AAARGH
This article examines the academic and legal controversy that has arisen in Israel over a graduate thesis using oral history--the taped testimonies of both Arab and Jewish witnesses--to document a massacre carried out by Israeli forces against the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura in late May 1948. Though the researcher, Teddy Katz, is himself a Zionist, the case sheds light on the extent to which mainstream Zionism is prepared to go in discouraging research that brings to the fore such aspects of the 1948 war as "ethnic cleansing." The article also discusses the research itself and summarizes the actual massacre as it can be reconstructed from the available sources. It is followed by excerpts from some of the transcripts.
ILAN PAPPÉ is a professor in the department of political science at Haifa University and the author of a number of books, including The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992).
ON 21 JANUARY 2000, the Israeli daily Ma'ariv published a long article on the massacre of Tantura. Written by journalist Amir Gilat, the article was based mainly on a master's thesis by Teddy Katz, a student in the department of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University. The thesis, entitled "The Exodus of the Arabs from Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel," had been awarded the highest possible grade for a master's thesis several months earlier. It had been submitted in March 1998, but for complications having nothing to do with the case itself, was examined only at the end of 1999. The thesis is microhistorical research on the 1948 war focusing on five Palestinian coastal villages between Hadera and Haifa, particularly on the villages of Umm Zaynat and Tantura. The testimonies reproduced by Katz in his fourth chapter tell a chilling tale of brutal massacre, the gist of which is that on 22-23 May 1948, some 200 unarmed Tantura villagers, mostly young men, were shot dead after the village had surrendered following the onslaught of Haganah troops.
Katz's research and the role of oral history
The basic idea behind Katz's thesis is that even works focused exclusively on the 1948 war, such as Benny Morris's Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, have not dealt in detail with the fate of individual villages. At the heart of the thesis are the oral testimonies Katz obtained, for microresearch of this kind could not have been carried out relying solely on archival material, which for individual villages is exceedingly scant.
Certainly, Katz was aware of the pitfalls of oral history. but his supervisor guided him, rightly in my opinion, to treat oral history as a significant and vital component in the historical reconstruction of the Nakba the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948. Especially with the advent of electronic recording, oral history has gained increasing recognition in the past decades in the academic community worldwide: there are over a thousand oral history programs under university auspices in the United States alone. Nor is written documentation still seen as necessarily more authentic or reliable than oral history. This is particularly true with regard to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) documents concerning the 1948 war, which are mainly reports or correspondence by military men whose aim is at times less to report than to conceal. This means that historians must often use as much guesswork and imagination in reconstructing what happened from the documents as they would in working with oral testimonies. (If one thinks ahead fifty years and imagines the contrast between official IDF reports concerning the latest intifada and the ocular testimony of witnesses, one has some idea of the problem.)
Oral history is not a substitute for written evidence, but it is particularly important in validating and filling in the gaps in the documentary evidence, which gives us the "bare bones." Thus, what is in the official Israeli record (the History of the Haganah, for example) a brief reference to the act of occupying a village--or "cleansing" it, to use the actual term of the Jewish texts--becomes in Palestinian history a detailed account of assault, expulsion, and in some cases massacre. Indeed, in the case of Tantura, the massacre might not have come to light at all had it not been for oral testimony on the Palestinian side--later corroborated by Jewish testimony--because the piecemeal evidence currently available in the Israeli archives is too fragmentary (as we shall see) to more than hint at what happened. In this case, then, it is the documents that fill out the oral history, rather than the reverse.
Recently, the Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote very movingly about the value of oral history. He was writing about its use in the reconstruction of the Holocaust, and though no comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba is intended, one of his passages serves to remind us of the value of oral history as a legitimate tool in reconstructing past traumas:
The memory of trauma is often murky, unstable, contradictory, untrustworthy. . . . What we learn from [memoirs of camp survivors in this case] are not the fine details of camp administration, train schedules, ideological purpose and genocidal organization. These are matters far better left for historians. What we learn is the infinity of pain and suffering that makes the memory of those years into a burden whose weight stretches far beyond the ephemeral human existence, a presence that clings to the mind and inhabits the deep recesses of consciousness long after it should have been cleansed and washed away.
In writing his thesis, Katz was well aware of the "murkiness" of the picture derived from the memories of participants and survivors so long after traumatic events. But he was not interested in fine details; he wished to learn the overall picture, leaving behind, perhaps forever, certainties about exact chronology and names and precise numbers. He wished to learn the pain and suffering as it was experienced by people in the midst of war and to show the kaleidoscope of perspectives from the various testimonies. Into these he wove the published and unpublished sources at his disposal--yet another perspective. And despite the inevitable discrepancies in the details, the broad picture he found is remarkably consistent. It is important to mention that he uses the same research technique for Umm Zaynat, with witnesses, Palestinian and Jewish, each from their own vantage point, telling how they saw the village's occupation and the expulsion. Yet in the case of Umm Zaynat, there is no mention of massacre.
Katz was able to overcome the suspicion and, indeed, delegitimization that is usually applied in Israel to Palestinian oral history (and, indeed, to Palestinian history in general) only because he succeeded in obtaining testimonies about the massacre not only from Palestinian witnesses but also from Jewish soldiers who had participated in the events. Had there not been corroborating Jewish testimonies on the Tantura affair, even the article in Ma'ariv would not have been taken so seriously.
Katz interviewed 135 persons for his thesis. The Tantura chapter is based on the testimonies of forty witnesses, by coincidence twenty Arabs and twenty Jews, all of them taped. Tracking down the Palestinian survivors was more difficult than finding the Jewish soldiers: Tantura had been captured by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade, and the names of the veterans were readily obtainable. The Palestinians he interviewed, on the other hand, most of whom live in Furaydis and Jisr al-Zarqa, villages near Tantura, as well as Tulkarm in the West Bank, had to be found by word of mouth through Jews who knew them or through the intervention of Palestinians from Tantura living abroad. Moreover, while Jewish soldiers are accustomed to being sought out to talk about their war experiences, the Tantura survivors still living in Israel were reluctant to participate in a project in which they were asked to shed light on Jewish barbarism during the war.
