Yom Ha’Atzmaut -- Between Redemption and Nakba:

Living Within Two Competing Narratives

Donniel Hartman

Background reading

1. Ari Shavit, "Lydda," My Promised Land

On July 11, two 3rd Regiment platoons advance from the conquered village of Daniyal toward the olive orchards separating Ben Shemen from Lydda. Strong machine gun fire from the outskirts of Lydda halts them. In the meantime, Moshe Dayan’s Regiment 89 arrives in Ben Shemen. By the water fountain Dr. Lehmann built for his Arab neighbors, Dayan forms the regiment into an armored column. One behind the other, they stand at the ready: a giant armored vehicle mounted with a cannon, menacing half-tracks, and machine-gun-equipped jeeps. In the late afternoon the column leaves Ben Shemen and speeds into the city of Lydda, firing at all in its way. In forty-seven minutes of blitz, more than a hundred Arab civilians are shot dead— women, children, old people. Regiment 89 loses nine of its men. In the early evening, the two 3rd Regiment platoons are able to penetrate Lydda. Within hours, their soldiers hold key positions in the city center and confine thousands of civilians in the Great Mosque, the small mosque, and the St. George’s cathedral. By evening, Zionism has taken the city of Lydda. The next day, two Jordanian armored vehicles enter the conquered city in error, setting off a new wave of violence. The Jordanian army is miles to the east, and the two vehicles have no military significance, but some of the citizens of Lydda mistakenly believe they are the harbingers of liberation. Some of the soldiers of the 3rd Regiment mistakenly believe them mean that they face the imminent danger of Jordanian assault. By the small mosque, Israeli soldiers are fired upon. Among the young combatants taking cover in a ditch nearby are some of the Ben Shemen graduates, now in uniform. The brigade commander is a Ben Shemen graduate, too. He gives the order to open fire. The soldiers shoot in every direction. Some throw hand grenades into homes. One fires an antitank PIAT shell into the small mosque. In thirty minutes, at high noon, more than two hundred civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda. When news of the bloodshed reaches the headquarters of Operation Larlar in the conquered Palestinian village of Yazzur, Yigal Allon asks Ben Gurion what to do with the Arabs. Ben Gurion waves his hand: Deport them. Hours after the fall of Lydda, operations officer Yitzhak Rabin issues a written order to the Yiftach Brigade: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.” Over the next day, negotiations are held in the rectory of St. George’s Cathedral. Present are Shmaryahu Gutman, who is now the military governor of

1

Lydda, and the dignitaries of the now occupied city. The bewildered dignitaries are anxious to save the lives of their flock, whereas the cunning Gutman is eager to expel the lot without giving an explicit expulsion order. When negotiations end in the late morning of July 13, 1948, it is agreed that the people of Lydda and the refugees residing there will exit Lydda immediately. By noon, a mass evacuation is under way. By evening, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs leave Lydda in a long column, marching south past the Ben Shemen youth village and disappearing into the East. Zionism obliterates the city of Lydda. Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be. In retrospect it’s all too clear. When Herbert Bentwich saw Lydda from the white tower of Ramleh in April 1897, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine, an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to the Jewish state and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Herbert Bentwich did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For half a century it succeeded in hiding from itself the substantial contradiction between the Jewish national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive forest and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, contradiction struck and tragedy revealed its face. Lydda was no more.

2. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims pp. 207-209

2

3

4

3. Martin Kramer, "What Happened at Lydda," Mosaic Magazine, July 2014

So whether Shavit “takes issue” or not, his narrative of Lydda invites an inevitable question: is it true?

Others have found Shavit’s account of Lydda “riveting” (Avi Shlaim), “a sickening tour de force” (Leon Wieseltier), and “brutally honest” (Thomas Friedman). As I read through it, however, the alleged actions and attitudes of Shavit’s Israeli protagonists struck me as implausible. To me they seemed to personify much too readily Shavit’s broader thesis: that “Zionism” had been preprogrammed to depopulate the country of its Arabs, and that this preprogramming filtered down even to the last soldier. In Lydda, soldiers licensed by “Zionism” then became wanton killers of innocents, smoothing the work of expulsion. Perhaps my suspicion was stoked by the fact that, time and again over the decades, Israeli soldiers have stood accused of just such wanton killing when in fact they were doing what every soldier is trained to do: fire on an armed enemy, especially when that enemy is firing at him. That such accusations might even be accompanied by professions of “love” for Israel is likewise no novelty. (See under: Richard Goldstone.) When such charges are made today, they tend to be subjected to rigorous investigation. Could Shavit’s narrative withstand a comparable level of scrutiny? Shavit relies largely on his interviews, conducted those many years ago. Since he doesn’t cite documents in a public archive, I have no way of knowing whether he fairly represents his subjects. But it did occur to me that these same protagonists may have told their stories to others. And, with a bit of research, I discovered that they had.

