Posts Tagged ‘David Ben Gurion’
Part 3. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted on: June 23, 2018
Part 3. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
And another 700,000 a few years later.
Points of Agreement after the Debate
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond own research shows that this was indeed how Israel came into being.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.
In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.
It’s worth noting at the outset that, while such a debate exists in the Israeli media, the US media remains, as ever, absolutely silent on the matter.
Points of Agreement
While there are a number of points on which Morris and his critics heatedly disagree, it’s imperative to begin by highlighting those facts that aren’t in dispute.
First and foremost, it’s completely uncontroversial that hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes by the Zionist forces during the 1948 war—about 700,000, according to Morris, by the time it was done.
Also uncontroversial is the fact that much of this flight and expulsion occurred well before the neighboring Arab states sent in their armies following the Zionists’ declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.
In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, Morris estimates the number of Arabs made refugees prior to May 14 at somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000.
In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, “There were in fact 350,000 if one adds all of the population from the 200 towns and villages that were destroyed by 15 May 1948.”[8]
This is consistent with Morris’s remark that the number was “apparently smaller” than 400,000.
Another uncontroversial fact is that there was a prevailing “atmosphere of transfer” among the Zionist leadership—with “transfer” being a euphemism for the forced displacement of Arabs from their homes.
As Morris notes in his book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, “an atmosphere of what would later be called ethnic cleansing prevailed”, and, to be sure, “much of the country had been ‘cleansed’ of Arabs” by the end of the war.[9]
David Ben-Gurion issues the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl (Rudi Weissenstein)
Indeed, the idea that the Arabs would have to go was an assumption inherent in the ideology of political Zionism.
The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who is considered the father of the movement, outlined the Zionist project in a pamphlet titled The Jewish State in 1896.[10]
A year prior, he had expressed in his diary the need to rid the land of its Arab majority:
“We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border, by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”[11]
Note: The “Christian” Evangelicals in the USA had already preceded Herzl ideology by 50 years, mainly with the faith that the Second Coming will occur after the Jews occupy Jerusalem. They had the same transfer and incremental genocide on their mind. It is the “Christian” Evangelical Zionists who financed and supported Israel politically and economically to buy land, settle and secure the backing of US establishment and institutions.
In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed that Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states, but there was a problem: there would remain an estimated 225,000 Arabs in the area proposed for the Jewish state. (The Hews were less of that number in the proposed part)
“Sooner or later there should be a transfer of land and, as far as possible, an exchange of population”, the Commission concluded.
It proceeded to draw attention to the “instructive precedent” of an agreement between the governments of Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 that determined that “Greek nationals of the Orthodox religion living in Turkey should be compulsorily removed to Greece, and Turkish nationals of the Muslem religion living in Greece to Turkey.”
The Commission expressed its hope “that the Arab and the Jewish leaders might show the same high statesmanship as that of the Turks and the Greeks and make the same bold decision for the sake of peace.”[12]
Of course, the Commission was not unmindful of “the deeply-rooted aversion which all “Arab” (meaning Palestinians) peasants have shown in the past to leaving the lands which they have cultivated for many generations. They would, it is believed, strongly object to a compulsory transfer . . . .”[13]
Part 2. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted on: June 22, 2018
Part 2. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond own research shows that this was indeed how Israel came into being.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.
In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.
The Debate
It started when Daniel Blatman, an Israeli historian and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, penned an op-ed for the Israeli daily Haaretz stating that ethnic cleansing “is exactly what happened in 1948.”
To support this, Blatman cited Benny Morris: the Israeli historian, Blatman wrote, “determined that most of the Arabs in the country, over 400,000, were encouraged to leave or expelled in the first stage of the war—even before the Arab nations’ armies invaded.”[2]
Benny Morris, October 30, 2007 (Aude/CC BY-SA 2.0)
That prompted a response from Morris, who wrote an op-ed of his own titled “Israel Conducted No Ethnic Cleansing in 1948”.
In it, he contends that Blatman “distorts history when he says the new State of Israel, a country facing invading armies, carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs.” And Blatman “betrayed his profession”, Morris further charged, “when he attributed to me things I have never claimed and distorted the events of the 1948 war.”
Central to Morris’s argument is that “Blatman ignores the basic fact that the Palestinians were the ones who started the war when they rejected the UN compromise plan and embarked on hostile acts in which 1,800 Jews were killed between November 1947 and mid-May 1948.” (wrong statement)
Moreover, the neighboring Arab states had “threatened to invade even before the UN resolution was passed on November 29, 1947, and before a single Arab had been uprooted from his home.”
Even prior to the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 181, which recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, the Arab states had continuously declared their intent “to attack the Jewish state when the British left.”