The thesis is not without its faults. When he wrote it, Katz was not aware of some important material (which in fact adds confirmation to the story, of which more later), and he failed to address the important issue of why, in contrast to many other massacres of the 1948 war, knowledge of this one had apparently not gone beyond the immediate circles of the survivors: neither Walid Khalidi's seminal work All That Remains nor the exhaustive Palestinian Encyclopedia, for example, mentions it. Other relatively minor methodological deficiencies, typical in theses of this level and kind, later became the basis for the prosecution's case in the libel suit brought against Katz, which will be described below. Nonetheless, Katz's thesis is a solid and convincing piece of work whose essential validity is in no way marred by its shortcomings.
Much of the subtlety of the academic work was lost in the bald summary of the Ma'ariv article, which made no mention of the methodological complexities involved. Still, the gist of the story was accurately conveyed. The article also includes positive and negative evaluations by a number of scholars. Among those praising the work were Professor Asa Kasher, a philosopher from Tel Aviv University and the author of the IDF's ethical code; Meir Pail, a military historian of the 1948 war; and this writer. These scholars were more categorical than Katz in characterizing the Tantura events. Thus, while Katz had not used the word "massacre" either in his thesis or in interviews about his work, they did not shrink from the term, and Professor Kasher called what happened in Tantura a "war crime." Three historians with negative assessments were also cited in the article. Only one of the three, Yoav Gelber, had actually read the thesis, but the others did not hesitate to join him in condemning it as, at best, the product of unfounded rumors or, at worst, a work written with the intention of weakening Israel's image and position in the peace negotiations.
Gilat also succeeded in tracking down some of the witnesses Katz had interviewed. The Palestinians repeated what they had said to Katz, but some of the Jews recanted. Several of them even joined the lawsuit against him, submitting affidavits denying their testimony--despite the fact that their testimonies are on tape and very clear. One of those who recanted, Shlomo Ambar, affirmed in his affidavit that he did not recall anything he said to Katz.
What happened in Tantura ?
Since the thesis was written, several other pieces of evidence have come to light that reinforce Katz's findings. Four documents were extracted from the IDF archives. One was a report mentioning twenty Palestinians killed in the battle, followed by a report a week later from IDF headquarters complaining that the unburied corpses in the village could lead to the spread of epidemics and typhoid. In the third document, the Israeli general chief of staff inquired about reports that had reached him "about irregularities in Tantura" and received the response that "overenthusiasm because of the victory" had led to some damage inflicted "immediately after our people entered the place." Finally, a document from the Alexandroni Brigade to IDF headquarters in June notes: "We have tended to the mass grave, and everything is in order."
Another piece of evidence Katz had not been aware of was a passage in a 1951 Palestinian memoir that includes a graphic description of the massacre. It is brought by Marwan Iqab al-Yihya, a survivor who had reached Haifa after the massacre and described to the author what he had seen with his own eyes. Additional testimonies were recently collected from Tantura survivors living in refugee camps in Syria by a Palestinian researcher, Mustafa al-Wali, and published in the Palestinian journal Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya. Some of these testimonies are reproduced in the current issue of this journal.
The Jewish and Palestinian testimonies, in combination with the few written sources we have, including the official history of the Alexandroni Brigade, give us a clear overall picture of what happened in Tantura on 22-23 May 1948, though many details are still obscure and probably will remain so. On the eve of the occupation, Tantura was a large village with a harbor--fit for boats, not ships--on the coast thirty-five kilometers south of Haifa and a few kilometers west of the main road linking Haifa to Jaffa and Tel Aviv. From the evidence, it transpires that after the battle ended and the village had surrendered to the Alexandroni Battalion, some 200 more people were killed. The IDF documentation, as noted above, refers to about twenty Arabs killed during the battle itself, and the commander in charge of the operation affirmed in his interview with Katz that no more than thirty Palestinians had been killed in the fighting. Yet one of the Jewish witnesses Katz interviewed, who personally supervised burials, testifies himself having counted 230 Palestinian corpses.
According to the witnesses, the killings took place in two stages. The first phase was a rampage. From Katz's interviews with the soldiers, it was unleashed by the soldiers' anger caused by shots fired at them after the village had officially surrendered. It appears that one or two snipers were still active and that they killed or wounded one, two, or even eight Jewish soldiers (the testimonies differ on the numbers) following the surrender. One of the Jewish eyewitnesses said that a particularly popular soldier had been killed in that fire. The rampage phase left about 100 people dead.
The second phase was more premeditated. It was carried out by intelligence units and people belonging to logistical units, most of whom lived in the nearby Jewish settlements of Atlit, Binyamina, Maayan Zvi, and Zichron Yaacov. These units systematically executed men suspected--often unjustifiably, it seems--of concealing personal weapons in their homes or of belonging to the Arab volunteers who had come to assist the Palestinians. These executions were finally stopped by people from Zichron Yaacov, who accused the soldiers of killing the wrong people. Another 100 or so victims, according to the witnesses, were dispatched in this phase.
After the rampage, the people of Tantura had been rounded up and led to the beach, where the men were separated from the women and children (up to twelve or thirteen years old). Aided by lists of names, the intelligence and logistics soldiers selected groups of seven to ten or even more and took them back to the village, either to the graveyard or a place near the mosque. They were either seated or made to stand against a wall and were shot at the back of the head.
