talking with Tamar Eshel. She lives in a small apartment in West Jerusalem, in what we might call seniors’ housing — Tamar is now in her late eighties — but all administrative decisions are made collectively by the residents. It’s an inspiring model, and one that seems natural for first-generation Israelis like Tamar. Her story is fascinating: she lived through the founding years of her state, fought for it against the British, and then became Israeli ambassador to the U.N., where in 1961 she headed up the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. She later became a Labour member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The experiences she lived through as a first-generation Israeli have, inevitably, shaped her profoundly.[30]
I think I’m very characteristic of the ’48 generation. We grew up in the collective, not as individual
s. Our prime motive was to serve our community, and to do whatever we can to get ourselves a corner in this world as an independent state. You had to give up your own private ambitions to serve the collective ideal. I filled a few roles in the Haganah, and in illegal immigration into the country. I was based in Marseilles, France.
I have plenty of criticism of what happens in this country, but I’m not one to undermine the basic tenets of this thing. It’s too dear to me. When you say “expulsion,” it’s not the right thing to say, and I’ll explain to you. When the U.N. resolution of 29 November 1947 was voted in the U.N., the Arabs refused to accept the two-state notion. We agreed to that, but they decided very vociferously that they would throw us out into the sea, and they joined up all the Arab countries around and the Palestinians here in a war against us. We were a small community of six hundred thousand. I think it’s a sheer miracle that we won the war.
So now, everybody rewrites history. They were expelled? No. They left. I would not say that in some places like Lydda and Ramle there wasn’t a real expulsion, but it was a minute number; they fled away. It was a war, and they fled. And their leadership exhorted them to leave.
Many stayed. It was a problem. And now they are something like 20 percent of the country. And now they don’t want to go and live in the Palestinian Authority.
I’m afraid to say that over the years there developed a way of rewriting history to justify what people didn’t do at the time. They really ran very quickly, very quickly. They didn’t stay to fight. So now, in order to justify the lack of whatever they were expected to do, they say, “Oh, they murdered all of us, they threw us away, they put us on lorries.” No. And I think the second and third generations start believing it, because people believe their own stories. This is already sixty years ago. So, I was here, and I don’t like this.
I understand that there is a trauma, the Nakba, they call it; we call it our independence. We celebrate on that day, and they say, “We cannot celebrate because this is our great tragedy.” Did they ever think what they contributed to this tragedy? They always say that we did it, but it isn’t so. They didn’t accept that [U.N. Partition] resolution.††
I discussed the language of expulsion with Hillel Cohen, a shrewd and engaging Hebrew University fellow and former journalist who has studied the period in detail.[31] ,‡‡
About seven hundred thousand people became refugees, but how many of them were expelled? A minority among them, I believe.
But if you’re in a village, I said, and you hear the gunfire from the neighbouring village, and you know what is happening, is that choice to leave really a free one?
No, not really. It means they have some choice, not free, but some choice. To hide in the surroundings of the village, for example, as many indeed did. So they were not exactly expelled. When the Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, or Haifa, or Tel Aviv were fired on in ’48, the people left because they were fired on. They were not expelled. Or, more recently, when Israelis left the Galilee during the Israel-Lebanon war, no one could term this “expelled.”
We have to be very accurate in the terms that we use. The people of Lydda and Ramle, they were expelled. The people of Haifa were not. My point is that we have to be accurate when we speak of this war, we have to ask what happened where, when, and why. If Acre [Acco] was shelled, if Jaffa was shelled, and people left, can we say they were expelled? I am not sure. Can we say they were forced out? Yes: or better, pushed out. I don’t know if in English the difference is as I feel it in Hebrew.
I think “expelled” and “forced out” in English are probably very close. If I force you out, you leave against your will.
Of course they preferred to stay. But it was a war. The Jews also preferred to stay, but they had to leave all the neighbourhoods of south Tel Aviv because they were fired at from Jaffa. So the Jews were expelled?
It’s interesting, isn’t it? If I was being fired at I’d say I was forced to leave. For you, expelled means being put on a truck or leaving at gunpoint…
No. For me in order to be accurate it means using the same terms for Jews and Arabs. And then we can check if we use the right terms. For example, we can apply the term “expelled” to the Jewish residents of Gush Etzion, because these villages were occupied by the Arabs, many Jews were killed, the rest were taken as prisoners of war, and when the war was over they were returned to Israel and not allowed to their villages. And the same is true, say, for the Palestinians of Tantura and other villages. The difference, and it is very important difference, is in the numbers.
Do you feel that there’s too much emphasis on the Nakba, that it was an unfortunate byproduct of the war and that these things happen in war?