He acknowledges that prior to the Zionists’ declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, and the subsequent introduction of Arab states’ regular armies into the conflict, a few hundred thousand Arabs (though a number “apparently smaller” than the figure of 400,000 cited by Blatman) “were expelled from their homes and forced to flee”.
How can it be true that, on one hand, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and never allowed to return, yet also true, on the other, that there was no ethnic cleansing?
Morris attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction by arguing that “at no stage of the 1948 war was there a decision by the leadership of the Yishuv [the Jewish community] or the state to ‘expel the Arabs’”. In other words, it’s true that many Arabs were indeed expelled, but this was not the result of an official policy of the Zionist leadership.
“It’s true that in the 1930s and early ‘40s”, Morris further acknowledges, “David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann supported the transfer of Arabs from the area of the future Jewish state. But later they supported the UN decision, whose plan left more than 400,000 Arabs in place.
“It’s also true that from a certain point during the war, Ben-Gurion let his officers understand that it was preferable for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the new country, but he never gave them an order ‘to expel the Arabs.’”
And, true, there was an “atmosphere of transfer that prevailed in the country beginning in April 1948”, but this “was never translated into official policy—which is why there were officers who expelled Arabs and others who didn’t. Neither group was reprimanded or punished.
“In the end, in 1948 about 160,000 Arabs remained in Israeli territory—a fifth of the population.”
Furthermore, “on March 24, 1948, Israel Galili, Ben-Gurion’s deputy in the future Defense Ministry and the head of the Haganah, ordered all the Haganah brigades not to uproot Arabs from the territory of the designated Jewish state. Things did change in early April due to the Yishuv’s shaky condition and the impending Arab invasion. But there was no overall expulsion policy—here they expelled people, there they didn’t, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.” (After committing genocide in a couple of towns, like Deir Yassin)
Morris acknowledges that the Zionist leadership in mid-1948 “adopted a policy of preventing the return of refugees”, but asserts this was “logical and just” on the grounds that these were the “same refugees who months and weeks earlier had tried to destroy the state in the making.”
What happened in 1948 does not fit the definition of “ethnic cleansing”, Morris concludes. The Arab states, on the other hand, “carried out ethnic cleansing and uprooted all the Jews, down to the last one, from any territory they captured in 1948”, while the Jews “left Arabs in place in Haifa and Jaffa”, among other places.[3]
(Haifa was predominantly Palestinians. The British mandated power, before vacating Haifa, closed all access to Haifa and opened the port for Palestinians to leave by the sea)
Arabs leaving Haifa as Jewish forces enter the city (Public Domain)
That wasn’t the end of the discussion.
Blatman responded in turn with an op-ed titled “Yes, Benny Morris, Israel Did Perpetrate Ethnic Cleansing in 1948”. In it, he writes that, “On March 10, 1948, the national Haganah headquarters approved Plan Dalet, which discussed the intention of expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state.”
With regard to Morris’s denial that what occurred fits the definition of “ethnic cleansing”, Blatman quotes the prosecutor in the trial of Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian-Serb leader convicted for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia:
In ethnic cleansing . . . you act in such a way that in a given territory, the members of a given ethnic group are eliminated. . . . You have massacres.
Everybody is Not massacred, but you have massacres in order to scare those populations. . . . Naturally, the other people are driven away. They are afraid . . .
And, of course, in the end these people simply want to leave. . . . They are driven away either on their own initiative or they are deported. . . .
Some women are raped and, furthermore, often times what you have is the destruction of the monuments which marked the presence of a given population . . . for instance, Catholic churches or mosques are destroyed.
In other words, contrary to Morris’s argument, it doesn’t follow that, since there is No document in which the Zionist leadership explicitly outlined a plan to expel all Arabs or in which military commanders were instructed to do so, therefore what occurred was not ethnic cleansing. What the prosecutor describes is exactly what happened in 1948,
Blatman notes: “Implied instructions, silent understandings, sowing fear among the population whose flight is the objective; the destruction of the physical presence left behind.”
Blatman quotes from Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949:
The attacks of the Haganah and the Israel Defense Forces, expulsion orders, the fear of attacks and acts of cruelty on the part of the Jews, the absence of assistance from the Arab world and the Arab Higher Committee, the sense of helplessness and abandonment, orders by Arab institutions and commanders to leave and evacuate, in most cases was the direct and decisive reason for the flight—an attack by the Haganah, Irgun, Lehi or the IDF, or the inhabitants’ fear of such an attack.
