by Jo Roberts
Then for half a year I was editing the film, trying to do it as quickly as I could, but the newspapers were full of debates, pro and con the making and showing of the film. When the time came to show it, on February 6, 1978, a group of National Religious members of the governing body of the Broadcasting Authority demanded that the Minister of Education stop the film, which was due to be aired in the evening, and the broadcast was cancelled.
The ban caused an uproar. “The flag of freedom of speech in Israel has been lowered to half-mast,”[8] stated MK Yossi Sarid. But to others, the film was tantamount to treason. Respected journalist Tommy Lapid (soon to be the Broadcasting Authority’s director general), wrote that “even if Goebbels were directing Arab propaganda efforts, they couldn’t have had greater success.”[9] The political landscape in which Khirbet Khizeh was situated had again shifted: now, eleven years after the 1967 War, stories of Palestinians being dispossessed resonated not with the memory of 1948 but with what was happening in the Occupied Territories, where Likud was opening the gates to unrestricted settlement.
Ram continued his story:
On the morning of February 6th, all of the people who worked at Israel Television, about six hundred people, held a big meeting, and decided that nothing else would be shown during that time-slot. The screen would be black. This was agreed not only by left-wingers, but by right-wingers who regarded it as government interference with the so-called “independent” Broadcasting Authority. And that’s what happened.
It was hard to ignore such a powerful gesture. After a week of political wrangling, the Broadcasting Authority decided to show the film, with discussion afterwards, and then to archive it. “That evening, everybody was watching the television, which always happens when there is censorship; everybody is very interested in knowing what they are trying to censor,” Ram commented. “There were only a few cars in the streets, everyone was at home, watching.” It was fourteen years before the film was shown again.
The important thing about this was that it shattered the common Israeli belief that the Arabs had run away. This was one of the main targets for me.
“Collective memory is situated at the divide between the conscious and the subliminal, between acknowledgment and denial, between history and psychology,”[10] writes Anita Shapira. Each year, she shows her university students parts of Ram’s film, and each year there is a stunned silence when it is over, even though the novella is firmly entrenched in the high-school curriculum. Khirbet Khizeh runs against the grain of the Jewish-Israeli consensus on the Palestinian exodus, upsetting both the state’s narrative of its own founding and Israelis’ perception of themselves as a people. “The expulsion has never been a secret,” Anita Shapira says, but Israelis “prefer not to remember, just as we discard those same objectionable bits of reality we find oppressive or that unsettle our own self-image.”[11]
“Now, most people know that the myth that all the Arabs ran away is only part of the story,” Ram said. “But it has been put into the corner, and a lot of words are used to justify it, the Nakba. Not only because of the self-image of Israelis, who don’t like to see themselves as people who make injustice. But if you think that the Nakba has happened, that people were thrown away from their houses, then maybe you need to acknowledge or make reparation for, or maybe the refugees should return.”
During Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982,† a Jerusalem Post reporter, Benny Morris, visited the Palestinian refugee camps in the south of the country. In Rashidiyya camp, he talked with elderly women who had been expelled from their homes during the 1948 War. It was his first encounter with Palestinian refugees. A few months later he began work on a book, a history of the Palmach, and what he found as he worked his way through the Palmach’s archives resonated with what the old women had told him.[12]
Benny Morris talked with me over coffee in a small Jerusalem café. His intensity spilled over in his rapid speech. “I had seen documents which pertained to the creation of the refugee problem, in the sense that here, there are expulsions, there there were people fleeing, and so on,” he explained. His research was terminated when the Palmach decided they would rather the work be done by one of their own, but what he’d already found had piqued his curiosity. “As luck would have it, the early eighties began the declassification of Israel’s state papers, not IDF archives, but state papers, meaning the papers of the foreign ministry, the interior ministry, the prime minister’s office, and so on — the declassification for ’48, in line with the thirty-year rule. So I was able to tap into a lot of files, look at a lot of files and documents.” He decided to redirect his attention to what he calls “a giant black hole in Israeli historiography”‡ — what had happened to the Palestinian Arabs, many of whom, like the women he’d met, were still living as refugees, in Lebanon or elsewhere.
The Lebanon War was controversial. Israel’s prior conflicts with Arab states had had the near-unanimous support of the Jewish-Israeli population; they were seen as necessary and just. For many Israelis, including the Labour opposition, the invasion of Lebanon, with the horrifying massacres of Palestinian refugees by IDF-supported Lebanese Christian Phalangists at Sabra and Shatila, was neither. Prime Minister Menachem Begin sought to justify the war by calling up the memory of 1948.[13] In pursuit of a homogeneous Jewish state, he pointed out, the father of Labour Zionism, his now-deceased political rival David Ben-Gurion, had struggled to prevent the formation of a Palestinian nation and had expelled Palestinian-Arab villagers from the new Israel. By attacking Palestinian strongholds in Lebanon, Begin’s Likud was simply continuing these policies.
