[News] Israel's latest attempt to erase Palestine - suppress official documentation of the ethnic cleansing

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-latest-attempt-erase-palestine/27941 



  Israel's latest attempt to erase Palestine

Ilan Pappe <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ilan-pappe> - 25 July 
2019

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

The attempt to suppress official documentation of the ethnic cleansing 
of Palestinians in 1948 is not new.

But efforts by teams from the Israeli defense ministry to remove 
sensitive documents from Israeli archives – as reported 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-israel-systematically-hides-evidence-of-1948-expulsion-of-arabs-1.7435103> 
by the /Haaretz/ newspaper recently – must be understood in a new 
political climate and are not simply an attempt to spare Israeli 
governments embarrassment, as some have suggested.

Those of us working with Nakba documents – Nakba means “catastrophe” and 
is the term Palestinians use for the expulsion in 1948 of some 800,000 
people from their lands and homes in what became Israel – were already 
aware of the removal of these documents. For many years, for instance, 
historians were unable to revisit “the village files,” which formed an 
important proof in my argument that the 1948 war was an act of ethnic 
cleansing.

Some of the crucial material Benny Morris used on the Deir Yassin 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/deir-yassin-massacre> and 
al-Dawayima <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/al-dawayima> massacres 
could also not be not re-opened 
<https://mondoweiss.net/2019/07/reveals-israeli-conspiracy/>. They all 
detailed a more honest Israeli version of the causes leading to what was 
termed the “Palestinian exodus” in 1948.

Why are these files being hidden? In 2016, the journalist Lisa Goldman 
assumed 
<https://972mag.com/classified-politicizing-the-nakba-in-israels-state-archives/117216/> 
that the reason was that the works of the “new historians” embarrassed 
the government and undermined Israel’s international standing.

The documents certainly challenged the official Israeli version of a 
voluntary Palestinian flight and exposed war crimes committed by Zionist 
and later Israeli forces.

But I think the reasons are far more profound and alarming. They are 
part of a new assault on Palestine and the Palestinians.


    Taking the politics out of Palestine

We need to look at the attempt at censoring these archives in two 
contexts: the political and the historical.

Politically, the removal of these documents has to be seen as part of an 
overall American-Israeli initiative (or at least tendency) to try to 
depoliticize the “Palestine question.”

In Israel, this began with Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideas about an “economic 
peace,” the attempt <https://www.haaretz.com/1.5061173> to induce the 
Palestinians to give up their political demands in return for an 
improved economic reality.

It continued with the legislation of the Nakba Law 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nakba-law>, which withdrew any 
government funding for public bodies and institutions that would 
commemorate the 1948 events as a catastrophe.

An important part of this strategy includes Israeli actions on the 
ground – settlement expansion 
<https://peacenow.org.il/en/annual-settlement-report-2018>, house 
demolitions 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israeli-rampage-destruction-jerusalem-village>, 
village clearances 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/will-icc-probe-israels-demolition-khan-al-ahmar> 
– that bring us closer to an official annexation of Area C – 
approximately 60 percent of the West Bank – into Israel and the 
establishment of small Bantustans in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

A number of Israeli politicians and officials have been quite open about 
wanting to annex all or parts of the West Bank, including, of course, 
the prime minister himself 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/07/netanyahu-vows-to-annexe-jewish-settlements-in-occupied-west-bank>.

Finally, there is the Israeli nation-state law 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nation-state-law>, which passed in 
2018. This law consolidated Israel as an apartheid state.

One particular clause in the law is relevant to our discussion: it 
stipulates that the right to exercise national self-determination in the 
country is “unique” to the Jewish people 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-passes-law-entrenching-apartheid>.

On the American side, meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken a 
number of steps that complement the Israeli attempt to erase Palestine 
as a political issue and Palestinians as a national movement.

These measures included the recognition of Jerusalem 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/oh-jerusalem-requiem-two-state-solution/22521> 
as Israel’s capital and the transfer there of the US embassy from Tel 
Aviv; ending 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/trump-targets-sick-palestinians> 
financial support for UNRWA, the UN body that caters for Palestinian 
refugees; removing 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-palestinians/us-state-department-revokes-plo-ambassador-family-visas-envoy-idUSKCN1LW0RE> 
the PLO delegation from Washington; and a Bahrain conference 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/omar-karmi/ultimate-deal-not-meant-work> 
focused on financial incentives for the Palestinians with no mention of 
any political rights.

Together, the Israeli and American campaigns amount to a new assault on 
Palestine and the Palestinians. The Palestinians are very vulnerable at 
this moment: Arab regimes are deserting them, the international 
community’s elite is indifferent, and Palestinians themselves are 
divided between Hamas and Fatah.