Note: Patriotic Syrians who volunteered to rescue the Fleeing Palestinians were denied arms and ammunition. USA was exercising undue pressures on the existing neighboring new independent States Not to intervene. Actually, Jordan was created for that purpose: defending Israel and welcoming transferred Palestinians
Blatman adds, “The expulsions were not war crimes, says Morris, because it was the Arabs who started the war. In other words, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who belong to the side that began the fighting have to be expelled. Maybe Morris would agree that the genocide carried out by the Germans against the Herero in 1904–1908 was justified since, after all, the Herero began the rebellion against German colonialism in Namibia.”[4]
Next to weigh in on the debate was Steven Klein, a Haaretz editor and adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University’s International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation.
Klein notes how Morris himself, in a 1988 essay titled “The New Historiography”, had explained how under Plan D, the Zionist forces “cleared various areas completely of Arab villages”, and how “Jewish atrocities . . . and the drive to avenge past misdeeds also contributed significantly to the exodus.”
(The Zionists attach the term “Arab” in order to deny an identity for the Palestinians)
A Palestinian woman and child (Source: Hanini.org/CC BY 3.0)
And in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001, “Morris observed that Ben-Gurion’s views on ‘transfer as a legitimate solution to the Arab problem’ did not change after he publicly declared support for forced expulsions in the 1930s, but that ‘he was aware of the need, for tactical reasons, to be discreet.’
Thus, so it seemed, he explained how Ben-Gurion could be responsible for the expulsion of many of the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs without ever issuing an order to that effect.”
Then in a 2004 Haaretz interview with journalist Ari Shavit, Morris had said, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.”
“Morris, of course, is welcome to change his political view”, Klein continues. “But he, like any other historian, must understand that he has left a paper trail that tells a substantially different narrative than the one he now advocates. The Benny Morris of 2016 seems to be doing what he once accused the ‘old historians’ of doing—interpreting history and downplaying Israeli misdeeds in order to defend Israel’s legitimacy.”[5]
Next to chime in on the debate was Ehud Ein-Gil, who points out in his own Haaretz op-ed that among the Arabs who were allowed to remain were “15,000 Druze who had allied with Israel, 34,000 Christians, whom Israel treated decently so as not to anger its Western allies, and some Bedouin Muslim villages, whose leaders had allied with Israel or with their Jewish neighbors.
“Of the 75,000 Muslims who remained (less than 15% of the prewar number), tens of thousands were internally displaced—people who had fled their villages or were expelled from them and have not been allowed to return to their homes to this day.”
“Morris is right”, Ein-Gil continues, “when he mentions the ‘atmosphere of transfer’ that gripped Israel from April 1948, but he errs when he claims that this atmosphere was never translated into official policy.”
He quotes the orders given to commanders in Plan D to either destroy villages or encircle and then mount “search-and-control operations” within them and, in the event of resistance, to expel all inhabitants.[6]
Finally, Morris responded once more to his critics with a Haaretz article titled “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and pro-Arab Propaganda”, in which he characterizes their articles as not reflecting “a serious way of writing history.”
His own “opinions about the history of 1948 haven’t changed at all”, Morris asserts.
He maintains that “Some Palestinians were expelled (from Lod and Ramle, for example), some were ordered or encouraged by their leaders to flee (from Haifa, for example) and most fled for fear of the hostilities and apparently in the belief that they would return to their homes after the expected Arab victory.
“And indeed, beginning in June, the new Israeli government adopted a policy of preventing the return of refugees—those same Palestinians who fought the Yishuv, the prestate Jewish community, and tried to destroy it.”
Morris contends, “In 1947–1948 there was No a priori intention to expel the Arabs, and during the war there was no policy of expulsion. There are clearly Israel-hating ‘historians’ like Ilan Pappe and Walid Khalidi, and perhaps also Daniel Blatman, going by what he has said, who see the Haganah’s Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948, as a master plan for expelling the Palestinians. It isn’t.”
Rather, Plan D “was intended to craft strategy and tactics for the Haganah to maintain its hold on strategic roads in what was to become the Jewish state. It also sought to secure the borders in the run-up to the expected Arab invasion following the departure of the British.
Blatman’s contention that Plan Dalet ‘discussed the intention of expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state’ is a malicious falsification. These are the words of a pro-Arab propagandist, not of a historian.”
Furthermore, Plan D “explicitly states that the inhabitants of villages that fight the Jews should be expelled and the villages destroyed, while neutral or friendly villages should be left untouched (and have forces garrisoned there).
“As for Arab neighborhoods in mixed cities, the Haganah field commanders ordered that the Arabs of the outlying neighborhoods be transferred to the Arab centers of those cities, like Haifa, not expelled from the country.”
Morris contends that, “if there had been a master plan and a policy of ‘expelling the Arabs,’ we would have found indications of this in the various operational orders to the combat units, and in the reports to the command headquarters, like ‘We carried out the expulsion in accordance with the master plan’ or ‘with Plan Dalet.’ There are no such mentions.”
