by Jo Roberts
In a position paper presented at the Zochrot-organized conference on the right of return in June 2008, the first such conference put together by Jewish Israelis, co-founder Norma Musih stated:
When the myth of “Eretz Yisrael” evaporates, and the country becomes an actual political entity, Jews will finally — paradoxically — be able to “arrive” at a real place, land here, see and learn its history at close hand, its geography and its demography. Only when Jews come to see the Palestinians who live here, and those who were expelled, as people worth living with can we hope to live here fairly and equitably.[55]
Such proposals seem like suicide to most Jewish Israelis. Certainly, they would ensure a demographic minority, and an end to Israel as a Jewish state. But Zochrot members do not appear to be afraid of this prospect. Whether or not one agrees with the political consequences of their position, their willingness to open themselves to the collective memory of the Other has clearly transformed their worldview at a profound level.
Palestinian academic Rema Hammami describes how she went searching for her grandfather’s old home in Jaffa. The facade of the house is now covered with pebbled concrete, but when she saw the arches on the building, she experienced “a sudden shock of recognition based on an old family photograph taken in front of this veranda, which back then had a huge asparagus fern growing up one side.”[56] The house was now a home for disabled children. Walking in through the open gate she came to the central hall, recalling “its columns and original Italianate tile floor.” As she reconstructed the space from the old family photographs she had pored over, Rema was startled by a woman’s voice asking what she wanted. When she responded that she had come to look at her grandfather’s home, the woman “became very flustered and said, variously, that I must be mistaken, that it couldn’t be true, and besides, how could I know it was my grandfather’s house?”
Her difficult and complicated experience, one that many first- and second-generation Palestinians have shared and many others have imagined, is narrated from the Palestinian perspective. Now imagine this encounter from the perspective of the Israeli woman. Her daily routine is suddenly interrupted by the authoritative presence of a woman who knows this property, not from direct experience but from shared and cherished family memory — one who, however many years have passed, has a deep moral claim to the house.
This is a dreaded scenario: the return of the repressed, the ghost who has every right to be vengeful. Those Palestinians who, like Hammami, make such journeys into the past have no power to demand, yet on a national level that demand, and indeed their visible pain, is deeply feared.
The personal stories of exiles and immigrants have woven a dense tapestry of claims onto Israel’s landscape. Mara Ben Dov’s story illuminates some of these complexities.[57] Mara lives in Ein Hod — she’s an artist, and, like Daphne Banai, a member of Machsom Watch. When I asked her how she felt about what happened in the village in 1948, she said simply, “We were happy we had the land.” Mara’s paternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz, and that trauma is etched deeper in her consciousness than the trauma of the strangers expelled from her village. “They haven’t gotten over it — I don’t blame them,” Mara said. “But it’s not different from what happened in Europe, our families losing their homes.” Mara thinks that the Israeli government should pay reparations to everyone who lost their homes in 1948: “The losers always suffer in war.”
Mara told me that during the war, according to a Palestinian-Israeli from Ayn Hawd, the house that is now Mara’s home was newly built and still unoccupied. Arriving in the art colony of Ein Hod in 1974, she and her husband planted a garden and fruit trees. Years of labour, of sweat, and of their little income went into extending and rebuilding until the house was nearly triple its original size. A few years ago, a Palestinian woman arrived from Kuwait. She told Mara that this was her stolen home. But is it only hers? Or is it, by now, also Mara’s? Sixty years after the war, how can these overlapping claims be resolved?
The political implications of a Palestinian “return” to what is now Israel are profound. Benny Morris gave me his take on why it is anathema to so many Israelis:
It’s a matter of demography. There are five and a half million Jews in Israel. There are 1.3 million Arabs in the state of Israel, not the West Bank. There are something like five million, the Arabs say five and half million, the U.N. says four and half million, Arab refugees, people mostly living in the West Bank and Gaza, a minority living in the Arab states. If these four and a half or five million Arabs enter the area of the state of Israel, the area where their families were displaced in ’48, there would be an instant majority of Arabs. And you can say, okay, let in a total number. You agree to the principle. You agree to the principle of the right of return. Let in one hundred thousand. But once you open the door to the principle, there will be endless knocking on the door, and when you’ve conceded the principle how can you stop them from coming? And then there’s no Jewish state, there’s an Arab majority state with a Jewish minority which will leave, as it left Morocco, as it left Syria, as it left Egypt, as it left Yemen. Jews don’t enjoy life in Arab states. If it’s to remain a Jewish state then there can be no right of return. It’s as simple as that.
There is justice in every refugee from ’48 saying, “I would like to go back to my home and live under my banana tree and my old house,” and so on. Why should a refugee not be allowed back into his home? But that’s individual rights. The problem is, it’s a political question here, not an individual question. Individually, they may be right; politically, there’s no justice in them returning.