5

Shmarya Gutman, Mula Cohen, “Bulldozer,” and others who fought in Lydda in July 1948 not only were interviewed by others but were even interviewed on film at the very places where they had fought. The evidence reposes in the archives of the museum of the Palmah (the Haganah’s strike force) in Ramat Aviv, where I found it and where it may be consulted by anyone. (I’m indebted to Dr. Eldad Harouvi, director of the archives, who expertly guided me through the collection.) Especially valuable is the uncut footage filmed by Uri Goldstein in preparing a 1989 documentary on the Yiftah brigade: the Israeli army unit, comprising fighters from the pre-state Palmah, that conquered Lydda. The same museum also holds transcripts of relevant interviews archived in the Yigal Allon Museum at Kibbutz Ginosar. Some of the testimony in the archives echoes the account given by Shavit. But there are major inconsistencies; not only are these numerous, but they form a pattern. In what follows, I invite you, the reader, to detect that pattern on your own. Remember that the evidence derives largely from testimony given by the same people whom Shavit interviewed only a few years later. I have supplemented it with additional oral testimony by Israeli soldiers whom Shavit should have interviewed, if he had wanted to be thorough.

A caution: “Zionism carries out a massacre” is a lapel-grabbing phrase, meant to excite and provoke. In comparing accounts of a battle, however, sober details make all the difference. As it happens, many of Shavit’s readers have praised his book for adding complexity to Israel’s story, thus replacing old “myths” with a more nuanced understanding. Shavit himself has proclaimed that Israel is “all about complexity. If you don’t see that, you don’t get it.” For anyone with a taste for complexity, what follows should constitute indispensable reading alongside the rather simpler tale entitled “Lydda, 1948.”

1. LYDDA, JULY 11-13, 1948

…After a half-hour of intense fire, the battle died down. Overnight, the Arab Legion withdrew from the police station, ending any prospect of an Arab counterattack. The next day, the Israeli military governor reached an agreement with local notables that the civilian population would depart from Lydda and move eastward. Israeli soldiers, acting under orders, also encouraged their departure. Within a few hours, a stream of refugees made its way to the east, emptying the city.

Shavit’s claim of a massacre is conveyed in passages relating to the “small mosque” (named the Dahmash mosque), in and around which the massacre supposedly took place. These passages lead the reader in a single direction: in Lydda, unarmed civilians were murdered wholesale by revenge-seeking soldiers, whose commanders then covered up the crime.

Because Shavit breaks up his telling of events with flashbacks, his narrative is choppy. Below, I have reassembled its key passages to tell his story in chronological

6

order and in his own words, italicizing some passages for emphasis. In each instance, I then state the main “takeaway” point and explore why Shavit’s narrative poses problems—not only because some other sources contradict it (contradictions in historical sources are inevitable) but because among those sources are the very same people whose oral testimony forms the bedrock of Shavit’s reconstruction of events…

2. A CITY RESISTS

Here is how Shavit’s reconstruction begins: In the early evening [of July 11], the two 3rd Regiment [should be: Battalion] platoons [of the Yiftah brigade] are able to penetrate Lydda. Within hours, their soldiers hold key positions in city center and confine thousands of civilians in the Great Mosque, the small mosque, and St. George’s cathedral. By evening, Zionism has taken the city of Lydda. Takeaway: The small mosque came under Israeli control on the first day, and it was among the places in which Israeli soldiers detained Arab civilians. There they would have been disarmed and placed under guard. Problem: As long ago as November 1948, only months after Lydda’s conquest, the military governor Shmarya Gutman, in a published account, stated unequivocally that the city center wasn’t taken by evening: “We went to bed while only that part of the city around the Great Mosque and the church was held by the Israeli army. In the city itself, they had not yet penetrated.” Those Arab men who reported to the Great Mosque and the Church of St. George (parts of a single complex on the southern edge of the city) arrived unarmed, and Israeli soldiers put them under guard. But the small mosque, according to Gutman, was not a place where Israeli soldiers concentrated local inhabitants. Gutman emphasized the point in his 1988 film interview by the documentarian Uri Goldstein. The interviewer, trying to set the scene for later events at the small mosque, wanted first to establish its status. Goldstein: This firing into the [small] mosque was after grenades were thrown from there?

Gutman: After the grenades were thrown. That’s the small mosque.

Goldstein: But people were detained there.

Gutman: There wasn’t a concentration of many people there. There they didn’t detain. That wasn’t a mosque where they detained. And from there they threw on the guys—who moved in formation of twos and threes—began to throw grenades on them.

Goldstein: It doesn’t add up. They detained people there, so how did they have grenades and all that?

Gutman: They didn’t detain people in that mosque. There were two mosques. In the small mosque, which was off on the side, from inside the courtyard they began to throw [grenades]. . . . It wasn’t a place of detention.