True, “there was an ‘atmosphere of transfer,’” but this was “understandable in light of the circumstances: constant attacks by Palestinian militias over four months and the expectation of an impending invasion by the Arab armies aimed at annihilating the Jewish state to be and perhaps the people as well.”
This “necessitated occupation and the expelling of villagers who ambushed, sniped at and killed Jews along the borders and the main roads.”
Moreover, “the vast majority of Arabs fled, and the officers of the Haganah/IDF had no need to face the decision of whether to expel them.”[7]
On the night of April 7-8, under the command of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, Palestinian irregulars counterattacked the Haganah occupiers of Castel. The Palestinians are seen here moving to the counterattack. From Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora, page 334. (Public Domain)
Note: Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini was one of many leaders who believed that Palestine is part of the Syrian nation and constitute one people.
How my Grandmother Was Made Homeless: The dispossessed
Every year, on May 15, I ask my grandmother to tell me the story of how she was made homeless.
It happened 67 years ago. She was 14, the youngest of 11 siblings from a middle-class Christian family.
They had moved to Haifa from Nazareth when my grandmother was a little girl and lived on Garden Street in the German Colony, which used to be a colony for German Templars, later becoming a cosmopolitan center of Arab culture during the British Mandate.
When I ask her to recall what life in Haifa was like back then, her eyes fix on the middle distance.
“It was the most beautiful city I have ever seen. The greenery … the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean Sea,” she says, as her voice trails off.
My grandmother remembers clearly the night her family left.
They were woken up in the middle of the night by loud banging on the front door. My grandmother’s cousins, who lived in an Arab neighborhood of Haifa, had arrived to tell them that Haifa was falling.
The British had announced they were withdrawing, and there were rumors that the country was being handed over to the Zionists.
At the time, the German Colony had been relatively insulated from the incidents of violence in the rest of the country, which included raids and massacres of Palestinian villages by Zionist paramilitary groups.
Yet the Haganah, a paramilitary organization that later formed the core of the Israel Defense Forces, saw the British withdrawal from Haifa as an opportunity and carried out a series of attacks on key Arab neighborhoods where my grandmother’s aunts and cousins were living.
“That night our Jewish neighbors told us not to leave,” my grandmother remembers.
“And my father wanted to stay, to wait it out. But my mother … well she had 11 children, and of course she wanted us to be safe. And her sisters were leaving because of the attacks in their neighborhoods.”
Courtesy of Saleem Haddad
The family debated all night. In the morning, they reached a decision.
They each quickly packed a small suitcase and left the rest of their belongings. “We hid the most valuable things we couldn’t take in a locked room in our house, thinking it would be safe until we came back,” she tells me, chuckling.
As the women of the family packed, my grandmother’s older brother, who had once been employed by the British forces, struck a deal, allowing them to leave on one of the last British vehicles withdrawing from Haifa. With what little they could carry, my grandmother’s family travelled to the Lebanese border, hiding in a British army vehicle.
When they arrived to Na’oura, on the border between Palestine and Lebanon, they were shocked to see so many other people from across the country.
“It felt like the world had ended. The borders were overcrowded with cars and trucks full of people and belongings fleeing the violence. Others were leaving by sea.”
At the border they were ordered into a car, which drove through Lebanon for a few more hours. They were dropped later that night in Damour, a coastal town just south of Beirut.
It was dark, they didn’t know anyone, and with no place to rest, the family of 13 slept on the streets in front of a supermarket, the dirty ground littered with rotting fruits and vegetables.
As the sun rose the next day, they walked the streets of the unfamiliar town, recognizing friends and neighbors from Haifa who were also wandering the streets aimlessly. After hearing that Beirut was too crowded with refugees, they headed to Jezzine, in south Lebanon, where friends helped set them up in a tiny room in the home of some family friends. (The same process is happening to the Syrian and Iraqi refugees)
“All summer we waited for news that we could go back,” my grandmother says. “By September, we realized there was little hope, and made plans to move to Beirut.”
For the next few years my grandmother’s family survived through the goodwill of friends and strangers, as well as through food parcels, given to them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which contained, among other things, powdered eggs, much to my grandmother’s fascination.
Her older brothers eventually took up jobs in Beirut to support the family. My grandmother’s family was lucky on balance: As wealthier and Christian refugees, they were given Lebanese citizenship. However, the vast majority of Palestinian refugees were never naturalized, instead placed in one of the dozen UNRWA-operated camps in Lebanon, where they continue to live to this day.
My grandmother’s story is not a unique one.
In 1948 Zionist militias depopulated and destroyed more than 530 Palestinian towns and villages.
An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and many who were unable to flee were massacred.
