Posts Tagged ‘Haganah’
Israel planned it since 2016: Mission accomplished this August 4, 2020. Port of Beirut flattened
Posted on: August 5, 2020
Israeli proposal to flatten Beirut in 2016: Done this August 4, 2020
At 6 pm, two conflagrations shook Beirut and demolished all of the port installations, neighboring streets 2 miles away, all buildings…
Half of public institutions located in the area, the central Electricity building, the Foreign minister., the hospitals around, about 5 of them., the sturdy wheat silos crumbled., newspaper dailies (Al Nahar), all the newly expensive and luxury high rises on this sea front..
So far, over 170 deaths and increasing and more than 6,000 injured and patients dispatched outside of Beirut for overflowing and for the poisonous environment due to the burning of 2, 750 tons of nitrate ammonium and other kinds of chemicals stored in the port hangard #12.
The latest news are that these highly flammable and detonating chemicals were stacked in the port since 2014 after requisitioning a Turkish ship that was transferring these chemicals from Georgia and was meant to stop in Beirut port and be discharged.
Why Beirut instead of Mozambique as the manifest declared?
Mind you that it was the US that built this nitrate of ammonium plant in Georgia.
Mind you that Hillary Clinton admitted that the US was highly involved in creating ISIS (Daesh) to occupy Mosul in Iraq. And all these Syrian insurgent factions since 2011 needed plenty of explosives.
A tsunami-kind of conflagration, red colored (color of depleted uranium/miniature atomic bomb detonation), that mushroomed in the sky like a small atomic bomb and advanced instantaneously inland and toward the sea at the speed of 750 m a second.
The hole that this conflagration left was 65 m deep. And generated a 4.3 earthquake scale.
A wide area of total devastation that remind people of picture of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki…
People vacating Beirut to higher and far regions in order Not to be affected by the dangerous chemical inhalation.
How Israel would have reacted if the port of Haifa experienced the same devastation? I bet more than half the injured Israelis would have died for lack of individual zeal to come to the rescue.
In Lebanon, minutes after the conflagration people were busy transferring the injured to the hospitals. 5 of the hospitals close to the seafront were totally devastated and the injured had to be transferred and hundreds were welcomed in Damascus.
Israel refuse to admit that it attacked the port with depleted uranium missiles, though Israel knew very well of these stored chemicals: Netanyahu mentioned two years ago that hangard #12 contained Hezbollah missiles, in preparation for this attack
Trump declared that Beirut was attacked, but was not precise. (Just the message that he doesn’t give a damn of Beirut and the Lebanese pseudo-citizens)
So far, most countries are proposing “humanitarian” and clinical aids to Lebanon and movable hospitals.
The question is: And what afterward?
The government resigned because more than 7 ministers sided with their sectarian militia leaders.
As usual, Lebanon is bound Not to have a working government.
What kinds of help and aid to this totally bankrupt pseudo State that treated the Lebanese as pseudo-citizens since “independence” in 1943?
Currently, the Lebanese high security command ordered the army to take full control of Beirut for 2 weeks.
I have seen a video of 10 bodies flying in the air after the second conflagration: they were the first fire fighters who arrived to the scene.
And this clean-handed government could Not confront the militia/mafia clan and had to resign.
Amitai Etzioni, supposedly a prominent American professor, and who teaches at renowned universities, says Israel may have no choice but to destroy Lebanon — again and flatten Beirut
A prominent American scholar who teaches international relations at George Washington University has publicly proposed that Israel “flatten Beirut” — a city with around 1 million people — in order to destroy the missiles of Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah.
Professor Amitai Etzioni — who has taught at a variety of prestigious U.S. universities, including Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley, and who served as a senior advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration — made this proposal in an op-ed in Haaretz, the leading English-language Israeli newspaper, known as “The New York Times of Israel.” Haaretz represents the liberal wing of Israel’s increasingly far-right politics.