7

In this film interview, then, Gutman repeats four times that those in the small mosque weren’t detained there by Israeli forces, and that it wasn’t a place of detention. On the first night, the small mosque lay beyond the limited zone of Israeli control, which didn’t extend into the city proper. (On the British map embedded below and the high-altitude and low-altitude aerial photos found alongside, all showing pre-war Lydda, the area of the Great Mosque and the Church of St. George is marked by a “1” and the small mosque by a “2.” They are separated by the old city and the town market.)

If Gutman’s recollection is accurate, it means that Israeli forces had no idea who might be in the small mosque, why they had assembled there, or what weapons they might have.

In the second key passage, Shavit explains what caused things to go wrong the next day, July 12: Two Jordanian armored vehicles enter the conquered city in error, setting off a new wave of violence. The Jordanian army is miles to the east, and the two vehicles have no military significance, but . . . some of the [Israeli] soldiers of the 3rd Regiment mistakenly believe them to mean that they face the imminent danger of Jordanian assault. Takeaway: Since the conventional enemy army had retreated and now lay “miles to the east,” the Israeli forces were never under military threat. Problem: Shavit makes no mention whatsoever of the Transjordanian Arab Legion’s continued presence not “miles to the east” but in Lydda itself, in the former British police station (marked on the map above with a “3″) just over a half-kilometer

8

(roughly 0.3 miles) south of the Great Mosque. This structure—which today houses the national headquarters of Israel’s border police—is a British-built Tegart fort, designed to withstand attack. When Israeli forces entered Lydda, it is where the remaining Arab Legion contingent, reinforced by local police and foreign volunteers, barricaded itself. Gutman, in his 1988 film interview, repeatedly refers to the Arab Legion forces in the police station as a looming threat. “From the police station,” he says, “heavy fire was directed at our men, and they couldn’t reach the streets approaching the place. That is, there was a feeling that there was a serious force there.” Even as the civilians streamed to the Great Mosque and the church, “all the time there was firing from the police station. They laid down heavy fire and there was a feeling of war”…

3. THE SMALL MOSQUE

In a third passage, Shavit sets the scene for the mosque massacre as a revenge killing, done outside the chain of command and exceeding any calculation of military necessity: An agitated young soldier arrives [at the church], saying that grenades are being thrown at his comrades from the small mosque. . . . [Gutman] realizes that if he does not act quickly and firmly, things will get out of hand. He suggests shooting at any house from which shots are fired, shooting into every window, shooting at anyone suspected of being part of the mutiny. Takeaway: Gutman, despite his “firmness,” didn’t authorize specific action against the small mosque itself, presumably because it couldn’t be deemed a military target. Problem: According to Gutman’s film interview, he didn’t just “suggest” returning fire against houses, windows, and suspect persons. Instead, he gave authorization specifically to strike the small mosque, which had now become a military target: From a small mosque, they began to throw bombs at soldiers. Two of our guys were killed. They asked me: “What should we do?” I answered: “It is permissible to fire into the mosque.” And they did it.

Gutman also answered the primary objection to doing so, raised by the soldiers themselves:

They asked me: “It’s forbidden to harm the mosque, it’s a holy place.” I said: “A place from which they throw bombs must be taken out.” And they took it out, and it’s true that there were a few local casualties there.

So a counterattack on the small mosque, according to this interview of Gutman, was a military necessity, sanctioned by Gutman’s own authority as military governor. It was part of the improvised plan to suppress the uprising...

9

5. NEW MYTHS FOR OLD?

Even after revisiting Shavit’s sources, we can’t be certain about what happened in and around the small mosque in Lydda on July 12, 1948. I don’t pretend to such certainty, nor do I pretend to have resolved the contradictions in the accounts I’ve examined. I’m a historian, but I haven’t made a study of the 1948 war, and I haven’t tracked down every source. There are no documents for this episode, only oral testimonies, with all their attendant hazards. Officers and soldiers contradict themselves, they contradict their comrades, and Israelis and Palestinians obviously contradict one another. But what I uncovered in just a few days of archival research was more than enough to reinforce my initial doubts about Shavit’s account, and should be enough to plant at least a seed of doubt in the mind of every reader of My Promised Land. That seed may have sprouted even earlier in the editorial offices of the New Yorker, or at least in its fact-checking department. In the magazine’s abridgment, tellingly, we learn that Israeli soldiers “confined thousands of Palestinian civilians at the Great Mosque,” but the small mosque is omitted as a place of civilian detention. It is then mentioned in only three sentences: “Some Palestinians fired at Israeli soldiers near a small mosque.” “One [Israeli soldier] fired an anti-tank shell into the small mosque.” And finally: “But then news came of what had happened in the small mosque. The military governor ordered his men to bury the dead"… At the end of “Lydda, 1948,” Shavit suddenly entertains the thought that “Zionism” may not have committed the massacre after all: “The small-mosque massacre could have been a misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events.” What, then, was “Zionism” responsible for? It was, he writes, “the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda.” These were “no accident. They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution”… If Shavit is sincere in expressing alarm at the misuse of his account, he can take action. He can deposit his interviews in a public archive so that researchers may compare them with other interviews given by the very same persons—and with Shavit’s own account in his book. And he can conduct his own comparison. It isn’t too late to revisit the Lydda “massacre” and honestly flag the points of contention in the forthcoming paperback edition and in the anticipated translations into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Chinese. (He needn’t bother about the Hebrew edition; its reviewers will do the job for him.)