By the end of July 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from outside Palestine, many of whom were survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, had been housed in homes formerly belonging to Palestinian families like my grandmother’s.
In December, the new Israeli state implemented a series of laws commonly referred to as the Absentees’ Property Law.
These laws created a legal definition for non-Jews who, like my grandmother, had left or been forced to flee from Palestine. The laws allowed the newly created Israeli state to confiscate 2 million dunams (about 500,000 acres) of land from Palestinian families, including my own.
In April 2015 the law was extended to cover land in the West Bank, thereby legalizing the continued expulsion of Palestinians and the confiscation of their land and property in order to house new Israeli citizens coming from abroad.
The uniqueness of what has become known as the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, is partly the timing: It occurred at the dawn of state formation throughout much of Asia and Africa, which meant that hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Palestinians found themselves stateless, unrecognized in the new world of postcolonial nation-states.
Perhaps as a result, there is a joke that Palestinians collect passports obsessively, fearful that we might be stripped of one or the other.
But is that really surprising given our history, that moment where the door was shut, leaving us on the outside, unrecognized—not just homeless, but stateless as well?
Courtesy of Saleem Haddad
In 1948, upon Israel’s creation, David Ben-Gurion, the founder and first prime minister of Israel, remarked that “the old will die, and the young will forget.” Given the centrality the Jewish tradition places on memory and the commemoration of struggle and suffering, Ben-Gurion should have known better.
For the past 67 years, Palestinians have resisted the Israeli government’s continued efforts to erase the memories of trauma and resistance that began with the Nakba.
To this day, Palestinians of my grandmother’s generation often wear the keys to their old houses around their necks, a sign that despite the dispossession of their land, their memories refuse to dim.
Every time my grandmother recounts her experience, a new memory emerges, and I add it to the story, embellishing it with new details and anecdotes.
But as her memories made their way onto the page, I had a moment of self-doubt: In my grandmother’s recollection, she was clear that her family had made a decision to leave.
Might this play into one of the myths used to justify the establishment of modern-day Israel on Palestinian land—the myth that, despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, Palestinians left on their own free will?
“Are you sure you left voluntarily?” I ask my grandmother. “There was a war,” she replies.
“But no one kicked you out, yes? No one was directly attacking you?” I continue.
Courtesy of Saleem Haddad
“Not us personally, but my mother was worried by the reports. We thought we would be gone for a few weeks at most.”
Could my grandmother’s memory of the Nakba bolster the false narrative that Palestinians voluntarily left, given that her family had not been physically removed form their home?
As I considered this, my thoughts began to coalesce around two points.
The first point—which seems particularly poignant in 2015, as boats of Arab and African migrants sink off European shores—is a question: What constitutes voluntary displacement?
On May 15, 1948, in the face of growing hostilities and the threat of a regional war, my great-grandmother did the only thing she knew to protect her children: She left. Does running away from an imminent war, with a small suitcase and plans to return, constitute a voluntary departure?
And if so, is the departed then unentitled to the land and belongings they left behind, and forbidden from ever returning?
My second thought centered on the politics of memory in war.
In his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera writes: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Israeli politicians hope that, given enough time and pressure, Palestinians will forget and accommodate themselves to their loss.
This remains true to this day, as the Israeli state consolidates its occupation, constricting the remaining Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettos.
Meanwhile, the collective Israeli memory of the Nakba continues to ignore the bloody events that led to the expulsion and displacement of the Palestinian Arab population.
In textbooks, the events of May 15, 1948, make no mention of how Palestinians experienced the Nakba and instead represent Israel as a heroic David defeating the many enemies arrayed against it.
Since 2011, the refusal to acknowledge the Palestinian Nakba is enshrined in Israeli law, with organizations facing fines if they commemorate the day.
In the face of a powerful Israel that seeks to wipe away remnants of Palestinian life and culture, there is an instinct to close ranks and develop a single story.
Nuance and contradiction are luxuries that a people under threat cannot afford.
Yet to remember the events of 1948 and to recount them, with their nuances and diversities, is a form of resistance: resistance against forgetting. The collective memory of the Nakba is made up of 750,000 stories, one for each of those who left their homes and were never able to return.
Taken together, the stories offer a nuanced, real, and humane look at a community’s reaction to what is now widely accepted as an act of ethnic cleansing. My grandmother’s story, unique to her, is but one part of a collective memory of this trauma that must be told in all its shades of gray.
To recount the unique personal stories of those who lived through the Nakba is to commemorate the struggle and suffering of Palestinians who lost their land and lives at a time when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side on the land of historic Palestine.
It is to inscribe individual fates onto the canvas of history, which the victors painted in large, ugly blocks. It is personal stories like my grandmother’s, and their ability to be passed down to future generations, that serve as a reminder that peace and coexistence are possible, so long as the memories of all are acknowledged.
