by Ilan Pappe
The past four years mark a significant change from the past. During this period, the right has waged a systematic campaign that included delegitimisation, open and concealed threats and, at times, actual sanctions against whoever dared to undercut their complacent world view … The seeds of delegitimisation spread through the air three years ago with the publication, by Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, of pseudo-scientific studies of the post-Zionist bias that supposedly prevails in Israeli academia. The seeds were then sown by these groups’ supporters in the government, including Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar. And they were tended to by right-wing organisations like Yisrael Sheli.
Faced with the campaign being waged by the right to reshape reality, academia – as an institution based on values like skepticism, tolerance and pluralism – has barely raised its voice. At least, not in public. The number of academics who see public activism as part of their job description is declining. But even the larger organisations, like faculty groups, the various universities and the Israeli Academy of Humanities and Sciences, are trying to prevent any kind of statement being uttered about the increasingly ugly face of Israeli society. Self-censorship and conformity are more efficient than direct repression.
This was in 2013 but until then it seemed that the new historians’ critique continued even as their influence disappeared, but now there were new grounds that reflected neo-Zionism’s preoccupation with demonstrating the morality of the Zionist venture. Whereas in the early years of the post-Zionist challenge, the argument addressed the facts, it has now shifted to ‘exposing’ what lies behind the critical history and sociology that emerged in Israel as of the late 1980s. The earlier response was epitomised by Efraim Karsh, who accused the new historians of fabricating the facts – an allegation he summarised in his book Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ – but made no mention of morality.6 In fact, the above-mentioned article in Techelet explicitly rebuked Karsh for failing to morally and ideologically confront the new historians while going to battle against ‘undeniable facts’.7 The editors of the journal concluded that Israeli academia could not permit the new historians to set the research agenda on 1948 – another critique absent from the earlier Zionist response.
The moral battle was waged energetically outside Israel, where the message of the post-Zionists had made more lasting inroads. Of the numerous books representing the neo-Zionist perspective on the 1948 war that appeared in the United States in the years following the eclipse of the new historians, the best example was a collection edited by Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar, titled Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right.8 In their introduction, the editors declared that the new historians, whom they named the ‘revisionists’, excluding Morris, had been waging an attack on Zionism itself. But it was the political philosopher Michael Walzer who led the moral battle with the greatest passion. Presenting Zionism as a liberation movement of exceptional morality, Walzer characterised the debate over the 1948 war as an existential battle against the forces of evil.9 He did not confront the facts but instead employed the discourse of ‘complexity’ to stifle debate. The dispossession of almost a million Palestinians, the discrimination against almost five million more, and the control through occupation were all characterised as complex issues. In a similar vein, Zionist historian Daniel Gutwein of the University of Haifa, after arguing that there was nothing new in the factual claims of the ‘new history’, depicted post-Zionism as a formidable enemy, a movement that, according to him, included postmodernists and nihilists bent on privatising the collective sacred national memory for their own selfish, if not perverse, interests.10 Others, as we have seen, accused the new historians of outright treason.11
Before examining the works of the neo-Zionist historians, a few words should be said about Morris, one of the most important of the new historians, who, following what he described as his ‘turning point’ in 2000, could be said to embody both of neo-Zionism’s hallmarks: its positivism and (in his political writings and interviews) its moral justification of the ethnic cleansing that took place during the 1948 war. Morris did not shy away from providing evidence damning to the Zionist narrative. His book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, provided the first systematic evidence, based on IDF sources, of major expulsions during the 1948 war. When the documents were first released in 1998, showing the expulsions to be far more premeditated, systematic, and extensive than had been shown in the more limited documentation available a decade earlier, Morris, ever the positivist, undertook what he referred to as the correction of a mistake, and so he revised and expanded his book to reflect the new evidence.12 By the time the new edition was published in 2004, however, the Second Intifada was well underway, and the revelation of what would earlier have been seen as damning new information about 1948 now fused conveniently with the closing of the public mind with regard to the Palestinians in the wake of the uprising. In this new atmosphere, not only were Israel’s brutal military operations against the Palestinians during the new intifada seen as justified, but so was their systematic expulsion in 1948. Morris, who had earlier been wrongly accused of being an ‘Israel hater’ and a post-Zionist, now set an example for the neo-Zionists, inasmuch as he was ideally situated to provide hindsight justification for the 1948–49 expulsions. In an interview with Ari Shavit published in Haaretz on 9 January 2004, he provided the ultimate justification for the ethnic cleansing in 1948: ‘Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.’13 Furthermore, he faulted Ben-Gurion for failing to ‘cleanse’ the ‘whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River’, which ‘would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.’14
The Professional Writing of History Gets a New Face
Morris’s description of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 as an act of self-defence, a choice ‘between destroying or being destroyed’, and his insistence that the 1948 war was one of those ‘circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing’15 were presented in an even cruder, more simplistic and quite fanatical way in his book 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War, first published in 2008. There the war of 1948 became a defence against a jihad, a kind of al-Qaida 1948 attack on the Jewish state that had to be fended off by every possible means. Indeed, in the dominant mood of post-2000, the Palestinian action and resistance of 1948 are recast in terms that reflect or echo modern-day terrorist organisations and their actions.16
This view, in various forms and shapes, aptly characterises the underlying spirit of neo-Zionist work on 1948 within the Israeli academy and in many recent collections on the war. In some of the new works, the moral defence of the war approaches messianic proportions. The introduction to one of the major collections on the war, the two-volume Israel’s War of Independence, 1948–1949, by its editor Alon Kadish, is a good example. Kadish, a former head of the Hebrew University’s history department, almost theologises the 1948 Jewish war effort, referring to the outcome as a victory of the ‘just’ over the ‘unjust’ in a battle that averted a second Holocaust,17 and to the year 1948 as the last link in the chain that ‘completed the redemption of the land and the return of the Jews to their homeland, as well as the renewal of their independence on the land’.18 In general, Kadish’s anthology, with its scores of articles focusing on military dimensions of the war, well exemplifies the mix of messianic Zionist discourse and the archival, positivist reconstruction that typifies the neo-Zionist approach. One might even suggest that it was thanks to the combined emphasis on messianic fulfilment and existential threat that the Judaisation and de-Arabisation of Palestine – and not just in the areas earmarked for the Jewish state in the 1947 UN partition resolution, but well beyond – is now fully recognised and morally justified as having been the principal goal of the Zionist leadership in 1948.