As for the grandees of American Jewish journalism who rushed to praise Shavit’s Lydda treatment, they have a special obligation to help launch the debate by sending readers to this essay. They know who they are.

10

4. Efraim Karsh, "The Uses of Lydda," Mosaic Magazine, July 2014

In "What Happened at Lydda ," Martin Kramer has performed a signal service by putting to rest the canard of an Israeli massacre of Palestinian Arab civilians in that city in July 1948. The charge has been most recently circulated by Ari Shavit in his best-selling My Promised Land. But Lydda is hardly the only instance of such allegations at the time of the founding of the Jewish state—or, for that matter, long afterward. As Kramer suggests at the outset of his investigation, "time and again over the decades, Israeli soldiers have stood accused of just such wanton killing when in fact they were doing what every soldier is trained to do: fire on an armed enemy, especially when that enemy is firing at him."

Indeed. In late 1947, a violent Arab attempt was made to prevent the creation of a Jewish state in line with November's UN partition resolution. No sooner had the Haganah rebuffed it than it was accused of scores of nonexistent massacres. The same happened in the run-up to the establishment of the state in May 1948 and the ensuing war launched by the Arab nations to destroy it. The fall of the city of Haifa in April 1948 gave rise to totally false claims of a large-scale slaughter that circulated throughout the Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18), during the battle of Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa, where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of "hundreds of Arab men and women." Accounts of a massacre at Deir Yasin (April 9), where some 100 people died, were especially lurid, featuring supposed hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of Jewish fighters and fictitious charges of havoc and rape.

In later years, Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinian cause have even invented retroactive atrocities, unknown to anyone at the time of their supposed occurrence. A notable instance is the "Tantura massacre" of May 1948, an event glaringly absent from contemporary Palestinian Arab historiography of the war. And this is not to mention more recent trumped-up allegations of atrocities committed by Israel in, most notoriously, Jenin (2002) and Gaza (2009).

It is into this crowded field that the prominent Israeli journalist Ari Shavit has stepped. "In 30 minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed," Shavit writes dramatically; "Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda." But as Kramer conclusively shows, it is likelier that there was no massacre: only casualties of war, killed or wounded in the fierce fighting between the small Israeli force in the city and the numerically superior force of local Arab fighters supplemented by Transjordanian troops and armored vehicles.

In its broad contours, the story of the conquest of Lydda, followed by the exodus of most of the city's residents, was a matter of public knowledge shortly after the July 1948 events about which Shavit writes; in subsequent decades, Israeli historians filled in the remaining gaps. But then, beginning in the late 1980s, revisionist Israeli "New Historians" successfully transformed what the New York Times had described at the time as "heavy casualties," incurred in the course of "considerable [Arab] resistance," into a massacre of hapless victims.

Since Lydda (together with the simultaneously captured twin town of Ramleh) also constitutes the only case in the war where a substantial urban population was displaced by Israeli forces, the massacre trope won a position of pivotal importance in the larger Arab claim: namely, that there was a premeditated and systematic plan to dispossess and expel the Palestinian Arabs. Shavit has picked up this latter

11

misrepresentation as well, writing that "the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda" were "an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution" (emphasis added).

If, however, there was anything inevitable about the expulsion of Lydda, the cause lay not in Zionism but in the actions of Palestinian Arab leaders and their counterparts in neighboring Arab states. Had these notables accepted the UN partition resolution calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place. As for Lydda itself, no exodus was foreseen in Israeli military plans for the city's capture or was reflected in the initial phase of its occupation. Quite the contrary: the Israeli commander assured local dignitaries that the city's inhabitants would be allowed to stay if they so wished. In line with that promise, the occupying Israeli force also requested a competent administrator and other personnel to run the affairs of the civilian population.

All this was rendered irrelevant when the city's notables and residents, rather than abiding by their surrender agreement with the IDF, attempted to dislodge the Israelis by force. The IDF, its tenuous grip on Lydda starkly exposed, thereupon decided to "encourage" the population's departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east, so as not to leave behind a potential hotbed of armed resistance. In an area where Jordan's Arab Legion was counterattacking in strength, it was essential to prevent any disruption of ongoing war operations.

As it happens, this spontaneous response by the IDF to a string of unexpected developments on the ground was uncharacteristic of general Israeli conduct. Then and throughout the war, inhabitants of other Arab localities who had peacefully surrendered to Israeli forces were allowed to remain in place. In this respect, Lydda was an one of the very few exceptions that proved the rule, not—as Shavit argues—the rule itself.