Etzioni’s op-ed was first published on Feb. 15 with the headline “Can Israel Obliterate Hezbollah’s Growing Missile Threat Without Massive Civilian Casualties?” (the answer he suggests in response to this question is “likely no”).
Topics: News, Politics News
“Should Israel Flatten Beirut to Destroy Hezbollah’s Missiles?” was the next, much more blunt title, chosen sometime on or before Feb. 16.
As of Feb. 18, the headline is “Should Israel Consider Using Devastating Weapons Against Hezbollah Missiles?”
Etzioni served in the Haganah — the terrorist army that formed Israel after violently expelling three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population — from 1946 to 1948, and then served in the Israeli military from 1948 to 1950. He mentions his military service in both the article and his bio.
(If a Palestinian or any “Arab” was discovered to have joined any military group, would he be teaching in the USA?)
In the piece, Etzioni cites an anonymous Israeli official who estimates that Hezbollah has 100,000 missiles in Lebanon.
In January, the U.S. government put that figure at 80,000 rockets. The anonymous official also says the Israeli government considers these weapons to be its second greatest security threat — after Iran.
Etzioni furthermore cites Israel’s chief of staff, who claims that most of Hezbollah’s missiles are in private homes. Whether this allegation is true is questionable. Israel frequently accuses militant groups of hiding weapons in civilian areas in order to justify its attacks.
On numerous occasions, it has been proven that there were no weapons in the civilian areas Israel bombed in Gaza. But that was beside the point for Israel.
Assuming it is true, the American scholar argues, if Israeli soldiers were to try to take the missiles out of these homes one at a time, it “would very likely result in many Israeli casualties.”
In order to avoid Israeli casualties, Etzioni writes: “I asked two American military officers what other options Israel has. They both pointed to Fuel-Air Explosives (FAE).
These are bombs that disperse an aerosol cloud of fuel which is ignited by a detonator, producing massive explosions.
The resulting rapidly expanding wave flattens all buildings within a considerable range.”
“Such weapons obviously would be used only after the population was given a chance to evacuate the area. Still, as we saw in Gaza, there are going to be civilian casualties,” Etzioni adds.
“The time to raise this issue is long before Israel may be forced to use FAEs.” (As people in Gaza were given 5 minutes to vacate an area and succumb to the shrapnel?)
Etzioni concludes his piece implying Israel has no other option but to bomb the city of Beirut. “In this way, one hopes, that there be a greater understanding, if not outright acceptance, of the use of these powerful weapons, given that nothing else will do,” he writes. (How about desist from the preemptive wars strategies and abide by UN resolutions?)
Lebanese journalists and activists have expressed outrage at the article.
Kareem Chehayeb, a Lebanese journalist and founder and editor of the website Beirut Syndrome, said in response to the piece “Should Israel kill me, my family, and over a million other people to destroy Hezbollah’s missiles? How about that for a headline?”
Chehayeb told Salon Etzioni’s argument is “absolutely absurd” and reeks of hypocrisy. “If some writer said the only way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just to bomb Israel,” he said, “people would go up in arms about it.”
He called it “ludicrous” that a prominent American professor “can just calmly say the solution is to flatten this entire city of 1 million people.”
“I’m just speechless. It sounds ISIS-like, just eradicating an entire community of people,” Chehayeb added.
Salon called Etzioni’s office at George Washington University’s Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies several times with a request for comment, but no one answered.
After this article was published, Etzioni emailed Salon a statement. “I agree with you that any suggestion to bomb or ‘flatten’ Beirut (or any other city) would be beyond horrible and outrageous,” he said. He said Haaretz had changed and then later corrected his headline.
“Ethics aside — Beirut is not where the missiles are housed,” Etzioni added. “The issue though stands how is a nation to respond if another nation or non-state actor rains thousands of missiles on its civilian population?”
