[News] Finding the truth amid Israel's lies

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://electronicintifada.net/content/finding-truth-amid-israels-lies/24531 



  Finding the truth amid Israel's lies

Ilan Pappe <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ilan-pappe> - 30 May 2018

------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Great sadness and suffering flooded the roads – convoy upon convoy
    of refugees making their way [to the Lebanese border]. They leave
    the villages of their homeland and the homeland of their ancestors
    and move to an alien, unknown new land, full of troubles. Women,
    children, babies, donkeys – everyone is on the move, quietly and
    sadly, to the north, without looking left or right.

    A woman cannot find her husband, a child cannot find his father …
    Everything that can walk is moving, running away not knowing what to
    do, not knowing where they are going. Many of their belongings are
    spread on the sideways; the more they walk the more exhausted they
    become, they nearly cannot walk anymore – shedding from the bodies
    everything they tried to salvage when they are on their way to exile …

    I met an 8-year-old boy going north and leading before him two
    donkeys. His father and brother died in the fighting and he lost his
    mother … I passed through the way between Sasa and Tarbiha and I saw
    a tall man, bent, scratching with his hands something on the tough
    rocky terrain. I stopped. I noticed a small dent in the land that
    was dug by bare hands, with nails, under the olive tree. The man
    laid in it a body of a baby who died in the arms of his mother and
    buried it with dirt and [covered it with] small stones. Then he went
    back to the road and continued to move north, his bent wife walking
    a few steps behind him, without looking back. I ran into an old man,
    who fainted on a rock on the sideway and nobody among the refugees
    dares to help him … When we went into Birim, everyone fled in their
    fright in the direction of the wadi facing north, taking their
    little kids and as much cloth as they could. The next day, they came
    back as the Lebanese did not allow them to enter. Seven babies died
    of hypothermia.

This moving description was not written by a human rights activist, a UN 
observer or a caring journalist. It was written by Moshe Carmel and 
appears in his book /Northern Campaigns/ – first published in 1949.

He toured the Galilee at the end of October 1948, after commanding 
Operation Hiram, in which Israeli forces committed some of the worst 
atrocities in the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The crimes 
were so serious that some leading Zionists described them as Nazi actions.

Carmel’s book and dozens like it – brigade books, memoirs and military 
histories – could be found on the shelves of Israeli Jewish homes from 
1948 onwards. Revisiting them, 70 years on, reveals an elementary truth: 
it would have been possible to write the “new history 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2537762?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents>” of 
1948 without a single new declassified document, but only if these open 
sources, as I call them, had been read with non-Zionist lenses.

The famous – and by now overused – expression that history is written by 
the victors can be countered in many ways. One way is by unpacking the 
victors’ publications in order to expose the lies, fabrications and 
misrepresentations, as well as their less conscious actions.

A rereading of these open sources about the Nakba, mostly written by 
Israelis themselves, unlocks fresh historiographical perspectives on the 
big picture of that period – while declassified documents allow us to 
see that picture in a higher resolution.

This reprise could have been done at any moment between 1948 and today – 
as long as historians were willing to employ the critical lens needed 
for such an examination.

Rereading these open sources, especially in tandem with the numerous 
oral histories of the Nakba, reveals the barbarism and dehumanization 
that accompanied the catastrophe. The barbarism is common to settler 
communities in the formative years of their colonization projects and 
can sometimes be obscured by the dry and evasive language of military 
and political documents.

I do not mean to belittle the importance of archival documents. They are 
important for telling us what happened. However, the open sources and 
oral histories are crucial for understanding the meaning of what happened.

Such a rereading exposes the settler-colonial DNA of the Zionist project 
and the place of the 1948 ethnic cleansing within it.


    Dehumanization on a massive scale

Take the Carmel quotation, for instance. How could someone overseeing 
such atrocities write so compassionately?

The clue is in another sentence in the same quotation that appears 
almost as a digression: “And then I noticed a 16-year-old boy, totally 
naked smiling at us, when we passed him (funny, when I passed him I did 
not tell because of his nakedness to which people he belonged and I only 
saw him as a human being).”

For one very exceptional short moment, that Palestinian kid was 
humanized (within the parentheses in the text). But dehumanization 
occurred on a scale we witness only in massive crimes such as ethnic 
cleansing and genocide.

The rule was that children were considered as part of the enemy, who had 
to be cleansed for the sake of a Jewish state or as Carmel put it – a 
day after he finished his Galilee tour – for the sake of liberation.