Those few exceptions, moreover, accounted for but a small fraction of the total exodus. Vastly more Palestinians were driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces than by the Israeli army. In fact, no contemporary sources describe the collapse and dispersal of Palestinian society as, in Shavit's words, "an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution." Here, from June 1949, is the (somewhat surprised) report of a senior British official from a fact-finding mission among Arab war refugees in Gaza:

While [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves), they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.

Martin Kramer is to be congratulated for helping to reclaim these historical truths, distorted by decades of propaganda and revisionist history. In disposing of the Lydda "massacre" canard, he has also exposed the disingenuous and shoddy scholarship underlying the ongoing endeavor to rewrite Israel's history.

12

5. Abba Eban: 11 Statements to the Special Political Committee of the United Nations General Assembly by Ambassador Eban- 17 November 1958

VOLUMES 1-2: 1947-1974

Aggression by Arab States Created Refugee Problem

The Arab refugee problem was caused by a war of aggression, launched by the Arab States against Israel in 1947 and 1948. Let there be no mistake. If there had been no war against Israel, with its consequent harvest of bloodshed, misery, panic and flight, there would be no problem of Arab refugees today. Once you determine the responsibility for that war, you have determined the responsibility for the refugee problem. Nothing in the history of our generation is clearer or less controversial than the initiative of Arab governments for the conflict out of which the refugee tragedy emerged. The historic origins of that conflict are clearly defined by the confessions of Arab governments themselves: "This will be a war of extermination", declared the Secretary-General of the Arab League speaking for the governments of six Arab States, "it will be a momentous massacre to be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades."

Palestine Arabs Urged to Flee by Arab Leaders

The assault began on the last day of November 1947. From then until the expiration of the British Mandate in May 1948 the Arab States, in concert with Palestine Arab leaders, plunged the land into turmoil and chaos. On the day of Israel's Declaration of Independence, on 14 May 1948, the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, supported by contingents from Saudi Arabia and the Yemen, crossed their frontiers and marched against Israel. The perils which then confronted our community; the danger which darkened every life and home; the successful repulse of the assault and the emergence of Israel into the life of the world community are all chapters of past history, gone but not forgotten. But the traces of that conflict still remain deeply inscribed upon our region's life. Caught up in the havoc and tension of war; demoralized by the flight of their leaders; urged on by irresponsible promises that they would return to inherit the spoils of Israel's destruction hundreds of thousands of Arabs sought the shelter of Arab lands. A survey by an international body in 1957 described these violent events in the following terms:

"As early as the first months of' 1948 the Arab League issued orders exhorting the people to seek a temporary refuge in neighboring countries, later to return to their abodes in the wake of' the victorious Arab armies and obtain their share of abandoned Jewish property- (Research Group for European Migration Problems Bulletin, Vol. V, No. 1, 1957, P. 10.(

Contemporary statements by Arab leaders fully confirm this version. On 16 August 1948 Msgr. George Hakini, the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Galilee, recalled:

13

"The refugees had been confident that their absence from Palestine would not last long; that they would return within a few days within a week or two; their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there would be no need for panic or fear of a long exile" .

A month later, on 15 September 1948, Mr. Emile Ghoury, who had been the Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee at the time of the Arab invasion of Israel, declared:

"I do not want to impugn anyone but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of' the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem.

Misery is Result of Unlawful Resort to Force by Arabs

No less compelling than these avowals by Arab leaders are the judgments of United Nations organs. In April 1948, when the flight of the refugees was in full swing, the United Nations Palestine Commission inscribed its verdict on the tablets of history:

"Arab opposition to the plan of the Assembly of 29 November 194 7 has taken the form of organized efforts by strong Arab elements, both inside and outside Palestine, to prevent its implementation and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including repeated armed incursions into Palestine territory. The Commission has had to report to the Security Council that powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of' the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein" .

This is a description of the events between November 1947 and May 1948 when the Arab exodus began. Months later, when the tide of battle rolled away, its consequences of bereavement, devastation and panic were left behind. At the General Assembly meetings in 1948 the United Nations Acting Mediator recorded a grave international judgment:

"The Arab States had forcibly opposed the existence of the Jewish State in Palestine in direct opposition to the wishes of two-thirds of the members of the Assembly. Nevertheless their armed intervention had proved useless. The (Mediator's) report was based solely on the fact that the Arab States had no right to resort to force and that the United Nations should exert its authority to prevent such a use of force" .