Salon also reached out to the university. Jason Shevrin, a spokesperson, told Salon “the George Washington University is committed to academic freedom and encourages efforts to foster an environment welcoming to many different viewpoints. Dr. Etzioni is a faculty member who is expressing his personal views.” The spokesperson did not comment any further.
Etzioni is by no means an unknown scholar. He notes on his George Washington University faculty page that, in 2001, he was among the 100 most-cited American intellectuals. He has also served as the president of the American Sociological Association.
Israel has already flattened Beirut before
Writer Belén Fernández, an author and contributing editor at Jacobin magazine, published a piece in TeleSur responding to Etzioni op-ed, titled “No, Israel Should Not Flatten Beirut.”
Fernández points out “that Israel has already flattened large sections of Lebanon, in Beirut and beyond.”
She recalls visiting a young man in a south Lebanon village near the Israeli border who “described the pain in 2006 of encountering detached heads and other body parts belonging to former neighbors, blasted apart by bombs or crushed in collapsed homes.”
Note 1: Hezbollah General Secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, replied: All we need is to launch a couple of missiles on the Ammonium plant in Haifa. The conflagration is as powerful as an atomic bomb.
Israel executed this idea and stored an amount of ammonium nitrate in the port of Beirut and let it be forgotten.
Apparently most of these tons of nitrate of ammonium were sold, transferred and whisked away to Syrian insurgent factions. Possibly, from the extent of the conflagration, only about 300 tons remained in the port
Note 2: Who still believes that this calamity is a simple matter of laziness of every responsible during the last 6 years?
Who is still unable to believe that Israel is Not able to prepare for a long-term catastrophe and that hangar #12 was being prepared and targeted for a timely decision to flatten Beirut?
The next article will try to answer the why and how Israel/US wanted Beirut flattened.
American professor proposes that Israel “flatten Beirut”? Why?
And how Israel is planning to “flatten Beirut”?
This current one million-person city has been previously decimated and flattened through several earthquakes and pandemics
Note: Re-edit “Amitai Etzioni, who teaches at renowned universities, says Israel may have no choice but to destroy Lebanon — again February 22, 2016″
A prominent American scholar who teaches international relations at George Washington University, and who has taught at a variety of prestigious U.S. universities, including Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley, has publicly proposed that Israel “flatten Beirut” — a city with around 1 million people — in order to destroy the missiles of Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah.
Professor Amitai Etzioni served as a senior advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration — made this proposal in an op-ed in Haaretz, the leading English-language Israeli newspaper, known as “The New York Times of Israel.” Haaretz represents the liberal wing of Israel’s increasingly far-right politics.
Etzioni’s op-ed was first published on Feb. 15 with the headline “Can Israel Obliterate Hezbollah’s Growing Missile Threat Without Massive Civilian Casualties?” (the answer he suggests in response to this question is “likely no”).
“Should Israel Flatten Beirut to Destroy Hezbollah’s Missiles?” was the next, much more blunt title, chosen sometime on or before Feb. 16.
As of Feb. 18, the headline is “Should Israel Consider Using Devastating Weapons Against Hezbollah Missiles?”
Etzioni served in the Haganah — the terrorist army that formed Israel after violently expelling three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population — from 1946 to 1948, and then served in the Israeli military from 1948 to 1950. He mentions his military service in both the article and his bio.
(Question: If a Palestinian or an “Arab” was discovered to have joined any military group, would he be teaching in the USA)
In the piece, Etzioni cites an anonymous Israeli official who estimates that Hezbollah has 100,000 missiles in Lebanon. In January, the U.S. government put that figure at 80,000 rockets.
The anonymous official also says the Israeli government considers these weapons to be its second greatest security threat — after Iran. (Actually, Israel repeatedly claimed that Hezbollah is the first and foremost threat to Israel existence)
Etzioni cites Israel’s chief of staff, who claims that most of Hezbollah’s missiles are in private homes.