These elements (divine promise plus existential survival) had likewise constituted a crucial subtext of the ‘old history’ of 1948, written prior to the
work of the new historians, though the old history, as already indicated, tended to be more discreet on such matters as expulsions and massacres. Another way in which the old mainstream Zionist historians differed from the neo-Zionist historians (and also from the new historians) was that they were generally not professional historians but rather journalists and pundits who were part of the political élite. Still, one of the main practitioners of the neo-Zionist narrative wrote an entire book to vindicate the early historiography of 1948 as valid and scholarly.19
Many of the neo-Zionist historians of 1948 are postgraduates or newly minted scholars, recently inducted into the community of professional historiographers. They not only have access to the documents released from the IDF archives in 1998 but have also been entrusted with selective and top-secret material that never would have been shown to scholars suspected of being critical of Zionism. Significantly, much of their work, which is in Hebrew, is published by the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The fruit of their efforts is voluminous and indicates both a new discourse and a fresh choice of subject matter, which generally moves away from the human dimensions of the war and towards its military aspects, with well-trodden military campaigns being reappraised from every possible angle. Modern themes such as Jewish civil society in wartime became favourites, redirecting the research away from the victimisation of the Palestinians to tales of the heroic steadfastness of the Jewish community in 1948.20
A number of works blamed the Palestinians for their fate, following established scholars who had steered clear of the ‘new history’, such as the various books written by the head of the Herzl Institute for the Research and Study of Zionism at the University of Haifa, Yoav Gelber.21 But while the ‘blaming the Palestinians’ theme is often a subtext in these works, sometimes it is explicit, as in the case of Tamir Goren, who has focused specifically on the responsibility of the Palestinians for their exodus from Haifa.22 Other topics include the recruitment of Jewish volunteers abroad and their fate; the role played by the settlements; logistical problems of infrastructure, politics, and the military; and the costs of the war. Some of the new research reverts to subject matter more characteristic of the old Zionist narrative, such as the reinvention of 1948 as primarily a war of liberation against the British. Such work also reaffirms the Zionist claim of ‘purity of arms’, though this time vis-à-vis the British forces instead of the Palestinians. By contrast, post-Zionists focused on demolishing that myth.23
A number of the above-mentioned works appear in Kadish’s two-volume set. Its title, Israel’s War of Independence, 1948–1949, is typical of neo-Zionist historiography, which has abandoned the neutral term ‘the 1948 war’, which was used by the new historians, in favour of either the ‘war of independence’ or the ‘war of liberation’ – never asking, by the way, the question of independence from whom or liberation from what. When discussing this issue, I am always reminded of the Palestinians in my hometown of Haifa. Quite often we have met and strolled through a park in downtown Haifa called the Park of Liberation – which in fact would have to mean the liberation of Haifa from its indigenous population by the settler community that took their place.