Early Settlements and Investors in Palestine
“Capital is the first Jewish colony” had said Edmond de Rothschild
Before WWI, France was the Only western power to totally and unequivocally support Jewish settlements in Palestine. France support was political, economical, educational and administrative.
During WWI, France realized that it relied heavily on the Arab/Moslem troops in its colonies in North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) for its war efforts and stopped this direct support for new colonies: It reverted to England to directly resume the colonization of Palestine and agreed on England mandate over Palestine.
After WWII, France was again the main supporter of the new Israeli State and delivered the most sophisticated weapons and even built the first nuclear power plant in Israel and helped in producing an atomic bomb in the 60’s.
Since 1860, the main Jewish leaders were French and freshly naturalized French. The government instituted Universal Israelite Alliance to construct schools for the Jews in northern Africa where French was the main language.
In 1870, France extended the citizenship to the Jews living in north Africa and denied it to the Moslem “Arabs”
Ä. Silberstein, born in Palestine, wrote in 1930: France had morally conquered the Jews in the Orient (meaning in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq…). Whatever issue was related to France’s dignity and interests was made their own…
Mikveh-Israel was the first settlement on a land offered by the Turkish Sultan south of Jaffa (Yafa) in 1869. It was a very fertile piece of land with a small river running through close to the town of Yazour, now called Jason.
Charles Netter travelled to Istanbul to negotiate the settlement of a land in Palestine carrying over 100,000 francs that was supplied by the French banker Salomon Goldschmidt (president of UIA)
Netter was mainly targeting the Oriental Jews in order to get them out of misery and put them to work on agricultural lands and learning practical artisanal skills. That was a pragmatic move since the Jews in the Orient had the same customs and traditions as the communities in the Land.
Actually, Netter was wondering why the Reformist Jews (mostly French at the time) were opting for the Oriental Jews to immigrate to America.
Netter was harsh on the ultra-orthodox clergy who collected the halucca, monetary retribution, from the pious Jews in order to pray on their behalf at the Wall in Jerusalem.
The triangle of Albert Cohen-Netter-Erlanger was the cornerstone that changed Edmond de Rothschild direction and purpose toward investing in Palestine and creating new colonies for the Jews.
Another catalyst to Edmond zeal was the Grand rabbi of Paris Zadoc Kahn (1839-1905). Zadoc delivered a speech in 1882 in the presence of Edmond that said:
“Desire goes much further than reality can deliver and sustain. Our sensibility, constantly taxed by excitation, has become maladive (sick). We keep analysing with a manic curiosity, and the thought is constantly reverting in vicious circles. The deeper we dig and the more we catch the void.
“Life becomes the goal. denuded from all its colors and grandeur.
We badly need moral vigor, a serene confidence that we can match the evil forces.
Faith is defined by our actions and activities: An hour of purposeful activity is worth a lifetime of idle faith.
Regulating resting breaks is mainly meant to reinvigorate our willpower and avoid exhausting our mental energy. Break periods should be enjoyed undertaking speculative work such as reading, daydreaming of useful projects and not doing any kinds of activities…
Any study that is not part and parcel of active work is sterile”
Edmond de Rothschild began investing in Palestine at the age of 37, in 1882.
In the next 17 years, it seems that he spent $100 million in purchasing lands (gueoulah), building factories, schools and hospitals and disseminating Jewish settlements to produce what he needed.
The initial purchased lands were owned by wealthy Lebanese like the Sursock (banking) and many other feudal lords who became leaders in Lebanon political system due to the money they got from selling their lands in Palestine
For example, the colonies in the north of Yessod ha-maala and Mishmar ha-yarden were to plant jasmine for Edmonds perfume factory in Grasse.
In 1882, over 100 Jews from Warsaw (Poland) were shipped to the first colony of Mikveh-Israel (Hope of Israel).
The colony of Rishon Zion (First in Zion) and south of Mikveh-Israel was the first colony that Edmond financed totally.
The settlement of Zikhon-Jacob in Samaria was invaded by 200 Jews shipped from Galatz in Rumania. These immigrants were well off and earned good money and they revolted when they realized they were shipped to Palestine. They demanded to be sent back home.
Many immigrants died of Diphtheria and other illnesses.
Most immigrants were initially Sephardi (from Yemen, Iran, Syria, Morocco, the indigenous Jews and French Jews flocking from Istanbul and Turkey and called Francos).
After the pogroms committed by Russia in Poland since 1905, The Ashkenazi Jews of Poland and Germany started to outnumber the Sephardi and their Grand Rabbi replaced the Sephardi Rabbi.
Edmond was also interested in colonizing Asiatic Turkey since 1891.