Whether this allegation is true is questionable. Israel frequently accuses militant groups of hiding weapons in civilian areas in order to justify its attacks.
On numerous occasions, it has been proven that there were no weapons in the civilian areas Israel bombed in Gaza.
Assuming it is true, Etzioni argues, if Israeli soldiers were to try to take the missiles out of these homes one at a time, it “would very likely result in many Israeli casualties.” (Why am I still reading this stupid article?)
In order to avoid Israeli casualties, Etzioni writes: “I asked two American military officers what other options Israel has. They both pointed to Fuel-Air Explosives (FAE). These are bombs that disperse an aerosol cloud of fuel which is ignited by a detonator, producing massive explosions. (What? They want to destroy Beirut or burn 1 million Lebanese citizens?)
The resulting rapidly expanding wave flattens all buildings within a considerable range.”
“Such weapons obviously would be used only after the population was given a chance to evacuate the area. (Really? Like in Gaza, where people were supposed to flee to?)
Still, as we saw in Gaza, there are going to be civilian casualties,” Etzioni adds. “The time to raise this issue is long before Israel may be forced to use FAEs.” (As people in Gaza were given 5 minutes to vacate an area and succumb to the shrapnel?)
Etzioni concludes his piece implies Israel has no other option but to bomb the city of Beirut.
“In this way, one hopes, that there will be a greater understanding, if not outright acceptance, of the use of these powerful weapons, given that nothing else will do,” he resumes his foolish racist idiosyncrasy. (How about desist from the preemptive wars strategies and abide by UN resolutions?)
Belén Fernández, an author and contributing editor at Jacobin magazine, published a piece in TeleSur responding to Etzioini’s op-ed, titled “No, Israel Should Not Flatten Beirut.” Fernández points out “that Israel has already flattened large sections of Lebanon, in Beirut and beyond.”
She recalls visiting a young man in a south Lebanon village near the Israeli border who “described the pain in 2006 of encountering detached heads and other body parts belonging to former neighbors, blasted apart by bombs or crushed in collapsed homes.”
A day before the agreed upon cease fire, upon the urging of Israel to US to work on it, Israel flattened 5-block radius in Beirut.
And Blair PM of England dispatched 1.5 million cluster bombs to spread in South Lebanon. Thousands of Lebanese have died or injured due to these illegal bombs.
Note 1: Beirut was destroyed by 2 major earthquakes in 550 and 560. The first earthquake destroyed Beirut and the second set fire on the city. Between 150 and 250, Beirut was the Central Jurisprudence of Rome and 5 eminent jurists set the laws for the Roman Empire.
Beirut and Lebanon was shaken with an earthquake in 1958. I was in boarding school and the adults carried out the sleeping children to the outside yard. For an entire decade, Lebanese had to pay the additional “Earthquake Tax”
Note 2: Lebanese journalists and activists have expressed outrage at the article.
Kareem Chehayeb, a Lebanese journalist and founder and editor of the website Beirut Syndrome, said in response to the piece “Should Israel kill me, my family, and over a million other people to destroy Hezbollah’s missiles? How about that for a headline?”
Chehayeb told Salon Etzioni’s argument is “absolutely absurd” and reeks of hypocrisy.
“If some writer said the only way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just to bomb Israel,” he said, “people would go up in arms about it.”
“I’m just speechless. It sounds ISIS-like, just eradicating an entire community of people,” Chehayeb added.
Salon called Etzioni’s office at George Washington University’s Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies several times with a request for comment, but no one answered.
After this article was published, Etzioni emailed Salon a statement. “I agree with you that any suggestion to bomb or ‘flatten’ Beirut (or any other city) would be beyond horrible and outrageous,” he said. He said Haaretz had changed and then later corrected his headline.
“Ethics aside — Beirut is not where the missiles are housed,” Etzioni added. “The issue though stands how is a nation to respond if another nation or non-state actor rains thousands of missiles on its civilian population?”
Salon also reached out to the university.