Begin’s invocation woke demons that he hadn’t intended to raise. His allegation called into question the official history of 1948 by suggesting that Ben-Gurion had actively sought to drive out the Palestinians. This seismic shift undercut a fundamental premise of Zionism: the understanding, rooted in a traumatic past, of Jews as ongoing victims of outside aggression.[14] If Begin was right, in the founding of their state Jews had also been aggressors.
Simha Flapan, director of the Arab Affairs department of the left-wing Mapam Party, was horrified by Begin’s claim. Determined to refute it, he went into the archives. He found that “political opinions and prejudices notwithstanding, Begin’s quotations and references were, indeed, based on fact.”[15] In 1987, he published The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, in which he deconstructed a number of founding myths of the 1948 War. Flapan’s book was primarily political rather than scholarly,[16] but he had fired the opening salvo. The following year, Benny Morris published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. He commented:
On the Jewish side it caused controversy, and I think it opened the floodgates in some way. It wasn’t me opening the floodgates really, it was the archives opening themselves, by the thirty-year rules and by the liberalism of the opening. The documents were there, all you had to do was go see them and understand what they were telling. And it wasn’t only me, there were other people doing other aspects of Israeli history around ’48 which also needed revision because of the documentation.
This disparate group of historians and journalists, working individually on separate issues, became collectively known as the New Historians.
Up until then, there had been no critical historical analysis in Israel of the 1948 War. “Everything that had preceded it was just memoirs,” Benny told me. “Here for the first time, faced with a large treasury of documents, you have real historiography.” The traditional historical take on the 1948 War was that it had been caused by the Arabs’ rejecting the U.N. Partition Plan, which the Yishuv had accepted; that the war was a “David versus Goliath” conflict, as the new Israeli state bravely fought off the vastly superior armies of seven neighbouring states; that the Palestinian Arabs had fled on the orders from Arab leaders, whose radio broadcasts promised them that they would shortly return. Three of the New Historians, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappé, challenged each of these elements of Israel’s creati
on myth.§
Avi Shlaim’s close examination of the documentary evidence suggested that, for Ben-Gurion, acceptance of the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan was a tactical step on the journey towards Zionism’s cherished goal of a Jewish state[17] in the whole of Biblical Israel.¶
He also showed that King Abdullah of Jordan had made a pre-War pact with the Yishuv, and they had agreed to carve up the territory between them.**
Ilan Pappé argued, with Shlaim and Morris, that despite (or perhaps because of) the vulnerability of the Yishuv their advance planning meant that they were better equipped, better trained, and better organized than their adversaries.[18] Morris, and later Pappé, combed the archives of the IDF, the BBC, and British and American Middle East diplomatic posts, all of which tracked Arab radio transmissions, but found no broadcast orders to leave Palestine: “Here [in Israel] it was accepted that the Arab leaders had asked everybody to leave, and this was clearly a lie, in light of the documentation,” Morris told me.
If the Palestinian Arabs had not run away, then why did they go? Morris answered that question in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, meticulously detailing how, as the war progressed, Jewish troops took possession of the lands of the future Israeli state, village by village. His research showed that, rather than fleeing of their own accord, many Arabs were actively expelled, both from land allocated to Israel under the U.N.’s Partition Plan and from territory designated for an Arab state.
It brought controversy because it ran against the official state narrative, the accepted narrative of the Zionist community of Israelis. And it also ran against the narrative of the Palestinians because it basically said it wasn’t a giant systematic expulsion, it was a war, what happened happened in various places; in some places people were left in place, in some places people were expelled, and in others people fled.
Although they had published only a handful of books between them, the New Historians received a great deal of press in Israel. Much of it was vituperative. Morris’ work came under attack from traditionalist historians who questioned both his conclusions and his commitment to his country. It wasn’t that the ideas were new; Arab historians such as Walid Khalidi had been chronicling the dispossession of the Palestinian refugees for decades. But now that the Palestinian experience of Israel’s War of Independence was being brought to light by a Jewish-Israeli historian, a correspondent for the mainstream Jerusalem Post, it was a lot harder to turn a blind eye.
What people now had to look at threw into doubt their beliefs about their country’s founding. The actions of the Haganah company in Khirbet Khizeh, where Yizhar’s antihero had agonized over Palestinian suffering but done nothing to prevent it, were not an isolated incident. The moral foundation of the Jewish state was shaken. Morris had talked provocatively of an “original sin.”[19] Anita Shapira, one of the voices speaking out from academia against the upstart New Historians, put it very succinctly. “That war furnished the founding myth of the state of Israel;” she later wrote in the New Republic, “and it is but a short step from questioning its justice to doubting Israel’s very right to exist.”[20]
Criticism came from another quarter, as well. Morris believed “there was no grand design, no blanket policy of expulsion.”[21] Arab historians believed otherwise. British-Palestinian academic Nur Masalha pointed to the political musings of the early Zionists as evidence for his thesis that this was not, as Morris contended, “largely haphazard and as a result of the War,” but rather an explicit policy of transfer.