Edmond appointed Elie Scheid in 1884 to head the Jewish colonies.
He first encountered Herzl in 1896 and Weizmann in 1913.
The Jewish Colonial Bank was founded in 1898.
The American Jewish Society was founded in 1906.
In the 1910’s, Edmond sold his shares in the oil fields in Baku (Azerbaijan) and reinvested this money in Palestine: The Bolsheviks in Baku, lead by Stalin, had made investment in Baku a daily problem. At the turn of the 20th century, Baku produced 50% of the world oil.
The PICA was founded in 1924 and Edmond placed Henri Frank to be the director for a strategic expansion of the settlements.
Edmond visited Palestine 5 times: in 1887 (3 weeks), in 1893 (5 days), in 1899, in 1914 (2 weeks), and in 1925 (10 days).
During the Great Depression of 1928, no funds came to the colonies and the development of Tel Aviv was halted. The project of establishing an Israeli state became dubious.
The Zionists reacted by committing massacres in Jerusalem in 1930 and Edmond fell prey to this machination of instilling religious enmities. He wrote a letter to France rabbi Israel Levi stating:
“Our interest is to separate the religious question from politics, to separate the mandate questions from our Israelite Home” (This suggestion has made a full circle: It is the Jews refusing to separate religion from politics and the Palestinians demanding a State of civil rights)
The British mandated power refused any democratic elections, even for municipalities in Palestine under the pretence that it is not fair for the Jewish minority. The Palestinians started their first civil disobedience (Intifada) in 1936 and lasted 4 years.
The British had to dispatch 100,000 troops to quell the insurrection and committed all kinds of massacre and invented all kinds of torture that Israel has adopted in their integrity, even the administrative detention law.
David Ben Gurion, in his preface to the book of Kressel, pointed out that, if you joined by lines all the colonies already established by Edmond, you discover that the locations were not done haphazardly.
The colonies exhibited the boundaries to the planned partition of Palestine.
Actually, when the UN partitioned Palestine in 1947, it gave the Jewish minority (40% of the population) 57% of the land, such as any Jewish colony could enclose the neighboring Palestinian towns and villages so that the Jewish State included all the established settlements.
In 1917, Britain foreign minister, Lord Balfour, addressed his letter for the establishment of a Jewish homeland to Lord Walter, the son of Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild who became the first Jew to enter the Chamber of Lords.
In 1918, the French foreign minister S. Pichon ratified Balfour letter, and President Wilson followed suit on August 1918 in a letter to S.Wise.
Consequently, the western nations had already set their mind to partition Palestine before WWI ended.
The remains of Edmond were transferred from Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris to the hill of Ramat Hamadiv, close to Haifa in 1954.
Note: France had a mandated power over Syria and Lebanon. The French strategy was to divide these two countries into cantons of minorities.
The Syrian people kept a steady rebellion against the French presence and France bombed Damascus to the ground in 1923-24.
France ceded a big chunk of the most fertile and strategic lands in northern Syria to Turkey of Ataturk in 1936.
Since then, all the French institutions made it a policy to grab any opportunity to humiliate and weaken Syria.
Talk of Zionist lobby in the USA? All the French institutions are Zionists regardless of political lines.
Up until 1968, most Israeli weapons were French. De Gaulle, one of the staunchest Zionist, stopped delivering Mirage fighter jets after the Israeli pre-emptive 1967 war.
Currently, it is France that is building the Israeli nuclear submarines, financed by Germany. Israel has obtained already 6 of the most modern submarines.
Gaza back-story: Israel won’t be telling you
The Israelis of Sederot are coming under rocket fire from the Palestinians of Gaza?
Over 6,000 descendants of the Palestinians from Huj – now called Sederot – live in the squalor of Gaza. Israeli army had turned up at Huj on 31 May 1948 and expelled its inhabitants, never to return.
Living among the “terrorists” Israel is claiming to destroy and who are shooting at what was Huj.
The people who lived in Sederot in early 1948 were not Israelis, but Palestinian “Arabs”. Their village was called Huj. Two years earlier in 1946, these same Arabs had actually hidden Jewish Haganah “terrorist” fighters from the British Army.
David Ben Gurion (Israel’s first Prime Minister) called the expulsion from Huj an “unjust and unjustified action”. Too bad. The Palestinians of Huj were never allowed back.
This is not just about the foul murder of three Israelis in the occupied West Bank.
Or the foul murder of burning alive a Palestinian in occupied East Jerusalem.
Nor about the arrest of many Hamas militants and politicians in the West Bank. Nor about rockets.
As usual, in Israel objective it’s about land.
It’s about land.