Those executed were between the ages of thirteen and thirty. The men within that age range who were spared were held in detention camps for a year and a half, separated from the women and children and old people who had been transported after the massacre to the nearby village of Furaydis. This village, by the way, along with Jisr al-Zarqa, were the only two out of sixty-four villages on the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv that had not been wiped out by the Jewish forces. This was because men from these villages had traditionally worked in the nearby Jewish settlements, which pressed to have them spared so they could continue to benefit from the cheap labor. Most of the men of Tantura were expelled to the West Bank after their detention, where they were joined by their families. Most of those who remained in Israel were able to do so through the intervention of Jews who knew them.
In general, the ethnic cleansing in Palestine as a whole and in the area between Hadera and Haifa in particular was carried out against a background of vague instructions from above, as is testified by the commander of the battalion occupying Tantura. According to these instructions, every commander occupying a village had full authority to do with the inhabitants as he saw fit, whether they surrendered or were taken prisoner.
The usual practice followed by Alexandroni in occupying a village--the brigade also captured the villages of Hayriyya, Kafar Saba, Qaysariya, Sakiyya, Umm Zaynat, and (later) `Ayn Ghazal, Ijzim, and Jabal, among others--was to expel the inhabitants while the battle was in progress. Villages were purposely not fully encircled, and one of the flanks would be left open so that the inhabitants could be put to flight through this "open gate." But in Tantura, due to lack of coordination during the battle, the village was completely surrounded with Jewish boats offshore blocking the sea route and the Alexandroni units on land, there was no "escape gate." The concentration of so large a village in the hands of the occupier--Tantura had about 1,500 inhabitants--produced the rampage, the massacre, and the executions. From the testimony of the perpetrators, it would appear that some saw the executions as being in the service of the Zionist security apparatus (killing young men they saw as soldiers of the enemy), others as part of a personal vendetta. The pattern must have been similar in the almost forty other places where massacres occurred.
Getting testimonies from both sides was sometimes painful. Those who actually witnessed the acts of killing during the execution phase, aside from the perpetrators, were generally young children or people who either worked with Jewish intelligence or were about to be killed and were saved at the last minute by Jews from nearby settlements. An air of uneasiness accompanies many of the testimonies. Mustafa Masri, who as a young child had witnessed the killing of his entire family before his very eyes, concludes a particularly chilling interview with Katz by uttering "But believe me, one should not mention these things. I do not want them to take revenge against us. You are going to cause us trouble. I made a mistake in giving you the name of the person who handed my family over." I think it is even clearer why the Jews did not talk about the massacre. As one of the Jewish witnesses, Joel Solnik, said to Katz "There were shameful things there, very shameful. It was one of the most shameful battles fought by the IDF. . . they did not leave anyone alive."
The resistance to talking about what happened came out clearly in an interview with a veteran Israeli general, Shlomo Ambar, who had been a young officer in the battle. He tells Katz that he had never gone back to Tantura and that he had seen things he does not want to talk about. Pressed by Katz, he says "I associate [what had happened in Tantura] only with this. I went to fight against the Germans who were our worst enemy. But when we fought we obeyed the laws of the war dictated to us by international norms. They [the Germans] did not kill prisoners of war. They killed Slavs, but not British POWs, not even Jewish POWs--all those from the British army who were in German captivity survived." Katz prods him further: "Come on, we are fifty years later, you'll go to heaven and they'll say that you had a chance to talk and didn't." Ambar: "I had sinned so much in my life. . . . On this I would be questioned in heaven?" Ambar looks at Katz's tape recorder: "Why are you using that?" Katz: "Because I can't remember everything." Ambar: "If I don't want to tell, it means I'm hiding something. It means that the occupation [of Tantura] was not one of our most successful battles." Katz: "You talk about Tantura, and you mention what even the Germans did not do." Ambar: "That's right. They did not kill Western prisoners, only Russians." A few minutes later, he adds "Let me tell you, I do not recall too well. The intention was to empty the village, and people died in the process. . . . People naturally are attached to their home place and do not want to go, so under the pressure of an occupying army, they were made to leave, toward the east. Period. Ask me something else."
The legal and academic battle
A few days after the affair was publicized by Ma'ariv, the veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade sued Katz for libel, asking for more than one million shekels in damages. One would have assumed that Haifa University would stand behind Katz. Given the high grade he had received, any discredit of his work--especially in so public a way--could only reflect poorly on the university's standards, but the moment the legal process began, the university began acting as if he were already guilty of incompetence at best or fraud at worst. Spearheading the crusade against Katz within the university were senior members of the Department of Erez Israel Studies, which has always been in the forefront of providing scholarly scaffolding for the Zionist narrative. As a result of the campaign, the university refused to offer Katz any legal, moral, or practical support in facing the suit. It was a Palestinian legal NGO in Israel, Adalah, that provided assistance on a pro bono basis. Katz was in disgrace. His name was summarily removed from a list of those to be honored for their work at a special ceremony. (Since the list had already been printed, his name had to be erased with tippex.) His status at the university was equivalent to that of an employee suspended, and his hopes of pursuing an academic career were shattered, at least for the time being.
Before the trial began, Katz tried to persuade the court not to take the case, arguing that it was a scholarly debate that should be determined not in court but within the university. If the university had supported this effort, he may have succeeded in avoiding a trial, but the university refused, and the trial opened as planned.
The trial began on 13 December 2000, with Katz being called to the witness box by the prosecuting attorney. The crux of the prosecution's case rested on six references--out of 230--in which Katz either misquoted or interpreted too freely what the witnesses said. In Ambar's testimony, Katz substituted the word "Germans" for "Nazis." In another, he summarized the testimony of a Tantura survivor, Abu Fihmi, as describing a killing, where the witness did not say this directly (though in fact, this is clearly what he meant). In four other instances, Katz wrote something that does not appear in the tapes but only in his written summaries of the conversations. No discrepancies were found in any of the remaining 224 references concerning Tantura.