Arab presence had always been seen as a stumbling block to the fulfillment of the Zionist dream in Palestine. This was not “a land without a people,” and to act as if it was, commented Yitzak Epstein in 1905, was to overlook “a rather ‘marginal’ fact — that in our beloved land there lives an entire people that has been dwelling there for many centuries and has never considered leaving it.”[22] Transfer was discussed amongst the Yishuv leadership as one possible solution. As a concept, population transfer was not regarded in the first half of the last century with the opprobrium that greets it today. In 1923, for example, the League of Nations approved the transfer of over one and a half million people between Turkey and Greece, and despite the mass suffering involved such displacement was still seen as a viable geopolitical tool.[23]
The transfer of Arabs out of Palestine was not something that the Yishuv had either the authority to formally propose or the power to enforce. Then, in July 1937, following consultations on the ground, the Report of the Peel Commission recommended a land and population exchange as a part of its partition proposal. Elated, Ben-Gurion mused in his dairy: “The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples…. We are being given an opportunity that we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty — this is national consolidation in an independent homeland…. Any doubt on our part about the necessity of this transfer, … any hesitancy on our part about its justice may lose [us] an historic opportunity that may not recur.”[24]
The British Government decided against implementing Peel’s proposals, but population transfer was now part of the ongoing debate. In April 1944, the British Labour Party, endorsing the concept of a future Jewish state in Mandate Palestine, also supported the “voluntary transfer” of that state’s Arab inhabitants. Then, after the U.N.’s partition proposal, fighting broke out, and the rules of the game changed. “The war will give us the land,” Ben-Gurion told the JNF’s Joseph Weitz. “The concepts of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, and in war they lose their whole meaning.”[25]
How did these geopolitical aspirations translate into what happened in 1948 in the towns and villages of Arab Palestine? Pressed by Masalha’s arguments and by his own ongoing research to reconsider his conclusions, Morris eventually wrote:
[T]ransfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism — because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population…. Thinking about the possibilities of transfer in the 1930s and 1940s had prepared and conditioned hearts and minds for its implementation in the course of 1948 so that, as it occurred, few voiced protest or doubt; it was accepted as inevitable and natural by the bulk of the Jewish population.[26]
There was, he concluded, a “consensus of transfer.”[27]
The arrival of the New Historians coincided with a renewed awareness in Israel of the geopolitical intertwining of Jews and Arabs. In 1987 the First Intifada erupted, a mass movement of boycotts, tax resistance, and popular demonstrations against the Occupation. The West Bank and Gaza were in the news, and young Israelis doing their national military service were being sent to enforce the Occupation. In the early nineties, Israelis and Palestinians formally sat down for the first time to negotiate, and to discuss limited Palestinian autonomy. With much fanfare, in September 1993 Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chair Yasser Arafat stood together with Bill Clinton on the White House lawn to sign the Oslo Peace Accords.
Hopes for peace were high in Israel, and that hope allowed for the loosening of the tightly woven national narrative. From social science and humanities departments across the country, academics challenged both the story of the state’s founding, and the ideology that bound the state together. “Israel is on the way to becoming a post-Zionist society,” suggested Erik Cohen in 1995, “… Zionism has ceased to be the moving force in many crucial areas of Israel’s Jewish society.”[28] Post-Zionism suggested that Zionism had fulfilled its purpose, and now the primacy of Israel’s Jewish identity needed to be shed to allow its democratic nature to fully emerge through the full participation of its Arab citizens, both Mizrahi and Palestinian. “Post-Zionism is a situation, not an ideology,” Tom Segev told Haaretz. “It is a situation in which people grow tired o
f an ideology and a collectivity and want to live their lives as individuals.”[29]
While a vibrant new force, post-Zionism was primarily espoused by left-wing intellectuals and it was fiercely contested. It had not yet significantly leached into Israeli collective understanding. But through the cultural media of books, newspaper articles, the arts, and television, that process had begun. One program in particular reached a wide audience: Tekuma, a twenty-two-episode documentary series on the history of Israel. Ilan Pappé, himself proudly post-Zionist, commented to me that:
The first decade after the periods of the New History there was a willingness by all kinds of cultural producers to follow up and continue the critical research into the past. And that included even some of the makers who took part in this huge series, Tekuma, television’s flagship for Israel’s fiftieth anniversary [1998]. Every chapter was made by a different director, and there was a supervising committee. So some of the chapters were still very loyal to the Zionist mainstream narrative; but others were more challenging, especially those done on 1948. They used Benny Morris’s and my books, direct quotes.
It was not only film; in those days it was even suggested that some of the textbooks in high schools be changed in order to include reference to the possibility that some Palestinians were expelled. This was one of the first signs of the change back to the old history, when these books were abolished, and the curriculum stayed the way it was.[30]
Despite his radical credentials,†† Benny Morris had always been a solid Labour-Zionist man, and he never embraced post-Zionism. When Oslo’s promise of peace evaporated as the 1999 Camp David talks ended with nothing more than mutual recrimination, Morris, like many Jewish Israelis, became deeply pessimistic. As the Second Intifada flared up, with its waves of suicide bombings on Israel’s streets, he began to drift rightward, writing hawkish commentary pieces for newspapers and journals.