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<h1 class="reader-title">Finding the truth amid Israel's lies</h1>
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<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ilan-pappe">Ilan
Pappe</a></span> <span class="field field-publisher">-</span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2018-05-30T16:37:00+00:00">30 May 2018</span></span>
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<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 …</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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
<em>Northern Campaigns</em> – first published in 1949.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2537762?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">new
history</a>” 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Such a rereading exposes the settler-colonial DNA of
the Zionist project and the place of the 1948 ethnic
cleansing within it.</p>
<h2>Dehumanization on a massive scale</h2>
<p>Take the Carmel quotation, for instance. How could
someone overseeing such atrocities write so
compassionately?</p>
<p>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).”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>They are the people Carmel met. And for a moment, he
was moved by their suffering.</p>
<h2>Redemption?</h2>
<p>The most important discursive elements in these kinds
of reports are the concepts of liberation and
elimination (<em>shihrur</em> and <em>hisul</em>).
What this meant, in reality, was an attempt to
indigenize the occupiers of Palestine through the
de-indigenization of the Palestinians.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>These violent acts against the Palestinians had very
little to do with finding a haven from anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This link is clear in books about the brigades in the
Israeli army. One such book, <em>The Alexandroni
Brigade and The War of Independence</em>, is a case
in point.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>“Villages must be destroyed”</h2>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Sites of memory, to use Pierre Nora’s <a
href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928520?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">concept</a>,
as well as the scholarly leaps of recent years are
triggered not by declassification <em>per se</em>,
but by their relevance to contemporary struggles.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Israel’s approved history</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Israel has <a
href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium.MAGAZINE-hidden-stories-of-the-nakba-1.6010350">closed</a>
most of the 1948 documents.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
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