This is why houses are destroyed, why names are changed, why history is denied, and why the right to return is the ultimate taboo and perhaps the most significant impediment to the ongoing attempts at a peace process. But Ilan Pappé, who has challenged Morris for anti-Arab bias, has a very different perspective:
I think it’s an essential part of any prospective solution. First of all, acknowledging the Palestinian right of return, even before you begin to translate it into reality, is a precondition for reconciliation. I think exactly how it should be implemented will have to be negotiated between everyone involved, the refugees, the people there on the ground. But the principal idea of the right of return — this is an individual right of Palestinians who were expelled with their immediate families to come back — is something which I don’t think can be questioned. The problem is that the Israelis are waiting for these [aging] Palestinians to die. But it’s also politically right that the refugees, even the third generation of people expelled, should have the principal right to come back. The only way out of the refugee camp is back to where you came from, unless you decide not to and you’re happy with compensation or somebody offers you something better. But nobody should question the right of someone living in a Palestinian refugee camp to explore the possibility of going back.
Does he think that the right of return could ever become part of mainstream discourse?
In the near foreseeable future, no. But I just think there is a chance because, in longer terms, the Zionist take on reality cannot be sustained forever. I think this whole project of a modern-day settler colonialist state is not going to hold. The question is, what would it be substituted by? The best thing I could think of would be a democratic state, and a democratic state could easily accept the right of return. Of course, it could be substituted by other things: by Islamic theocracy; a total chaotic ex-Yugoslavia situation. There are many things that can happen to it once the present reality has transformed. But in one of the scenarios, which I think is the only positive one, the right of return plays a very crucial role. If you put it the other way around, if Israelis don’t change their mind about the right of return, there will be no peace and reconciliation. There will be more bloodshed, that can eventually also destroy them, not just the Palestinians.
The writings of Benny Morris and his fellow New Historians brought the hard truth of the 1948 expulsions
into the public forum, provoking outrage and denial, shame, and, for a few, a reexamination of the basic tenets of Zionism. But the historical memory of such an event is mutable, and the course of its passage through the national consensus is hard to predict. In 2004 Morris published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, the fruit of further research in the newly opened archives, and he gave an interview to Haaretz that left his questioner, Ari Shavit, stunned:
Morris: Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist.… I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered.
Shavit: I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too few Arabs?
Morris: If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job.… If he had carried out a full expulsion — rather than a partial one — he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.[58]
Ben-Gurion, Morris opined, should have “cleansed the whole country —the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River.”
Benny Morris had not shifted his position as a historian. He stood by all the research on 1948 that he had done. But as the peace talks failed, due to what he saw as an ongoing lack of good faith on the part of the Palestinians, and as Israelis lived the trauma of a suicide bombing campaign, Morris began to draw different conclusions from his work. “The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us,” he said to Shavit.
Morris now endorses Samuel Huntington’s controversial thesis that there is a “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim world and the West. For Israelis, in a West-leaning state located in the Middle East, that is a deeply troubling prospect. “In my opinion, we will not have peace,” he told Haaretz. “In this generation there is apparently no solution. [Only t]o be vigilant, to defend the country as far as is possible.” There is something tragic in his pessimism, a kind of stoic despair.
Did he still hold the position he’d taken on transfer in the Haaretz interview? I asked him when we met.
I think the whole Middle East would have been a happier place since ’48 if that had happened. That’s my view. It would have been much less complicated. The fact that we’re still intermixed — and Israel’s conquest and settlement of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip made the intermixing even worse — intermixing is one of the reasons for the continued tension. I mean, at base the reason is that they don’t want us here. But given that we’re here, this exacerbates everything, the fact that we’re intermixed. That’s what led to what happened in ’48 .
Many Jewish Israelis would agree with him. In a political climate of fear and insecurity, the desire to expel the Other becomes more compelling, and attitudes have changed markedly during the past decade. Public opinion polls show a radical antipathy towards Palestinian Israelis. In a 2010 survey commissioned by the Israel Democratic Institute, 49 percent of those polled believed that Arabs should not have equal civil rights.[59] A 2012 poll by Tel Aviv University professor Camil Fuchs, which came up with the same result, also showed a third of respondents wanting Palestinian Israelis barred from voting in elections for the Knesset.[60] Over half the participants in a 2007 poll by Israel’s Centre Against Racism deemed marriage between a Jewish woman and an Arab man to be tantamount to national treason — a Jerusalem neighbourhood has vigilantes policing against such dating.[61] According to a 2008 Knesset Channel poll, 76 percent of the participants thought that some or all Palestinian-Israeli citizens should be transferred to a future Palestinian state.[62]
Why is transfer such a compelling option for so many contemporary Israelis? To answer that question, we need to look not only to 1948, but also to another pivotal moment in Israeli history, the 1967 Six Day War. Israel’s rapid trouncing of its enemies, especially after the national fear of annihilation in the weeks before the conflict, led to what Shlomo Avineri describes as a “universal feeling of redemptive deliverance,”[63] and, in the years that followed, a small but vocal group of Jews began to settle in the newly acquired territories of the West Bank; or, as they crucially saw them, Judea and Samaria. This activist movement, Gush Emunim, melded messianic, ultra-Orthodox Judaism with right-wing nationalist ideology, and also with the traditional pioneering spirit of early Labour Zionism. Thus straddling the great divide of Israeli politics, it garnered a lot of support. Under Begin’s Likud, elected in 1977, its settlements became the spearhead of government policy.