The significance of the Arab assault upon Israel by five neighboring States had been reflected in a letter addressed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to representatives of the permanent members of the Security Council on 16 May 1948:

14

"The Egyptian Government", wrote the Secretary-General, "has declared in a cablegram to the President of the Security Council on 15 May that Egyptian armed forces have entered Palestine and it has engaged in 'armed intervention' in that country. On 16 May I received a cablegram from the Arab League making similar statements on behalf of the Arab States. I consider it my duty to emphasize to you that this is the first time since the-adoption of the Charter that Member States have openly declared that they have engaged in armed intervention outside their own territory. "

6. Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel, pp. 87, 95-96

15

7. UN Palestine Commission- First Special Report to the Security Council: The Problem of Security in Palestine Feb. 16. 1948

6. The Secretary-General has been informed by the Arab Higher Committee that is determined to persist in its rejection of the partition plan and in its refusal to recognize the resolution of the Assembly and “anything deriving therefrom”. The Subsequent communication of 6 February to the Secretary-General from the representative of the Arab Higher Committee set forth the following conclusions of the Arab Higher Committee Delegation:

16

“a. The Arabs of Palestine will never recognize the validity of the extorted partition recommendations or the authority of the United Nations to make them. “b. The Arabs of Palestine consider that any attempt by the Jews or any power or group of powers to establish a Jewish State in Arab territory is an act of aggression which will be resisted in self-defense by force. c. It is very unwise and fruitless to ask any commission to proceed to Palestine because not a single Arab will cooperate with the said commission. d. The United Nations or its commission should not be misled to believe that its efforts in the partition plan will meet with any success. It will be far better for the eclipsed prestige of this organization not to start on this adventure. e. The United Nations prestige will be better served by abandoning, not enforcing such an injustice. f. The determination of every Arab in Palestine is to oppose in every way the partition of that country. g. The Arabs of Palestine made a solemn declaration before the United Nations, before God and history, that they will never submit or yield to any power going to Palestine to enforce partition.

“The only way to establish partition is first to wipe them out – man women and child.

7. The Commission has no reason to doubt the determination and force of the organized resistance to the plan of partition by strong Arab elements inside and outside of Palestine. In an official report, dated 4 February 1948, the Mandatory Power states that:

“1. The High Commissioner for Palestine reported on 27 January that the security position had become more serious during the preceding week with the entry into Palestine of large parties of trained guerrillas from adjacent territory. A band of some 300 men had established itself in the Safad area of Galilee, and it was probably this band or part of it which carried out an intensive attack during that week on Yechiam settlement, using mortars and heavy automatics as well as rifles. 2. On the same date, the High Commissioner further reported that a second large band of some 700 Syrians had entered Palestine via Trans-Jordan during the night of 20-21 January. This band had its own mechanized transport, its members were well equipped and provisioned, and wore battle dress. The party appears to have entered Trans-Jordan from Syria and then crossed into Palestine at a point at which the entry of Syrians was not expected. The Syrian and Lebanese frontiers are manned on the Palestine side by both troops and police, although the nature of the border country makes it extremely difficult to secure the entire frontier against illegal entry, especially at night. On arrival in Palestine, this band appears to have dispersed, and its is thus now impracticable to deal with it by military action. So far as is known, its numbers have not engaged in illegal activity beyond the possession of arms.

17

3. Arab morale is considered to have risen steadily as a result of these reinforcements, of the spectacular success of the Hebron Arabs in liquidating a Haganah column near Surif, and of the capture and successful dismantling by the Arab National Guard of a Jewish van filled with explosives which was to have been detonated in an Arab locality. Even the relatively serious loss of life and damage to property caused by Jewish reprisals, have, in the High Commissioner’s view, failed to check the revival of confidence in the fellaheen and urban proletariat. Panic continues to increase, however, throughout the Arab middle classes, and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country. 4. Subsequent reports dated 2 February indicate that a further party of troops belonging to the ‘Arab Liberation Army’ arrived in Palestine via the Jisr Djamiyeh Bridge during the night of 29-30 January. The party, numbering some 950 men transported in 19 vehicles, consisted largely of non-Palestinian Arabs, all in uniform and well armed. It is now dispersed in small groups throughout villages of the Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm sub-districts. The security forces have taken action to prevent further incursions across the Jisr Djamiyeh and the Sheikh Husseini Bridges.”

8. A subsequent communication from the Mandatory Power under date of 9 February 1948, also reports that:

“A report has been received from Jerusalem to the effect that it is now definitely established that a second party of some seven hundred guerrillas (believed to be under the command of Fawzi Bay al Kankji) entered Palestine via Djamiyeh Bridge on 29th/30th January. It is understood that this band dispersed rapidly among the villages of Samaria and that there is now in that district a force of not less than 1400. Although this force has dispersed, it remains cohesive and is increasingly exercising considerable administrative control over the whole area. As an instance of this, the force has of its own accord and in collaboration with Arab National Committee, already deals with local bandits and other petty crimes. The presence of this forces, which exhibits a surprising degree of discipline, has been warmly welcomed by the inhabitants of Samaria. It appears anxious to avoid becoming involved with the British Security forces. The secrecy which cloud the entry of the second contingent is due to a deliberate and successfully imposed policy of silence. “Individual attacks by Arabs on British troops and police have increased. These are due partly to a desire to obtain arms even at the price of murder, and partly to nervousness, particularly in rural areas, caused by the frequent use by the Jews of British uniform in order to facilitate offensive action.”