The presentation of these discrepancies consumed the first two days of the trial. When the court broke for the day at the end of the second day, a member of Katz's team of three lawyers (which had also checked through every reference against the tapes) exulted in a private conversation that the prosecution had exhausted its entire case. The cross-examination by the defense concerning this material, and the defense's case, was to begin the following day. None of the Jewish soldiers had agreed to appear in court, but since it was expected to be a long trial it was expected that they would be forced to testify. The defense and some of Katz's supporters were looking forward to a trial that would mark the first time in Israel's history that, in effect, Israel's role in the Nakba was on trial.
That night, however, for reasons Katz himself cannot explain even today, he signed an agreement that in essence repudiated his own academic research. Weakened by a stroke several weeks earlier and subjected to enormous pressures by his family, friends, and neighbors in the kibbutz where he lived, he acquiesced on the advice of one of his lawyers (a cousin of his) to bring an end to the whole affair; he was likewise assured by the university lawyer, an unofficial member of his legal team, that signing the agreement would be for his own good, appearing to hint that it would enable him to continue his studies at Haifa University.
The agreement Katz signed took his other two lawyers totally by surprise. Titled "An Apology," the agreement is so sweeping as to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to a police "confession" extracted under dubious conditions. The section relating to his research reads as follows:
I wish to clarify that, after checking and re-checking the evidence, it is clear to me now, beyond any doubt, that there is no basis whatsoever for the allegation that the Alexandroni Brigade, or any other fighting unit of the Jewish forces, committed killings of people in Tantura after the village surrendered. Furthermore, I wish to say that the things I have written must have been misunderstood [by the press] as I had never intended to tell a tale of a massacre in Tantura. . . . I accept as truth [only] the testimonies of those among the Alexandroni people who denied categorically the massacre, and I disassociate myself from any conclusion which can be derived from my thesis that could point to the occurrence of a massacre or the killing of defenseless or unarmed people.
Twelve hours later, Katz formally regretted his retraction and wanted to continue the trial, but the judge refused. The judge's ruling made no reference to the merits of the case, but only to the court's ability to accept Katz's retraction of his retraction. As this report is written, the matter now rests with the High Court, which will decide by April 2001 whether the trial can be resume.
The Israeli press, which had given front-page coverage to Katz's retraction, barely mentioned his efforts to rescind it. He was depicted in the three major newspapers--both in the news sections and, later, in op-eds--as a fabricator, a pseudohistorian who had invented a nonevent for ideological reasons (a ridiculous allegation given that Katz, like the lawyer for the prosecution, is a member of Meretz). Because Katz had given in so early on, after two days of testimony wholly taken up with undeniable discrepancies, it was assumed that the six discrepancies were representative of the entire work. From there it was all too easy to conclude that there had been no massacre and probably not really a Nakba in 1948. The national radio and television exulted in Katz's "exposure." Even left-wing journalists like Tom Segev remarked that there may have been a massacre, but it met the wrong historian.
Haifa University did not accept his retraction of his denial either and acted as if the agreement with the prosecution were valid. On 26 December 2000, the prosecutor urged the university to strip Katz of his title. The university set up two committees, one to check the tapes against the quotations in the thesis, the other to investigate whether there had been failures of the supervision process. The fact that Katz's academic adviser was a Druze and that one of his examiners was rumored to be a Palestinian (in Israel the examination process is anonymous) was the subtext that nobody openly talked about. Nonetheless, these additional factors undoubtedly made it easier for the university to move ahead with the unprecedented procedure of stripping Katz of his title. His own department, the Department of Middle Eastern History, stopped it just in time, demanding that some of the measures be frozen until the court verdict.
As a faculty member of Haifa University, I posted on the university's internal Web site some of the more important transcripts of the more than sixty hours of Katz's tapes, most of which had not been referred to in court. They include horrific descriptions of execution, of the killing of fathers in front of children, of rape and torture. They come from both the Jewish and the Palestinian witnesses. As a result of these transcripts, a number of people, even if they had reservations about the quality of Katz's research, no longer had any doubts about what happened in Tantura, which is after all the important issue. I also published an open letter accusing the university of moral cowardice. A lecture of mine at the School of History scheduled long before, was abruptly canceled without explanation. Only two of my colleagues, in a university with hundreds of faculty members, openly protested this basic violation of free speech. But then again, this was in January 2001, the same month that Israel's famed technical university, Technion, took a decision giving its president the authority to expel students and lecturers involved in political activity on campus.
Without doubt, the response to the Tantura case reflects the hardening of attitudes in Israel that has followed the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada and especially the October events involving the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Since then, the moral voice of Jews in Israel has been all but silenced. "Prophets of Peace" such as David Grossman, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua, have publicly stated in various radio interviews that they were wrong to trust the Palestinians and, far more important, signed a petition published on the front page of Ha'Aretz on 2 January 2001 emphasizing their unequivocal opposition to the Palestinian right of return. It is probable that had the Katz case begun before the outbreak of the present intifada, or even better during the more optimistic days of the Oslo process, the public and academic reaction would have been somewhat more moderate. Poor Katz, himself a Zionist, could not have chosen a worse time to bring evidence of a massacre, raising the spectre of Israeli responsibility in crimes of war in 1948.
All is not bleak, however. Before the trial opened, an association organized to help Katz convened an impressive conference in November 2000 in Tel Aviv, where for the first time old-timers in the Israeli peace camp, including Shulamit Aloni and Uri Avineri, talked openly about the 1948 ethnic cleansing. The event included screening of the film 1948 by Muhammad Bakri, itself an impressive piece of oral history in which Jews and Palestinians testify about the ethnic cleansing in 1948. Indeed, this was one of the first public gatherings where the term "ethnic cleansing" was freely used and where the central question was not whether collective crimes been committed in 1948, but rather their current implications with regard to a peaceful settlement of the Palestine conflict. Many speakers wondered how research in Israel on the Nakba could be furthered and protected.