Jason Shevrin, a spokesperson, told Salon “the George Washington University is committed to academic freedom and encourages efforts to foster an environment welcoming to many different viewpoints. Dr. Etzioni is a faculty member who is expressing his personal views.” The spokesperson did not comment any further.
Etzioni is by no means an unknown scholar. He notes on his George Washington University faculty page that, in 2001, he was among the 100 most-cited American intellectuals. He has also served as the president of the American Sociological Association.
Note: Hezbollah General Secretary, Hassan Nasr Allah, replied: All we need is launch a couple of small-range missiles on the Ammonium plant in Haifa. The conflagration is as powerful as an atomic bomb.
Part 11. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted on: July 16, 2018
Part 11. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
The Expropriation of Palestinian Land
Resolution 181 and the Early Phases of the 1948 War
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.
The Expropriation of the Land
As Theodor Herzl had envisioned, the Mandate facilitated the process of expropriation and removal of the poor Arab peasants by the Zionists, including by denying them employment. The Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine signed in Zurich on August 14, 1920, stated:
Land is to be acquired as Jewish property and . . . the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund [JNF], to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. . . . The Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labour, and in all works or undertakings carried out or furthered by the Agency, it shall be deemed to be a matter of principle that Jewish labour shall be employed . . . .[45]
A 1930 report by Sir John Hope Simpson for the British government on immigration, land settlement, and development noted that, “Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that the land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which the “Arab” (Palestinian) can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future.
Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land.”[46]
The prejudice underlying the JNF’s policy blinded the Zionist leadership to the harm it also caused to Jewish landowners. The 1921 British Haycraft Commission report cited an example:
[T]he Zionist Commission put strong pressure upon a large Jewish landowner of Richon-le-Zion to employ Jewish labour in place of the Arabs who had been employed on his farm since he was a boy. The farmer, we were told, yielded to this pressure with reluctance, firstly, because the substitution of Jewish for Arab labour would alienate the Arabs, secondly, because the pay demanded by the Jewish labourers, and the short hours during which they would consent to work, would make it impossible for him to run his farm at a profit.[47]
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]
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.
Prominent American professor proposes that Israel
“flatten Beirut” — a 1 million-person city it previously decimated
Amitai Etzioni, who teaches at renowned universities, says Israel may have no choice but to destroy Lebanon — again
A prominent American scholar who teaches international relations at George Washington University has publicly proposed that Israel “flatten Beirut” — a city with around 1 million people — in order to destroy the missiles of Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah.
Professor Amitai Etzioni — who has taught at a variety of prestigious U.S. universities, including Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley, and who served as a senior advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration — made this proposal in an op-ed in Haaretz, the leading English-language Israeli newspaper, known as “The New York Times of Israel.” Haaretz represents the liberal wing of Israel’s increasingly far-right politics.
Etzioni’s op-ed was first published on Feb. 15 with the headline “Can Israel Obliterate Hezbollah’s Growing Missile Threat Without Massive Civilian Casualties?” (the answer he suggests in response to this question is “likely no”).
Topics: News, Politics News
“Should Israel Flatten Beirut to Destroy Hezbollah’s Missiles?” was the next, much more blunt title, chosen sometime on or before Feb. 16.
As of Feb. 18, the headline is “Should Israel Consider Using Devastating Weapons Against Hezbollah Missiles?”
Etzioni served in the Haganah — the terrorist army that formed Israel after violently expelling three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population — from 1946 to 1948, and then served in the Israeli military from 1948 to 1950. He mentions his military service in both the article and his bio.
(If a Palestinian or an “Arab” was discovered to have joined any military group, would he be teaching in the USA)
In the piece, Etzioni cites an anonymous Israeli official who estimates that Hezbollah has 100,000 missiles in Lebanon. In January, the U.S. government put that figure at 80,000 rockets. The anonymous official also says the Israeli government considers these weapons to be its second greatest security threat — after Iran.