Taken as a whole, the Alon Kadish collection exhibits many of the hallmarks of neo-Zionist historiography. Part of the new strategy, especially with regard to the expulsions, is to emphasise that these are common if not inevitable occurrences in war and then to treat them from an almost technical standpoint. This is effectively demonstrated in an article by University of Haifa geography professor Arnon Golan (published in 2003 in Israel Affairs and in an anthology titled The Israeli Palestinians: An Arab Minority in the Jewish State), which bears the wonderfully bland title ‘Jewish Settlement of Former Arab Towns and Their Incorporation into the Israeli Urban System (1948–1950)’.24 Golan, who had earlier taken a leading role in trying to refute works by the new historians, here abandons his earlier denial of the ethnic cleansing to write:
The policy carried out with regard to the occupied Arab villages was their total destruction and the expulsion of the villagers who remained. The action was always implemented in keeping with the strictest interpretation of Plan Dalet … There were also the phenomena of vandalism and revenge.25
The facts are there, recounted matter-of-factly, without any hint of moral discomfort. Golan explains that both sides exercised the same policy of expulsion, typical in times of war – a bewildering statement that has no foundation whatsoever but sounds good. This bizarre attempt to create a parity of victimhood had already been attempted in his 1993 doctoral dissertation. This version of the 1948 war produced both Arab and Jewish refugees; thus, the issue was one of ‘equal victimhood’. It bears emphasis that, in contrast to most writers claiming equal victimhood with reference to the Jewish refugees from Arab countries, Golan specifically refers to the few hundred Jews whose settlements in what became the West Bank were dismantled and to the residents of the Jewish quarter in the old city of Jerusalem, all areas annexed to Jordan by prior Jewish consent. Golan regrets the absence of a more effective and coordinating hand in the division of the spoils of war resulting from the systematic Israeli pillaging of Palestinian property, houses, lands, and bank accounts, but points out that the dispossession of the Palestinians was the only way to make possible the absorption of so many Jewish immigrants after the 1948 war.26 His approving treatment of Israel’s anti-repatriation policy is another aspect of this approach.
Not surprisingly, many of the chapters of Kadish’s Israel’s War of Independence reproduce the basic outline of events recounted earlier by the new historians, yet now the results look very different. Dani Hadari’s chapter, for example, emphasises (as do the new historians) Plan Dalet’s importance in precipitating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.27 Although Hadari does sanitise the terminology (he refers to the part of the plan detailing instructions to destroy Palestinian villages merely as ‘an important military mission’), he makes no attempt to conceal actions that classical Zionist writers would have preferred to avoid discussing.28 For example, not only does he write that the Jewish troops rarely honoured Plan Dalet’s offer to let certain Palestinian villages surrender, he also commends the army for its harsh interpretation of the plan, ascribing it to the army’s known propensity to ‘take the initiative’ – litol yozma.29 He even highlights the case of Umm Zayant, a village that was promised immunity but was destroyed and its inhabitants expelled despite their overtures of peace. Hadari employs the same tone when discussing the army’s policy of shooting villagers who tried to return to their villages after having been expelled. As with other such actions, he treats it as a purely military problem. Hadari has high praise for the IDF’s de-Arabisation of the Galilee from May to October 1948. Interestingly, while the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is almost never used by the neo-Zionists, the term ‘de-Arabisation’ has been adopted. Yet in pre-1948 classical Zionist discourse, Arabs were hardly mentioned at all, and such a term would have been unthinkable. The land, after all, was basically ‘empty’, and the task was therefore to colonise it. Only rarely was it acknowledged that colonisation required removal of the local population.
Among the numerous other examples of the neo-Zionist tendency to unapologetically recount events that earlier would have aroused uneasiness, at the very least, or simply been omitted from the account altogether, I will mention only a few. The writer Uri Milstein, for instance, describes in detail the massive looting of Palestinian houses but invokes it, not to criticise the acts themselves, but to expose the Hagana’s disorganisation and failure to coordinate.30 Two chapters in the Kadish anthology are also good examples of the neo-Zionist treatment of the systematically aggressive policy of the Zionist forces towards the Palestinian or mixed towns, where they premeditatedly drove out the Palestinian inhabitants. The chapter by Yoav Peled on the April 1948 operations in Jaffa corroborates the new historians’ finding that the military confrontation in the town and the expulsion of its fifty thousand Palestinian inhabitants could have been avoided,
but that Hagana commanders did not want the Palestinians to remain. A similar picture emerges from Moshe Arnewald’s chapter depicting the expulsion of the Palestinian inhabitants of West Jerusalem during the same period. Both researchers find this policy acceptable, and neither shows any sign of the moral reservations typical of the new historians.31 For example, the final pages of Peled’s article describe how the Irgun carried out its operation to ‘cleans[e] enemy outposts’ by ‘relentlessly bombard[ing] the Ajami quarter and other Arab neighbourhoods of the town centre with the objective of breaking the inhabitants’ morale and creating chaos and havoc to cause mass flight’.32 As recounted by Arnewald, the objective of the Jewish plan to take over West Jerusalem is identical: ‘to cause a flight from the Arab neighbourhoods outside the Old City and the concentration of the Arab population in it’.33 He comments that as a result of the attacks, ‘the population density of the Old City by May 1948 was unbearable’, its original population having doubled or even tripled.34 Despite the ‘gravity’ of the living conditions and hygienic situation, and although ‘on 8 May typhus broke out and riots began due to the scarcity of food and flour’, he notes that the Old City’s population did not leave because it felt secure.35 In fact, the population, along with its refugees, did remain – because it was not expelled and was protected by the Transjordanian Arab Legion, which aborted all the Israeli attempts to occupy it. Elsewhere the situation was different; virtually the entire Arab population of West Jerusalem was driven out as a result of these actions.