More recently, on 2 February 2001, a group of highly respected academics from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University organized a day of study on the relationship between the legal system and academia. Among the participants, surprisingly, were the presiding judge in the Katz affair and the rector of Haifa University. The general tenor of the meeting seemed to be against any interference by the legal system in academic research; more concretely, many participants criticized Haifa University for its conduct in the Katz affair. Professor Asa Kasher and Meir Pail reiterated their support for Katz's research, specifically stating that the inaccuracies uncovered by the prosecution did not significantly undermine the quality of the dissertation.
Some implications
Thus far, the Katz affair sheds light on and raises issues in three areas: the place of Palestinian oral history in the historiography of 1948 and the relationship of the Israeli judiciary and academia to the Nakba. Concerning the first, one of the most noteworthy elements of the debate over the Katz affair was the way in which Palestinian oral testimony was treated. Traditionally, Palestinian oral history--and indeed written works in general by Palestinians concerning 1948--have been branded in Israel as sheer propaganda and wild flights of "Oriental" imagination. Yet the legal challenges to Katz's thesis centered not on the truthfulness of the Palestinian testimonies per se or on the validity of oral history as a tool in research, but on Katz's mishandling of the testimony. Furthermore, several historians in dismissing Katz's findings, used as evidence to support their case the fact that the massacre is not mentioned in Walid Khalidi's All That Remains--a work not treated in Israel as an authority before. This is not to say that a "revolution" in Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian history has occurred, and it is obvious that the Palestinian sources were considered reliable only insofar as they did not mention the massacre. Still, if the trial resumes, the oral testimonies by Palestinians on the Nakba--like the testimonies of Jews on the Holocaust in the Eichmann and Demanuk trials--will have to be treated as a legitimate source, both in court and in scholarly debate.
The second issue raised by the case is the attitude in principle of the judicial system on the question of the Nakba. Zionist historiography on 1948 has been almost universally accepted in Israel; even the "new historians" have refused to use the term "ethnic cleansing" in reference to 1948 and with few exceptions have been unwilling to concede that there was a "master plan" of expulsion or conquest. It is thus that the concept of war crimes in relation to the 1948 war has never been raised. Yet it is difficult to see in any other terms the expulsion (direct and indirect) of some 750,000 Palestinians, the systematic destruction of more than 400 villages and scores of urban neighborhoods, as well as the perpetration of some forty massacres of unarmed Palestinians. Criminal suits are unlikely to be brought by Palestinians, which legally speaking would face the principle of obsolescence (only grandchildren who can prove direct harm can sue, at least theoretically).
This is why the Tantura case is so important. It is the only case so far in the history of Israel in which the Nakba has been discussed in court. By not allowing the trial to continue, the judge prevented Palestinian survivors from telling their story in court. It also indirectly preempted future research on 1948 that does not subscribe to Zionist ideology by giving future scholars reason to worry about the legal consequences of taking on the struggle over the past. This becomes a particularly sensitive field of research in that it deals with issues of the past that are relevant to the nature of a future comprehensive settlement of the Palestine question.
The third issue is Israeli academia's approach to the Nakba. A number of members of the academy were only too happy to swoop down like vultures on the methodological defects in the work of a historian just starting out on his academic career--easy prey by all accounts. One could speculate that the motivation was not simply denial of the massacre--in fact the Nakba--but a kind of recognition that if Katz had won the case, Israeli academia's role for more than fifty years in suppressing the truth about the Nakba would itself be on the dock. Jewish participants in the 1948 war were surprised when approached by a Jewish researcher who did not, as is usually the case in Israel, want to hear about their heroism in 1948 but rather confronted them with their barbarism. The more honest among them were not afraid to tell what they had seen, because they were confident, given the reigning ideology that is not opposed to killing Arabs, that even such acts would be protected as exceptional or legitimate. For some, the opportunity to confide in Katz helped to alleviate personal guilt and remorse. Zionist scholars of 1948, it would appear, are less in need of such alleviation and have lived comfortably enough with their role in covering these crimes. One can perhaps find extenuating circumstances in the actions of the perpetrators, but not for the deniers.
It is difficult to predict the final results of the Katz case, but based on reactions so far, one can assume that the Jewish academic establishment will continue to try to prevent the legitimization of oral history for 1948 and that it will be more vigilant in making sure that fresh historians confirm the broad lines of the Zionist narrative on 1948. Admittedly, certain foundational myths, such as the "few against many" and "Arab voluntary flight," have already been shattered, but the overall narrative has survived these setbacks. The argument now runs as follows: yes, some Palestinians were expelled during the war, but it was simply a byproduct of the fighting, certainly not because of any plan of mass expulsion. Hence, such expulsions as did take place were an integral part of any conventional war and have nothing to with ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
The only way to confront this reality is to encourage independent NGO-type research institutions in Palestine and in Israel entrusted with the task of expanding research on the Nakba. The first priority is to establish a bank of oral testimonies, before there is no one left to interview.
It should be clear by now that no true reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians can ever take place without full awareness of what happened in the Nakba. It is for this reason that research on the Nakba by Jewish scholars has to be part of a public campaign based on clear positions vis-à-vis the conflict and its solution. The questions of compensation, the Palestinian right of return, and Israeli moral responsibility are anyhow already in the public mind of both Israelis and Palestinians as negotiable issues. Finally, research on the Nakba requires some kind of international protection. The historical research, the public campaign, and the legal defense should be part and parcel of the same political action in Palestine, Israel, and abroad.
APPENDIX: EXCERTPS FROM THE TRANSCRIPTS
Dan Vitkon, a soldier in Alexandroni
Vitkon: In Tantura, someone who later was a big shot in the Israeli Ministry of Defense was an officer in Tantura, and he killed with his own pistol, one Arab after the other, because they did not disclose where they hid their weapons. . . . He shot them one after the other in his Parabelum and he killed there [the name and identifying details are given].
Yosef Graf, a guide from Yaacov Zichron who accompanied the units
Graf: The Arabs raised the white flags, the kuffiyya, the hatta. . . .