9. The main facts controlling the security situation in Palestine today are the following:

a. Organized effect by strong Arab elements inside and outside Palestine to prevent the implementation of the Assembly’s plan of partition and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including armed incursions into Palestinian territory. b. Certain elements of the Jewish community in Palestine continue to commit irresponsible acts of violence which worsen the security situation, although that Community is generally in support of the recommendations of the Assembly.

18

c. The added complication created by the fact that the Mandatory Power, which remains responsible for law and order in Palestine until the termination of the Mandate, is engaged in the liquidation of its administration and preparing for the evacuation of its troops.

8. Theodor Herzl: The Jewish State, 1896

II. The Jewish Question

No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from Jews!"

Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys--for example, their exclusion from certain hotels--even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous. The forms of persecution varying according to the countries and social circles in which they occur. In Russia, imposts are levied on Jewish villages; in Rumania, a few persons are put to death; in Germany, they get a good beating occasionally; in Austria, Anti-Semites exercise terrorism over all public life; in Algeria, there are traveling agitators; in Paris, the Jews are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. Shades of anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable. But this is not to be an attempt to make out a doleful category of Jewish hardships.

I do not intend to arouse sympathetic emotions on our behalf. That would be foolish, futile, and undignified proceeding. I shall content myself with putting the following questions to the Jews: Is it not true that, in countries where we live in perceptible numbers, the position of Jewish lawyers, doctors, technicians, teachers, and employees of all descriptions becomes daily more intolerable? Is it not true, that the Jewish middle classes are seriously threatened? Is it not true, that the passions of the mob are incited against our wealthy people? Is it not true, that our poor endure greater sufferings than any other proletariat? I think that this external pressure makes itself felt everywhere. In our economically upper classes it causes discomfort, in our middle classes continual and grave anxieties, in our lower classes absolute despair.

…

Our national character is too historically famous, and, in spite of every degradation, too fine to make its annihilation desirable. We might perhaps be able to merge ourselves entirely into surrounding races, if these were to leave us in peace for a period of two generations. But they will not leave us in peace. For a little period they manage to tolerate us, and then their hostility breaks out again and again. The world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken. In its ignorance and narrowness of heart, it fails to observe that prosperity weakens our Judaism and extinguishes our peculiarities. It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem; it is only hatred encompassing us that makes us strangers once more. Thus, whether we like it or not, we are now, and shall henceforth remain, a historic group with unmistakable characteristics common to us all.

We are one people--our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our

19

strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State, and, indeed, a model State. We possess all human and material resources necessary for the purpose.

…

THE PLAN

The whole plan is in its essence perfectly simple, as it must necessarily be if it is to come within the comprehension of all.

Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.

The creation of a new State is neither ridiculous nor impossible. We have in our day witnessed the process in connection with nations which were not largely members of the middle class, but poorer, less educated, and consequently weaker than ourselves. The Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.

The plan, simple in design, but complicated in execution, will be carried out by two agencies: The Society of Jews and the Jewish Company.

The Society of Jews will do the preparatory work in the domains of science and politics, which the Jewish Company will afterwards apply practically.

The Jewish Company will be the liquidating agent of the business interests of departing Jews, and will organize commerce and trade in the new country.

9. Toby Greene and Tal Becker, The idea of a Jewish state is itself democratic: An interview with Tal Becker, June 2013

http://www.bicom.org.uk/analysis-article/6082/

PART II: THE QUESTION OF HISTORICAL JUSTICE Greene: How do you respond to those who argue that the Jews never had the right to establish a country on what they consider ‘someone else’s land’, and that the state is established inherently on the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948? Becker: First of all, I am somewhat reluctant to go into the historical story, because I feel like we need to deal with the situation we have today, and what is best for the future of millions of Palestinians and Jews. As much as we Israelis believe in the justice of our cause and our own historical narrative, the idea of spending time convincing our neighbours that our narrative is correct doesn’t appeal to me. That’s much more a mode of trying to win theoretical arguments and I’m more interested in reconciling interests. I don’t need the Palestinian people to accept that I’m right and I don’t need to accept that the Palestinians are right. I need us to share the fact that we want a better future for our children.

But at the same time, it’s important to say from a Jewish perspective that our positions are rooted in historical and legal rights. Beyond our unbroken historical, religious and

20

cultural connection to this land, there is a basic fact that the 1922 League of Nations Mandate turned the idea of establishing a Jewish national home from a desire of the Zionist movement and then a policy preference of the British, into an international legal obligation. The League of Nations Mandate is an international treaty that said that the Jewish national home would be established here without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the local inhabitants who were not Jews. That in turn developed into the UN Partition Plan of 1947 that the Jews accepted and the Arabs didn’t accept. It was this Arab rejection of partition which contributed decisively to the war of 1947-8 and the Palestinian refugee problem that followed.

It is on the strength of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, which was also acknowledged by the world, that Israel established a state here. We are not saying there should be the Jewish people’s right to self-determination to the exclusion of Palestinian self-determination. But I cannot see the moral basis for arguing vehemently for Palestinian rights without arguing for Jewish rights in parallel.