He published this message to his troops: “The whole Galilee, the ancient 
Israeli Galilee, was liberated by the powerful and devastating force of 
the IDF [Israel’s military] … We eliminated the enemy, we destroyed it 
and caused it to flee … We [conquered] Meiron [Mayrun], Gush Halav 
[Jish], Sasa and Malkiya … We destroyed the enemies’ nests of Tarshiha, 
Eilabun, Mghar and Rami … The castles of the enemy fell one after the 
other.”

Seventy years after the Nakba, the Hebrew language is as important a 
tool as access to the closed Israeli archives. The Hebrew text clearly 
tells you who the enemy was – the enemy that fled, was eliminated and 
expelled from its “castles.”

They are the people Carmel met. And for a moment, he was moved by their 
suffering.


    Redemption?

The most important discursive elements in these kinds of reports are the 
concepts of liberation and elimination (/shihrur/ and /hisul/). What 
this meant, in reality, was an attempt to indigenize the occupiers of 
Palestine through the de-indigenization of the Palestinians.

This is the essence of a settler-colonial project and Carmel’s book – 
and those by others – reveal it in full. Carmel saw the 1948 occupation 
as a redemption of the Roman Galilee.

These violent acts against the Palestinians had very little to do with 
finding a haven from anti-Semitism.

The Zionist project was, and still is, a project of de-indigenizing the 
Palestinian population and replacing it with one comprised of Jewish 
settlers. It was in many ways the implementation of a romantic 
nationalist ideology, the like of which fed fanatic Italian and German 
nationalism in the late 19th century and beyond.

This link is clear in books about the brigades in the Israeli army. One 
such book, /The Alexandroni Brigade and The War of Independence/, is a 
case in point.

The Alexandroni Brigade was entrusted with the occupation of much of 
Palestine’s coast, north of Jaffa, about 60 villages in total. Before 
occupation of the villages, the troops were taught about the historical 
context of their operations. The narrative provided by the commanders is 
repeated in the book in two chapters. The first is titled “The Military 
Past of the Alexandroni Space” and it begins by saying “the front in 
which the Alexandroni Brigade faced in the war of Independence is unique 
in the military history of the region and of Eretz Israel [Greater 
Israel] in particular.”

This was the Sharon – the coast of Palestine in the Zionist narrative – 
which is an invented term with no roots in history. The Sharon, the book 
on the Alexandroni Brigade tells us, was “a rich and quite fertile land” 
that “attracted” armies during their “occupation journeys” into the land 
of Israel. This historical chapter is full of tales of heroism, 
claiming, for example, “this is where [the people of] Israel under [the 
prophet] Shmuel confronted the Philistines.”

The Hebrews were always disadvantaged in the battle against their 
enemies but “then as today, it was the superior spirit that tipped the 
balance in favor of Israel.”

Under Baibars, the Mamluk sultan, the Sharon was destroyed as an 
agricultural land and “from then on the Sharon would regain its economic 
vitality until its resettlement with the Zionist immigration [aliya],” 
the book states. Baibars, by the way, had been there in 1260. So the 
book on the Alexandroni Brigade tells its readers that the Sharon had 
been without people for more than 600 years, which is Zionist 
fabrication of history at its best.

During the Ottoman period the Sharon “was in total devastation, 
saturated with swamps and malaria,” the book adds. “Only with the Jewish 
aliya and settlement in the end of the 19th century a new period of 
prosperity [in the Sharon’s history] began.”

The Zionists “returned” the Sharon to its former glory and it became one 
of the most Jewish areas in the “Mandatory Eretz Israel” – as the book 
calls Palestine when it was administered by a British mandate.


    “Villages must be destroyed”

The ethnic cleansing of the Hebrew coast began while Palestine was under 
British control. Britain was, in many respects, a vital ally of the 
Zionist movement. Yet it did not facilitate the colonization of 
Palestine as quickly as some Zionists wanted. The book on the 
Alexandroni Brigade even depicts Britain as being a sometimes inhuman 
obstacle to Jewish “redemption.”

So the Sharon clearly still had Arabs in it. The book describes the 
region as the lifeline for the Jewish community, yet suggests that 
Jewish life was disrupted by the many surrounding Arab villages.

It was mainly the eastern part of the Sharon that was “purely Arab and 
constituted the main threat towards the Jewish settlements; a threat 
that had to be taken into account in any military planning.”