I don’t think it’s too emphasized. The point is that people became refugees not because of the shelling, not because they were driven out, not because they were put on buses, they became refugees because they were not allowed to return.
This is the difference between the experience of Jews and Arabs. The Jews of Romema in Jerusalem, or the Hatikva neighbourhood of Tel Aviv — they left during the war, but after the war was over they were able to return to their homes. What makes people refugees is the blocking of the return, not the fact that they leave their houses.
And this is the crux of the matter, the reason why the language of the Nakba provokes such a visceral response. If these refugees were allowed to return, what would that mean for Israel’s uneasy truce between being a democracy and being a specifically Jewish state? For Tamar Eshel, the answer is clear: “The right of return means the destruction of Israel.”
In Israel, as in so many other places, both land and memory are contested. Collective memory shapes a claim to a given territory: the Biblical claim to the land of Israel anchored Jews throughout two thousand years of diaspora and finally pulled them home. For Palestinians, the olive trees of their villages and the lost orange groves of Jaffa resonate deeply within the collective memory of exile. Both politically and personally, memory and landscape are intimately connected.
Our memories shape how we see a landscape; conversely, our reshaping of a landscape will define how we remember what happened there. As we will see, this dynamic is played out in very direct ways on the landscape of Israel. After 1948, maps were rewritten and ruined villages un-made, stone removed from stone. These profoundly political acts have shaped the distinct collective memories of Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews, and continue to shape their coexistence. And, at the same time, they echo very personally in the lives of individual Israelis.
Lily Traubman lives in Kibbutz Megiddo, which was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors from Poland and Germany. The hill overlooking the kibbutz, Tel Megiddo, holds a rich archeological heritage: twenty-six different layers of ancient settlements have been unearthed during the extensive excavations. It also gives its name to the Biblical Armageddon.
The kibbutz was built on the lands of al-Lajjun, an Arab village of some twelve hundred inhabitants that was occupied by the Haganah at the end of May 1948, two weeks after the birth of the Israeli state. All that is left of the village, apart from the ruins of its houses, is the deserted mill; a large building that was once the village’s health centre; and its mosque, used for decades as a carpentry workshop by the kibbutz’s woodworkers.
Lily arrived in Israel in 1974, herself a refugee, from Pinochet’s Chile. Her father had disappeared, and when the army came looking for her she took refuge in the Colombian Embassy. Her request for asylum to Israel was granted; on her arrival, she came to Kibbutz Megiddo.
It was many years before she learned the recent history of where she lived. She was aware of the ruins she walked past every day, but they simply didn’t register as having a living past. “I came to Megiddo, and the village of al-Lajjun was completely transparent. As if it didn’t exist.”[32] A social justice activist, she joined Women in Black, a Palestinian-Jewish women’s peace organization. At a conference in the late eighties, she met a Palestinian woman from the Jenin refugee
camp, in the West Bank. As they chatted, the woman said she was from al-Lajjun. Lily was stunned. “I couldn’t say another word. I was silent because I didn’t know what to say to her. I live in her house and she is a refugee. I didn’t know how to cope with this truth. A lot of times in Israel they press into your head that it’s us or them. But here we were, together at the conference.”
The process of re-imagining the land where you live is a slow and painful one. Lily notes that “It took me some more time to see that even where there are only ruins, not complete houses; there, too, someone lived in the past.” Attempts to share this new understanding with the rest of the kibbutz have been hard. “Any mention of al-Lajjun is perceived as a threat to drive out the Jews.” And that fear raises memories of the Holocaust, especially for the members of Kibbutz Megiddo. After the screening of a film on Palestinian-Jewish peace activism, one kibbutznik raged at Lily: “One day they will come and slaughter us, and may you be the first to be slaughtered.” For the refugees of al-Lajjun, who have found no new home, even well-meaning gestures can misfire. When a small group of kibbutzniks, including Lily, travelled to a Palestinian-Israeli town to watch, with refugees from al-Lajjun, a documentary on their shared history, some of the refugees were angry at them: “They won’t even let us come to the mosque and restore it, so why are they coming here to watch a movie together?” “Why are you doing this to us?” asked another Palestinian woman. “It is reopening our wounds.”
Lily’s hope for the future is very different from that of most Israelis. “I would like a new neighborhood or village to be built next to us and that the people of al-Lajjun return to live in it. I would like them as my neighbors. I know that even rebuilding is not perfect justice, but perfect justice doesn’t exist anywhere.” She would be willing for the kibbutz to give up its present lands for the project. “Life without fear is a large gain. The man who is afraid they will come to slaughter us lives with this fear since 1949. I have not been afraid for some time now, but people are still afraid and it is terrible to live this way. Today in Eastern Europe Jews get back their property and it doesn’t cause a tragedy.”