Katz: Wait a minute. There was no battle going on?
Graf: Before that, there were clashes, sure. Skirmishes. Our guys had taken cover and shot back at the Arabs who then raised the white flags. . . . I called to our guys: "Don't advance!" They did not heed and were shot at, and then they [the soldiers] assaulted and killed them all.
Katz: That is, in response to the shooting at them, they stormed?
Graf: Yes. And killed almost everyone.
Katz: How many, roughly? You remember a figure--twenty, fifty?
Graf: No. I think they counted in the end 140 or 150, all young men.
Katz: Were these people killed in the battle?
Graf: While occupying the village, there were many dead who were shot while staying in their homes in the village.
Katz: After the surrender, actually?
Graf: There was no surrender. It was occupation.
[Later in the conversation]
Graf: I am telling you these [Alexandroni] people, they massacred.
Katz: In an amok attack?
Graf: Yes.
Salih `Abd al-Rahman (Abu Mashayiff), from Tantura
Katz: How were people killed in Tantura?
Abu Mashayiff: There was fighting between them. In the end, they caught them on the coast, in Tantura, and took them near a huge building and killed them like this.
Katz: Which building?
Abu Mashayiff: Houses near the coast. The sea was next to the village.
Katz: Killed them after they surrendered?
Abu Mashayiff: After they had caught them.
Katz: How many, roughly?
Abu Mashayiff: Eighty-five.
Katz: You were there and saw it with your own eyes?
Abu Mashayiff: Yes.
Katz: How did it go? Only eighty-five were standing there, or the whole village was standing there?
Abu Mashayiff: No. Eighty-five stood. You know how it works. They came to the villagers as a whole who were all seated on the beach, and on the spot they said to this one and that one: "Get up! You, you. . . ."
Katz: According to what?
Abu Mashayiff: They had names.
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: Shimshon Mashvitz stopped killing after he was stopped by Rehavia Altshuler?
Abu Mashayiff: Yes. He agreed after he had killed eighty-five people.
Katz: He alone killed eighty-five people?
Abu Mashayiff: Yes.
Katz: What was he using?
Abu Mashayiff: A Sten. He killed them. They stood next to the wall, facing the wall, he came from the back and killed them all, shooting them in the head.
Katz: Every time he placed several of them next to the wall?
Abu Mashayiff: Yes.
Katz: Groups of eight, five--how many?
Abu Mashayiff: Every group twenty or thirty people.
[Later in the conversation]
Abu Mashayiff: Twice or three times he changed magazines.
Katz: That is, one bullet per person?
Abu Mashayiff: Yes.
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: How far where you from there?
Abu Mashayiff: Let's say, thirty meters.
Tuvia Lishansky, a senior intelligence officer
Katz: How many soldiers did you encounter?
Lishansky: Units of five or six soldiers.
Katz: That roamed the streets and killed anyone they saw?
Lishansky: Yes, yes.
Katz: And this is why?
Lishansky: Because they lost eight soldiers in the battle, and during the fighting they decided to execute.
Katz: How many were executed?
Lishansky: Not too many.
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: What was your impression of what had happened in the streets and the houses--how many died there?
Lishansky: Quite a lot, but I cannot tell you. The soldiers, after losing comrades, were rampaging, dropping to the ground everything. They were crazy, leaving havoc and destruction behind them.
Katz: And this is all because of the eight [soldiers] dead?
Lishansky: Yes. Look, they were not used to losing so many dead on our side. In most of the battles they did not encounter much resistance and the Arabs would run or surrender.
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: From your experience, you know of such things [executions] in other places?
Lishansky: Yes, of course.
Katz: That people came, took people according to lists, and killed them on the spot?
Lishansky: Absolutely. I remember, there or in Jisr al-Zarqa, that for instance we caught someone suspected of killing a Jewish guard, and he was brought to Zichron police, was convicted, and I do not remember exactly what happened to him, but he was wasted.
Katz: But here I am talking about many people, taken according to lists and killed on the spot. . . .
Lishansky: Yes, yes. We knew about these things. For instance, there were two from Jisr al-Zarqa. . . .
Katz: But here we are talking about larger numbers.
Lishansky: Yes, I am just giving an example from Jisr.
Mordechai Sokoler, a guide from Zichron accompanying the units
Katz: The battle was over. The women, children, and old men stayed in the place. For how long?
Sokoler: A day or two. After they were transferred.
Katz: With all the bodies?
Sokoler: With the bodies for two days. Then I brought people from Furaydis and buried them.
Katz: It means that the family members stayed in the village. . . .
Sokoler: Another day or two.
Katz: With all the bodies?
Sokoler: Yes, yes.
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: How many people of Tantura surrendered with their hands over their head?
Sokoler: Two hundred and thirty.
Katz: Two hundred and thirty--is that an accurate number? You counted them?
Sokoler: No, I evaluated them, but after they were killed, we counted them.
Katz: And how many were there?
Sokoler: The same number.
Katz: Two hundred and thirty?
Sokoler: Yes.
Katz: How many were killed in the battle?
Sokoler: They were all killed in the battle. The sniper hit one of the soldiers in the leg, shooting began. And then they were killed, all hell broke out. They did not know who was shooting.
Katz: For killing 230 people, it takes time.
Sokoler: [Laughing] They were concentrated in one spot.
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: So you have counted and reached 230?
Sokoler: Yes.
Katz: From this you say only a few, maybe ten were killed in the battlefield?
Sokoler: Only ten [gives the names of the people of Tantura he knew who died in the battle].
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: The only question I still have is about where you personally were, so that I can know what you saw with your own eyes.
Sokoler: The worst things I didn't see. I had not seen the end of the battle. I left the place. All and all, I was there one day and a half, mainly busy with burying.
Katz: You were involved personally with the burial...
Sokoler: I and Arabs from Furaydis laid [in the grave] one Arab after the other, closed their eyes with the hatta, row on top of row, and that was it.
