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.

Not so, argues Morris. So who’s right?

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.

Resolution 181 and the Early Phases of the 1948 War

Despite their best efforts, by the end of the Mandate, the Jewish settlers had managed to acquire only about 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district, including Jaffa, which included the largest Jewish population center, Tel Aviv. According to the UNSCOP report, “The Arab population, despite the strenuous efforts of Jews to acquire land in Palestine, at present remains in possession of approximately 85% of the land.”

A subcommittee report further observed that “The bulk of the land in the Arab State, as well as in the proposed Jewish State, is owned and possessed by Arabs” (emphasis added). Furthermore, the Jewish population in the area of their proposed state was 498,000, while the number of Palestinians was 407,000 plus an estimated 105,000 Bedouins.

“In other words,” the subcommittee report noted, “at the outset, the Arabs will have a majority in the proposed Jewish State.”

UNSCOP nevertheless proposed that the Arab state be constituted from about 44 percent of the whole of Palestine, while the Jews would be awarded about 55 percent for their state, including the best agricultural lands. The committee was not incognizant of how this plan prejudiced the rights of the majority Arab population. In fact, in keeping with the prejudice inherent in the Mandate, the UNSCOP report explicitly rejected the right of the Arab Palestinians to self-determination.

The “principle of self-determination” was “not applied to Palestine,” the report stated, “obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there.

Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”[56]

Given the proper historical context, we can now return to Benny Morris’s argument that “the Palestinians were the ones who started the war when they rejected the UN compromise plan and embarked on hostile acts”. This argument assumes that the Arabs’ rejection of the plan was somehow unreasonable. It was not.

Morris’s argument also assumes that Resolution 181 somehow lent legitimacy to the Zionists’ goal of establishing a “Jewish state” in Palestine within the area proposed under UNSCOP’s plan. It did not. While it is a popular myth that the UN created Israel, the partition plan was actually never implemented.

Resolution 181 merely recommended that Palestine be partitioned and referred the matter to the Security Council, where it died.

Needless to say, neither the General Assembly nor the Security Council had any authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants.

(Actually, most of the nations in the UN in 1947 were under mandated power by the colonial powers and African States had Not yet got their independence in the 60’s. And yet Israel was recognized with barely a single majority vote))

Although Resolution 181 was cited in Israel’s founding document as having granted legitimacy to the establishment of the “Jewish state”, in truth, the resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.[57]

When Morris says that the Arabs states had declared their intent “to attack the Jewish state when the British left”, what he really means, therefore, is that they declared their intent to take up arms to prevent the Zionists from unilaterally declaring for themselves sovereignty over lands they had no rights to and politically disenfranchising the majority population of Palestine.

Morris employs this same rhetorical device—a mainstay of Zionist propaganda—in his book 1948 to suggest that it was the Arabs who were the aggressors, while the Jews were simply defending themselves. For example, he emphasizes that “most of the fighting between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 occurred in the areas earmarked for Jewish statehood”—thus implying that most of the fighting occurred on land rightfully belonging to the Jews.

However, the fact that most of the violence occurred within this area is completely irrelevant and tells us nothing about which side was guilty of aggression. After all, Arabs owned more land than Jews and much of this fighting took place in Arab villages and townslocated within that same “earmarked” territory.

It is largely on the basis of his assumption that the land proposed for the Jewish state under the partition plan was indeed rightfully the Jews’ that he can sustain his narrative that, “From the end of November 1947 until the end of March 1948, the Arabs held the initiative and the Haganah was on the strategic defensive.”[58]

“Going into the civil war, Haganah policy was purely defensive”, Morris repeats—although he grants that “the mainstream Zionist leaders, from the first, began to think of expanding the Jewish state beyond the 29 November partition resolution borders”; and its “defensive policy” during the early months of the war “was dictated in part by a lack of means” as it “was not yet ready for large-scale offensive operations”.[59] But the Arabs initiated the violence, in Morris’s account, and the Haganah acted in self-defense while “occasionally retaliating against Arab traffic, villages, and urban neighborhoods.”[60]

Ilan Pappé sheds some additional light on how the Haganah’s “defensive” operations were undertaken:

The first step was a well-orchestrated campaign of threats. Special units of the Hagana would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (read ‘Arab volunteers’) and distribute leaflets warning the local people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army.

Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers. The Hagana called these incursions ‘violent reconnaissance’ (hasiyur ha-alim). . . . In essence the idea was to enter a defenceless village close to midnight, stay there for a few hours, shoot at anyone who dared leave his or her house, and then depart.[61]

For example, on December 18, 1947, the Haganah attacked the village of Khisas at night, randomly blowing up houses with the occupants sleeping inside, killing fifteen, including five children.

With a New York Times reporter having closely followed the events, Ben-Gurion issued a public apology and claimed the attack had been unauthorized; but “a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.”[62]

“Much of the fighting in the first months of the war”, writes Morris, “took place in and on the edges of the main towns—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, and Haifa. Most of the violence was initiated by the Arabs.

Arab snipers continuously fired at Jewish houses, pedestrians, and traffic and planted bombs and mines along urban and rural paths and roads.” He describes “several days of sniping and Haganah responses in kind”—a typical example of how he characterizes the Haganah’s violence as occurring in self-defense or as retaliation for earlier Arab attacks he identifies as having initiated any given round of fighting.[63]

Pappé again offers some additional illumination that once again calls into question Morris’s assertion that it was the Arabs who were mostly responsible for initiating the violence. With respect to Haifa, Pappé writes:

From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted, the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by the Irgun and the Hagana. As they had only arrived in recent decades, the Jewish settlers had built their houses higher up the mountain. Thus, they lived topographically above the Arab neighbourhoods and could easily shell and snipe at them.

They had started doing this frequently since early December. They used other methods of intimidation as well: the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited.

The moment panic-stricken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed with machine-gun fire. In areas where the two communities still interacted, the Hagana brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices, and so wreaked death and chaos.

A special unit of the Hagana, Hashahar (‘Dawn’), made up of mistarvim—literally Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews who disguised themselves as Palestinians—was behind this kind of assault. The mastermind of these operations was someone called Dani Agmon, who headed the ‘Dawn’ units.

On its website, the official historian of the Palmach puts it as follows: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.’

But worse was to come.[64]