Now whether or not people agree that the international decisions which affirmed the Jewish people’s right to establish a national home here were justified is frankly irrelevant at this point. The Jewish people acted on those international decisions. In their multiple hundreds of thousands, they invested their energies – in many cases gave their lives – to build a Jewish and democratic nation state that is, for all its imperfections, an extraordinary success against the odds. The Jewish people are here, they have a state it is not going away, and people just have to come to terms with it.

If you are on a university campus you can imagine how you undo history and everyone can choose to goes back in time, until you get to Adam and Eve. But in practical terms, there is no way to move forward on the basis that every wronged individual, on either side, should be able to undo everything that was done in history. There is no way to fundamentally undo the historical dispossession of Jews from this land and their yearning for it for thousands of years, or the dispossession of Palestinians. Similarly, we cannot undo the Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan in 1947, or the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands following 1948. What we can do is imagine how we create a better reality for both peoples than the one we now know.

Greene: This forward-looking approach seems different to the emphasis on the idea of ‘historical justice’ that we often hear spoken of in relation to a peace agreement. Becker: I think the idea of justice in its complete and absolute sense is an illusion when it comes to conflict resolution. It is not going to be possible to reach absolute justice because Israeli and Palestinian conceptions of justice are founded on historical narratives that are not reconcilable. Therefore, the idea that there is no peace without justice, when conceived in absolutist terms, is a recipe for never having peace in any meaningful sense.

21

I think instead we should aspire to an agreement that resonates with fairness, and that aspires to give both peoples as much dignity and security and respect as possible. Each people must feel they are better off as a result of the agreement. They may not have reached all of their expectations but they must feel like an agreement respects their rights and their dignity in a fair way. It will come with costs to both sides. No agreement that feels like victory only for one side is going to last. If a two-state agreement is ever reached, Israel will be asked out of necessity to cut itself off in some way from much of Judaea and Samaria, the areas where its history as a people was created. The Palestinian people will need to irreversibly come to terms with the fact that places where they lived, the Palestinian villages before 1948, are not places where their sovereignty will extend to.

10. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 55a

ומחזיר כולה הבירה כל מקעקע: אומרים ב״ש, בבירה ובנאו מריש גזל: רבנן תנו

. השבין תקנת משום, בלבד מריש דמי אלא לו אין: אומרים וב״ה, לבעליו מריש

AND THAT IF A BEAM WRONGFULLY APPROPRIATED HAS BEEN BUILT INTO A PALACE. The Rabbis taught: If a man wrongfully takes a beam and builds it into a palace, Beth Shammai say that he must demolish the whole palace and restore the beam to its owner. Beth Hillel, however, say that the latter can claim only the money value of the beam, so as not to place obstacles in the way of penitents.

11. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Kama 94b

Our Rabbis taught: If robbers or usurers [repent and of their own free will] are prepared to restore [the misappropriated articles], it is not right to accept [them] from them, and he who does accept [them] from them does not obtain the approval of the Sages. R. Johanan said: It was in the days of Rabbi that this teaching was enunciated, as taught: It once happened with a certain man who was desirous of making restitution that his wife said to him, Raca, if you are going to make restitution, even the girdle [you are wearing] would not remain yours, and he thus refrained altogether from making repentance. It was at that time that it was declared that if robbers or usurers are prepared to make restitution it is not right to accept [the misappropriated articles] from them, and he who accepts from them does not obtain the approval of the Sages. An objection was raised [from the following:] If a father left [to his children] money accumulated by usury, even if the heirs know that the money was [paid as] interest, they are not liable to restore the money [to the respective borrowers]. Now, does this not imply that it is only the children who have not to restore, whereas the father would be liable to restore? The law might be that even the father himself would not have had to restore, and the reason why the ruling was stated with reference to the children was that since it was necessary to state in the following clause Where the father left them a cow or a garment or anything which could [easily] be identified, they are liable to restore [it], in order to uphold the honour of the father, the earlier clause similarly spoke of them.

22

רוח אין ־ מהן והמקבל, מהן מקבלין אין ־ שהחזירו ברבית ומלוי הגזלנין: רבנן תנו באדם מעשה: דתניא זוֹ משנה נשנית רבי בימי: יוחנן רבי אמר. הימנו נוחה חכמים

אבנט אפילו, תשובה עושה אתה אם, ריקה: אשתו א״ל, תשובה לעשות שבקש אחד רביות ומלוי הגזלנין: אמרו שעה באותה תשובהֹ עשה ולא ונמנע שלךִ אינו

: מיתיבי. הימנו נוחה חכמים רוח אין ־ מהם והמקבל, מהם מקבלין אין ־ שהחזירו

להחזירֹ חייבין אין ־ רבית שהן יודעין שהן אע״פ, רבית של מעות אביהם להם הניח, להחזיר חייב אינו נמי דאביהם הוא בדין להחזיִר חייב אביהם הא, דלא הוא אינהו

: סיפא למתני בעי דקא משום? בדידהו דקתני והא

23