    Eliminating the native

Israeli and American intentions combined with the vulnerability of the 
Palestinians bring us to a dangerous historical juncture. Israel is now 
in a position to attempt once more to act according to the logic of the 
“elimination of the native” (the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe’s 
characterization 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/14623520601056240> of the 
motives behind setter colonial movements such as Zionism).

Israel succeeded only partly in implementing this aim in 1948. The 
Palestinian national movement and people struggled succesfully then, and 
continue to struggle now, against the completion of the ethnic cleansing 
of 1948.

But this is a difficult moment. Abroad, efforts to shield Israel from 
criticism have intensified.

Pro-Palestinian politicians are defamed 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/jewish-labour-movement-was-refounded-fight-corbyn> 
as anti-Semites. Legislation is being introduced in different countries 
to protect Israel from criticism 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israels-bogus-definition-anti-semitism-shuts-down-free-speech/25471> 
and activism 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/u-s-house-passes-anti-bds-resolution-in-bipartisan-vote-1.7568292>, 
including boycotts.

Removing archival material and the possible destruction of documents 
expose the deeper ideological motives behind this current assault on 
Palestine and the Palestinians.

How much has this undermined our ability to reconstruct what happened in 
the Nakba and for assessing its significance today?

In many ways, we have been here before. Israel looted 
<https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/01/world/israeli-looted-archives-of-plo-officials-say.html> 
the PLO archives in October 1982, destroyed part of them, transferred 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-are-palestinian-photos-and-films-buried-in-israeli-archives-1.5490325> 
some of them to Israel and returned a small portion.

In 2001, Israel raided the Orient House in East Jerusalem and stole 
<https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/13_Editorial_2.pdf> 
the archives there.

Now Israel raids its own archives to cleanse them of evidence of its 
past crimes.

Will this damage our ability to reconstruct the past?

In one way, no. The Palestinian refugees after 1948 did not need Israeli 
“new historians” to tell them that they were victims of ethnic cleansing.

Archival evidence is needed, though, to expose the intent and planning 
behind the crime and for contextualizing the past within a wider 
understanding of the nature of the Zionist movement and Israel.

For both purposes, documents already seen, and in many cases already 
scanned and digitized for posterity, are enough to prove beyond doubt 
the Zionist ideological intent behind the attempt to eliminate the 
Palestinians in 1948 and after.

While there is no one “smoking gun” document proving the full intent 
behind the ethnic cleansing – although, as the scholar Walid Khalidi 
commented <http://pbble.com/doc/Khalidi-Plan-Dalet.pdf>, a paper known 
as Plan D came very close – there are enough discrete documents that 
together expose the crime against humanity Israel committed against the 
Palestinians.


    Erasing Palestine

As we move forward in time, from 1948 on, the information is more 
accessible and any attempt to destroy or hide it is bound to fail. 
Students, historians, pundits and activists can see very clearly the 
pattern of violence Israel inflicted and continues to inflict on the 
Palestinians (in this respect, one is reminded of another remark 
<https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3437-forum-on-patrick-wolfe> by 
Patrick Wolfe that settler colonialism is not an event but a structure).

Nevertheless, the origins of this structural violence is in the Nakba 
and therefore its documentation is important. It is this origin that 
explains Israeli policies since 1948: the imposition of military rule on 
Palestinians inside Israel until 1966 and its transition onto the 
occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the Judaization policy of 
expropriation of land and displacement in the Galilee, the Jerusalem 
area and the Naqab (Negev); the brutal repression of the two intifadas; 
the destruction of southern Lebanon in 1982 and 2006 and finally the 
inhuman siege on Gaza.

All these criminal policies can be proven without declassifying Israeli 
documents but are better historicized and contextualized if supported by 
documentation that show how – in the case of Israel – the “logic of 
elimination of the native” was being implemented.

We need to accumulate and present clearly what I would call indicative 
documents, which are very near to a “smoking gun” proof of the 
intention, inhumanity and purpose of the 1948 ethnic cleansing. I have 
displayed several of these documents on my public Facebook page 
<https://www.facebook.com/pappeIlan/>, but we need proper archives that 
can be safeguarded from a state and an international coalition that 
wants to erase Palestine from our historical memory and to diminish it 
into an economic question.

This is not the first nor will it be the last attempt to erase 
Palestine. Sometimes these attempts are hidden from the eye but are 
nonetheless are highly significant and can only be traced by 
professional historiography.

In March 1964, Israel demanded that American citizens who had passports 
issued with the designation “Palestine” would be issued with new 
passports without that designation. The US State Department complied.

“We will cease using ‘Palestine’ in passports as place of assignment and 
cease issuing, renewing, or amending passports with seal bearing word 
‘Palestine’,” a telegram 
<https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v18/d30> 
informed the US embassy in Tel Aviv.

But Palestine is not designation, and not a place of assignment that 
exists only in archives, open or closed. It is a real country, under 
colonization and occupation.

We should all strive to continue to tell its history as it explains the 
present and influences our future.

/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./


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