Katz: I understand that only their eyes and heads were covered [with the kuffiyyeh].
Sokoler: Only the heads, we buried them with their clothing and all...
Katz: And this was two days after the fighting.
Sokoler: After eight days, I came back to the place where we buried them, near the railway. There was a big mound, for the bodies had inflated. After two or three days, the mound had gone down.
Katz: Two or three days later?
Sokoler: Yes.
Katz: I understand that later they added soil and spread it over the graves.
Sokoler: This I do not know.
Ali `Abd al-Rahman Dekansh (Abu Fihmi), from Tantura
Abu Fihmi: They entered the village, stood us in a row next to the beach, positioned a Bren [a submachine gun] from here and from there, and brought our boats, twelve in number, in order to shoot us. . . . Then came these three people from Zichron Yaacov who said "Why are you doing this? Why are you killing people? They [the soldiers] said to them "These are Iraqis and Syrians." They [the people from Zichron] said, "These are the people of Tantura, and in the summer we visit them. They give us their houses, and they sleep outside. We spend the summer here. Why are you doing this?" So they made us sit [and stopped the shooting].
[Later in the conversation]
Abu Fihmi: Shimshon Mashvitz gave me two notebooks and two pencils, gave me ten people and two stretchers to pick up the dead from the streets and take them to our graveyard. He told me to write down the names of all of them. He asked me, "Are you a native here?" And I said "This is my village, and this is my house"--our house was near the harbor. . . . I wrote down ninety-five men and two women.
[Later in the conversation]
Abu Fihmi: The person who was with me knew Hebrew. He overheard them saying that after they [the diggers] finish the first mass grave, let them dig another one and kill them and put them in it [an action ended by the arrival of people from Zichron Yaacov].
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: You told us that you surrendered. What does it mean?
Abu Fihmi: We raised the white flag.
Katz: Alright, and afterwards they killed, after you raised your hands. How many did they kill?
Abu Fihmi: We have not seen, they collected us together.
Katz: Roughly how many?
Abu Fihmi: According to the announcement made by their army, they said they had killed two hundred and fifty.
Katz: This is all in all. But how many were killed after you raised your hands? Two, four, how many?
Abu Fihmi: This I cannot tell you.
Katz: Roughly?
Abu Fihmi: This I do not know.
Katz: Did you count them? Many or few?
Abu Fihmi: I am telling you their military announcement said they have killed two hundreds and fifty. It is a war military announcement, it was broadcast.
Najiah Abu Amr, from Tantura
Katz: What do you remember from the day of the occupation?
Abu Amr: They entered the village and killed people. They entered from all directions and killed the guards who watched the village and then collected us and took us from the center of the village toward the east.
Katz: On the beach?
Abu Amr: Yes. First to the beach.
Katz: How long were you there?
Abu Amr: From 0500 to 1400 on the beach.
Katz: All the women?
Abu Amr: All the men and the women, and they were separated. Women on one side, men on the other. And then they took us near the graveyard, brought buses, and took the women and children out of the village.
Katz: What time was this?
Abu Amr: 1500.
Katz: On the way to the graveyard, what did you see?
Abu Amr: Corpses of the dead [begins to list names].
Katz: Did you see men or women?
Abu Amr: I saw one woman killed, and four or five other corpses [gives names].
Katz: But did you see from afar other bodies?
Abu Amr: I have not seen with my own eyes, but I was told there were many dead and that they brought people from Furaydis to bury them [gives names]. But I have not seen them, I was told about them.
Katz: For instance, did you know that the Abu Safiyya family was murdered? How many were they?
Abu Amr: There were [gives ten names of members of the family]. These ten names I remember, but there were thirteen of this family. They were all murdered at the prime of their youth.
Katz: Do you know how many dead were there?
Abu Amr: I know that many people were killed, but I do not know how many. I estimate that there were about 100 dead [again begins listing names]. There were so many dead in this village, between 100 and 150. . . .
Katz: When you reached the graveyard, what did you see?
Abu Amr: I saw the soldiers trying to harass the women, but they were pushed away by the women. And when they saw the women not succumbing, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and try to undress them, claiming they have to check their bodies. They took a lot of gold from the women. I also saw them tying one young man, Salim Abu Shaqr, and killing him in the house of Ihsan al-`Abd.
Katz: I want to understand this. They took him with his hands tied behind his back?
Abu Amr: No. They took him from within the groups of the young men, tied him with his jacket, and took him to a faraway house and shot him.
Katz: Why?
Abu Amr: They claimed that he brought weapons into the village. People informed on him. He was very unlucky. His wife, Hayat, is my aunt, a sister of my mother.
Fawzi Mahmoud Tanj (Abu Khalid), from Tantura
Katz: And what happened on the beach?
Abu Khalid: They took a group of seven to ten young men, each time, took them to the streets and shot them.
Katz: Only the young men?
Abu Khalid: Yes.
Katz: Where did it happen? On the beach?
Abu Khalid: No. They took them to the village.
Katz: They took seven and killed them?
Abu Khalid: Yes. They shot them and came to take another group.
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: How many times they did it?
Abu Khalid: They killed ninety people.
Katz: It means they came and took ten times?
Abu Khalid: Yes.
Katz: How many soldiers came?
Abu Khalid: Many soldiers.
Katz: But with each group?
Abu Khalid: Ten to twelve.
Katz: The same soldiers?
Abu Khalid: No, each group took a group.
Katz: And the village is watching?
Abu Khalid: Yes, and then they took the men away to the graveyard.
Katz: And, tell me, how the people of Zichron stopped it.
Abu Khalid: Wait a minute, I will get there. They brought us to the graveyard.
Katz: That is, those who remained? And you saw . . .
Abu Khalid: We saw the bodies.
Katz: After killing ninety, they took those who remained?
Abu Khalid: Yes, to the graveyard.
Katz: And what happened there?