Etzioni furthermore cites Israel’s chief of staff, who claims that most of Hezbollah’s missiles are in private homes. Whether this allegation is true is questionable. Israel frequently accuses militant groups of hiding weapons in civilian areas in order to justify its attacks.
On numerous occasions, it has been proven that there were no weapons in the civilian areas Israel bombed in Gaza.
Assuming it is true, the American scholar argues, if Israeli soldiers were to try to take the missiles out of these homes one at a time, it “would very likely result in many Israeli casualties.”
In order to avoid Israeli casualties, Etzioni writes: “I asked two American military officers what other options Israel has. They both pointed to Fuel-Air Explosives (FAE). These are bombs that disperse an aerosol cloud of fuel which is ignited by a detonator, producing massive explosions.
The resulting rapidly expanding wave flattens all buildings within a considerable range.”
“Such weapons obviously would be used only after the population was given a chance to evacuate the area. Still, as we saw in Gaza, there are going to be civilian casualties,” Etzioni adds. “The time to raise this issue is long before Israel may be forced to use FAEs.” (As people in Gaza were given 5 minutes to vacate an area and succumb to the shrapnel?)
Etzioni concludes his piece implying Israel has no other option but to bomb the city of Beirut. “In this way, one hopes, that there be a greater understanding, if not outright acceptance, of the use of these powerful weapons, given that nothing else will do,” he writes. (How about desist from the preemptive wars strategies and abide by UN resolutions?)
Lebanese journalists and activists have expressed outrage at the article.
Kareem Chehayeb, a Lebanese journalist and founder and editor of the website Beirut Syndrome, said in response to the piece “Should Israel kill me, my family, and over a million other people to destroy Hezbollah’s missiles? How about that for a headline?”
Chehayeb told Salon Etzioni’s argument is “absolutely absurd” and reeks of hypocrisy. “If some writer said the only way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just to bomb Israel,” he said, “people would go up in arms about it.”
He called it “ludicrous” that a prominent American professor “can just calmly say the solution is to flatten this entire city of 1 million people.”
“I’m just speechless. It sounds ISIS-like, just eradicating an entire community of people,” Chehayeb added.
Salon called Etzioni’s office at George Washington University’s Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies several times with a request for comment, but no one answered.
After this article was published, Etzioni emailed Salon a statement. “I agree with you that any suggestion to bomb or ‘flatten’ Beirut (or any other city) would be beyond horrible and outrageous,” he said. He said Haaretz had changed and then later corrected his headline.
“Ethics aside — Beirut is not where the missiles are housed,” Etzioni added. “The issue though stands how is a nation to respond if another nation or non-state actor rains thousands of missiles on its civilian population?”
Salon also reached out to the university. Jason Shevrin, a spokesperson, told Salon “the George Washington University is committed to academic freedom and encourages efforts to foster an environment welcoming to many different viewpoints. Dr. Etzioni is a faculty member who is expressing his personal views.” The spokesperson did not comment any further.
Etzioni is by no means an unknown scholar. He notes on his George Washington University faculty page that, in 2001, he was among the 100 most-cited American intellectuals. He has also served as the president of the American Sociological Association.
Israel has already flattened Beirut before
Writer Belén Fernández, an author and contributing editor at Jacobin magazine, published a piece in TeleSur responding to Etzioini’s op-ed, titled “No, Israel Should Not Flatten Beirut.” Fernández points out “that Israel has already flattened large sections of Lebanon, in Beirut and beyond.”
She recalls visiting a young man in a south Lebanon village near the Israeli border who “described the pain in 2006 of encountering detached heads and other body parts belonging to former neighbors, blasted apart by bombs or crushed in collapsed homes.”
Note: Hezbollah General Secretary, Hassan Nasr Allah, replied: All we need is launch a couple of missiles on the Ammonium plant in Haifa. The conflagration is a powerful as an atomic bomb.
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.