The Israelis of Sederot are coming under rocket fire from the Palestinians of Gaza and now the Palestinians are getting their comeuppance. Sure. But wait, how come all those Palestinians – all 1.5 million – are crammed into Gaza in the first place? Well, their families once lived, didn’t they, in what is now called Israel? And got chucked out – or fled for their lives – when the Israeli state was created.
And – a drawing in of breath is now perhaps required – the people who lived in Sederot in early 1948 were not Israelis, but Palestinian Arabs. Their village was called Huj. Nor were they enemies of Israel. Two years earlier, these same Arabs had actually hidden Jewish Haganah fighters from the British Army.
But when the Israeli army turned up at Huj on 31 May 1948, they expelled all the Arab villagers – to the Gaza Strip! Refugees, they became. David Ben Gurion (Israel’s first Prime Minister) called it an “unjust and unjustified action”. Too bad. The Palestinians of Huj were never allowed back.
And today, well over 6,000 descendants of the Palestinians from Huj – now Sederot – live in the squalor of Gaza, among the “terrorists” Israel is claiming to destroy and who are shooting at what was Huj. Interesting story.
And same again for Israel’s right to self-defence. We heard it again today.
What if the people of London were being rocketed like the people of Israel? Wouldn’t they strike back? Well yes, but we Brits don’t have more than a million former inhabitants of the UK cooped up in refugee camps over a few square miles around Hastings.
The last time this specious argument was used was in 2008, when Israel invaded Gaza and killed at least 1,100 Palestinians (exchange rate: 1,100 to 13). What if Dublin was under rocket attack, the Israeli ambassador asked then? But the UK town of Crossmaglen in Northern Ireland was under rocket attack from the Irish Republic in the 1970s – yet the RAF didn’t bomb Dublin in retaliation, killing Irish women and children.
In Canada in 2008, Israel’s supporters were making the same fraudulent point. What if the people of Vancouver or Toronto or Montreal were being rocket-attacked from the suburbs of their own cities? How would they feel? But the Canadians haven’t pushed the original inhabitants of Canadian territory into refugee camps.
And now let’s cross to the West Bank.
First of all, Benjamin Netanyahu said he couldn’t talk to Palestinian “President” Mahmoud Abbas because he didn’t also represent Hamas. Then when Abbas formed a unity government, Netanyahu said he couldn’t talk to Abbas because he had unified himself with the “terrorist” Hamas. Now he says he can only talk to him if he breaks with Hamas – even though he won’t then represent Hamas.
Meanwhile, that great leftist Israeli philosopher Uri Avnery – 90 years old and still, thankfully, going strong – has picked up on his country’s latest obsession: the danger that Isis will storm west from its Iraqi/Syrian “caliphate” and arrive on the east bank of the Jordan river.
“And Netanyahu said,” according to Avnery, “if they are not stopped by the permanent Israeli garrison there (on the Jordan river), they will appear at the gates of Tel Aviv.”
The truth, of course, is that the Israeli air force would have crushed Isis the moment it dared to cross the Jordanian border from Iraq or Syria.
The importance of this, however, is that if Israel keeps its army on the Jordan (to protect Israel from Isis), a future “Palestine” state will have no borders and will be an enclave within Israel, surrounded on all sides by Israeli-held territory.
“Much like the South African Bantustans,” says Avnery. In other words, no “viable” state of Palestine will ever exist. After all, aren’t Isis just the same as Hamas? Of course not.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Getty Images)
But that’s not what we heard from Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s spokesman. No, what he told Al Jazeera was that Hamas was “an extremist terrorist organisation not very different from Isis in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Boko Haram…” Tosh.
Hezbollah is a Shia militia now fighting to the death inside Syria against the Sunni Muslims of Isis. And Boko Haram – thousands of kilometres from Israel – is not a threat to Tel Aviv.
But you get the point. The Palestinians of Gaza – and please forget, forever, the 6,000 Palestinians whose families come from the land of Sederot – are allied to the tens of thousands of Islamists threatening Maliki of Baghdad, Assad of Damascus or President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja.
Even more to the point, if Isis is heading towards the edge of the West Bank, why is the Israeli government still building colonies there – illegally, and on Arab land – for Israeli civilians?
This is not just about the foul murder of three Israelis in the occupied West Bank or the foul murder of a Palestinian in occupied East Jerusalem. Nor about the arrest of many Hamas militants and politicians in the West Bank. Nor about rockets. As usual, it’s about land.
Note 1: Do you care to refresh your memory on the Timeline of the attack on Gaza in 2012? https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/a-timeline-on-gaza-tragedy-from-imeu-and-the-electronic-intifada/
Note 2: Same lousy and murderous reasons that the western nations are extending Israel to resume its carnage, as in 2008 and 2012. Will anything change in humanity?
Adonis Diaries 