The “threat” was “taken into account” first by isolated attacks on 
villages. The book says that up to 29 November 1947 the relationship 
between Jews and Palestinians was good and continued to be so after that 
date. And yet a sentence later the books tells us that “in the beginning 
of 1948, the process of abandoning isolated Arab villages began. One can 
see the early signs for this in the abandonment of Sidan Ali (al-Haram) 
by its 220 Arab inhabitants and Qaisriya by its 1,100 Arab inhabitants 
in mid-February 1948.” There were two massive expulsions that took place 
while the British forces who were responsible for law and order, watched 
on and did not interfere. Then “in March with the escalation of the 
fighting, the process of abandonment intensified.”

The “escalation” came with the implementation of Plan Dalet – a 
blueprint for destroying Palestinian villages. The book on the 
Alexandroni Brigade brings a summary of the orders emanating from the 
plan. The orders include the task of “determining the Arab villages that 
must be seized or destroyed.”

There were 55 villages, according to the book, in the area occupied 
according to Plan Dalet. The Hebrew Sharon was almost completely 
“liberated” in March 1948 when the coast “was cleansed” from Arab 
villages apart from four. In the language of the book: “Most of the 
areas near the coast were cleansed from Arab villages, apart from … a 
‘small triangle’ and in it the Arab villages of Jaba, Ein Ghazal and 
Ijzim – which stuck out like a sore thumb, overlooking the Tel 
Aviv-Haifa road; there were also Arabs in Tantura on the beach.”

A deeper analysis of these texts and other open sources would shed light 
on the structural nature of the ongoing settler colonial project in 
Palestine, the ongoing Nakba.

The history of the Nakba is thus not only a chronicle of the past, but 
an examination of a historical moment that is continuing in the 
historian’s time. Social scientists are far more equipped to deal with 
“moving targets” – namely analyzing contemporary phenomena – but 
historians, so we are told, need distance to reflect on and see the full 
picture.

On the face it, 70 years should provide enough distance, but on the 
other hand, this is like an attempt to understand the Soviet Union, or 
for that matter the Crusades, by contemporaries, and not by historians.

Sites of memory, to use Pierre Nora’s concept 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928520?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents>, as 
well as the scholarly leaps of recent years are triggered not by 
declassification /per se/, but by their relevance to contemporary struggles.

Oral history projects, as well as the brigade books, are all crucial and 
accessible sources that penetrate the genuine and cynical Zionist, and 
later Israeli, shields of deception. They help understand why the 
concept of a democratic or enlightened settler state is an oxymoron.


    Israel’s approved history

A deconstruction of Israel’s approved history is the best way to 
challenge a word laundrette that turns ethnic cleansing into 
self-defense, land robbery into redemption and apartheid practices into 
“security” concerns.

There is a sense, on the one hand, that after years of denial, the 
historiographical picture has been revealed worldwide with clear 
contours and colors. The Israeli narrative has been challenged 
successfully both in the academic world and in the public domain.

And yet there is a sense of frustration, given the limited access to 
declassified documents in Israel to scholars, even Israeli ones, while 
Palestinian scholars can hardly hope in the current political climate to 
have any access at all.

Going beyond the archival documents about the Nakba is, therefore, 
necessary not only for a better understanding of the event. It may also 
be a solution for researchers in the future, given the new Israeli 
policy on declassification.

Israel has closed 
<https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium.MAGAZINE-hidden-stories-of-the-nakba-1.6010350> 
most of the 1948 documents.

The alternative sources and approaches suggested in this piece highlight 
several points. A knowledge of Hebrew is helpful and the need to 
continue with oral history projects is essential.

The settler colonial paradigm also remains relevant for analyzing afresh 
both the Zionist project and resistance to it. Yet there are still 
issues with the adaptability of the paradigm – such as whether it can be 
applied to Jews from Arab countries who moved to Palestine – and these 
should be further explored.

But more than anything else we should insist that commitment to 
Palestine is not an obstacle for good scholarship but an enhancer of it. 
As Edward Said wrote: “But where are facts if not embedded in history, 
and then reconstituted and recovered by human agents stirred by some 
perceived or desired or hoped-for historical narrative whose future aim 
is to restore justice to the dispossessed?”

Justice and facts, moral positions, professional acumen and scholarly 
accuracy should not be juxtaposed one against the other but rather seen 
as all contributing to a wholesome historiographical enterprise. Very 
few historiographical projects are in need of such an integrative 
approach as the research on the ongoing Nakba.

/The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and 
director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University 
of Exeter./


-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20180530/1659c09e/attachment.htm>