Settlement of occupied territory is illegal under international law, but for the government the temptation was hard to resist. Annexation¶¶ of the West Bank would give geopolitical depth to the narrow and strategically vulnerable state of Israel. And on a deeper level there was the resonance of the Jewish people’s Biblical claim to the Land, of which Judea and Samaria were an integral part. Soon, drawn by financial incentives and tax breaks, tens of thousands of secular Israelis were relocating to the new towns, their homes creating “facts on the ground” that pegged Israel’s flag ever more firmly to the Occupied Territories.
The more Israelis who choose to improve their quality of life by becoming suburban settlers, the more normalized settlement becomes in the national psyche. And, as settlement becomes normalized, it seems increasingly obvious to many Jewish Israelis that the problem is not the settlers in the West Bank, but the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.***
It was against this backdrop that, in the early 1980s, rogue MK and rabbi Meir Kahane could advocate the eviction of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and of Palestinian Israelis from Israel. Kahane would visit Arab villages in Israel, meet with their leaders, and inform them that there was no room for them in the Jewish state.[64] His Kach party was banned in 1988 as “racist” and “undemocratic,” but the concept of transfer had been unleashed. Indeed, Rehavam Ze’evi, founder of the Moledet party, explicitly named it as an integral aspect of the Zionist project: “Everything carried out by Zionism in the last 100 years has been precisely that: ‘transfer.’ Every place we built here was on the ruins of an Arab village or city.”[65] Now that Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu has successfully campaigned on the transfer issue, it is no longer deemed either racist or undemocratic, but an aspect of mainstream political debate. “The eviction of the Palestinians is no longer a Zionist heresy but rather the truth of Zionism, the openly declared history and the potential future of the state,”[66] comments political analyst Robert Blecher.
The myth-breaking work of the New Historians has also played a role in establishing the concept of transfer in public discourse. It might seem that learning about the Nakba would provoke feelings of shame and repentance, as it did for the members of Zochrot. But such a response is not a given. If one believes strongly enough in the moral rightness of the Zionist enterprise — “my country, right or wrong” — then the expulsions will ultimately be understood through that lens: if that was what Ben-Gurion and his colleagues needed to do, then that was what they needed to do. Instead of revulsion at the past, there is a sense that if this is such an integral part of our history it must be acceptable. Perhaps this happened to Benny Morris, who told Ari Shavit: “Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to cope with the in-depth questions that these people coped with … and maybe I adopted part of their universe of concepts.”
Israel’s understanding of its founding story is expanding to absorb the revelations made by the New Historians. “It’s now taught in all the universities, because it’s accepted as dogma — a lot of what I write and some other things that have been written have been accepted as truth,” Benny told me. But once the intellectual upheaval of Israel’s post-Zionist moment passed, the New History could be seen as normalizing what happened in 1948. Philosophy professor Adi Ophir has commented: “We now recognize the crimes but the mainstream has adopted the inevitability of the crimes and the co
ntinuing inevitability of the conflict — this goes on to justify new crimes.”[67]
How socially acceptable in Israel is the idea of transfer? I asked Ilan Pappé.
I think that it’s a prevalent idea among most Jews who live in Israel, that this is one possible way of solving the problem within the state of Israel, and even the Occupied Territories. Now, for most there’s a realistic recognition it might be an impossible political plan, but nonetheless it’s a very desirable one. I think that Jews in Israel tend to think about it as a more practical plan at times of crisis, like the latest intercommunal strife you had in Acco, or during the Second Intifada, or during the Lebanon War, and so on. Then they think more seriously about the possibility. But definitely there is [only] a very small group of Israeli Jews who think this is unacceptable from a moral point of view.
In practice, transfer could take many forms: Palestinian Israelis could be forced out; traded out in a land swap as part of a peace deal with a new Palestinian state, as per Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal; or encouraged, with either carrots or sticks, to leave of their own accord. I asked Ilan if he thought forcible transfer could ever happen.