Abu Khalid: They took us there, seated us, aimed the weapons at us, and wanted to kill us. [Then] the people of Zichron came and said, "These don't [kill]. You have killed enough."
[Later in the conversation]
Katz: Were you present in the digging?
Abu Khalid: Yes.
Katz: The same day?
Abu Khalid: The same day they took them and dug a big hole.
Katz: How many were killed in the battle itself?
Abu Khalid: Four or five.
Mustafa Masri (Abu Jamil), from Tantura
Katz: After they occupied the village?
Abu Jamil: An officer took the family--we were fourteen people--and started counting us. [He] says to me, "Come here." "What do you want?" I ask. "You sit with the kids." [Abu Jamil was thirteen at the time.] I said OK. He began questioning each young man: "Were you in the war?" This and that said no. I and the [other] person who was released, we walked twenty meters, and then he kills my father and the whole family.
Katz: This person knew your father from before?
Abu Jamil: No, the person who knew my father handed him to another person. I said to the person we knew, "We know you. We know your wife, your children. You know my father. How could you do this?" He says to me, "In the war, I do not recognize anyone."
Katz: In fact, he saved you and another one?
Abu Jamil: But they killed fourteen members of my family.
Katz: You were the youngest?
Abu Jamil: Yes.
Katz: So it was our luck you were thirteen?
Abu Jamil: No, it was from God. He also killed an old man, I think he was 100. And he killed someone seventeen years old--every man and his fate.
Katz: It means you left, and then heard the shooting?
Abu Jamil: No, we were close. Fifteen meters, no more. I said to him, "Why did you do it?" He said to me, "I was told to kill them. What can you do in a war?"
[Later in the conversation]
Abu Jamil: There was a senior officer from Givat Ada, but not in the army.
Katz: You remember his name? I was told something like Shimshon.
Abu Jamil: Yes, Shimshon.
Katz: Shimshon what?
Abu Jamil: I do not remember. After he took them, he shot them directly in the eyes. Then he took two, he had such a whip, and lashed them just for fun. . . .
[Toward the end of the conversation]
Abu Jamil: But believe me, one should not mention these things. I do not want them to take revenge on us, you are going to cause us trouble. I made a mistake in giving you the name of the person who handed my family over. . . .
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol XXX, No. 3, Spring 2001, Issue 119
<http://www.ipsjps.org/jps/119/pappe.html>
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Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 09:00:14 +0200
List-Archive: <http://listes.samizdat.net/wws/arc/multitudes-infos>
Subject: [CognitiveHistory]
Professor Ilan Pappe (Ph.D., Oxford University; B.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem) teaches in the Department of History of the Middle East at the University of Haifa.
This contains the following:
Dr. Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University and the Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. His recent books include:
The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (New York, 1992).
The Israel/Palestine Question (London, 1999).
A recent paper is "Bi-National Realities versus National Mythologies: The Death of the Two-States Solution", In the book Israel and a Palestinian State: Zero Sum Game?, 2001.
3)
http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2001/jan/BTL_Teddy_Katz.htm
Between the Lines
January 2001
After two days of hearings in the Tel Aviv District Court (December 13th and 14th), the libel suit initiated by former fighters of the Alexandroni Brigade against historian Teddy Katz has come to a halt. Katz, in an M.A. thesis written under the auspices of the University of Haifa, presented evidence of a large-scale massacre committed by members of the Brigade in the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura in May 1948. The following is the final conclusion of the thesis which appeared in the press in January 2000 and which caused the libel suit:
"On the night of 22 May 1948 and during the following morning, Battalion 33 of the Alexandroni division attacked the village of Tantura. The village was occupied after several hours of skirmishes, some of which were quite fierce. However by early morning the IDF had total control of the village. According to testimonies of 20 of Tantura survivors and some of the division soldiers, the troops then hunted down the village's men for several hours and killed them. First, they shot them in daylight in houses, open yards and even in the streets, and then concentrated their efforts in the village cemetery."
On December 19th, Katz, under tremendous pressure, in deteriorating health (fearful of a relapse of the stroke he suffered a year ago when the story of the massacre first hit the press), and behind the back of three of his lawyers, signed a compromise agreement with members of the Brigade in which he denied that a massacre had taken place. Almost immediately upon signing the agreement Katz regretted his action, which was taken without consultation with his defense lawyers Avigdor Feldman, Hasan Jabarin and Orna Cohen of Adalah. His decision for retraction was largely based upon consultation from family lawyers who pushed him to end the case. When the court hearings resumed on December 21st, Katz informed the court that the agreement he had signed did not represent his true opinions. He said he had been under pressure from his family to reach a quick agreement because the legal proceedings were proving bad for his health. He added that he was upset that he signed the agreements, saying that he had done so in a moment of weakness. He requested the court to cancel the agreement.
In her ruling of the same day, Judge Drora Pilpel rejected Katz's request, granted the compromise agreement the status of a judicial ruling, and thus brought the trial to a close. The legal arguments employed equated the agreement between Katz and the Alexandroni veterans with that of a commercial agreement in which regret is not a sufficient reason for annulment.
However, as Dr. Ilan Pappe emphasizes (ALEF website, 24/12), the important thing is that only a few hours after signing the agreement Katz regretted his decision and realized that he was manipulated by his family lawyers. Pappe added that "Only in the legal world is retraction a problem. In any other personal sphere of interaction, second thoughts are less important than the final decision. Judge Pilpel wanted to close the case as soon as possible and Katz gave her a chance. There is nothing there [in the whole story of Katz's retraction] about the Nakba, Tantura, or even Katz's ability as a scholar."
However, as Prof. Baruch Kimmerling warned (Ha'aretz 26/12), the court decision has quickly become a second judgment of the Professor who gave Katz a grade of 97% on his thesis. According to Dr. Ilan Pappe (open letter, ALEF website 1/1/2001), the University of Haifa is seriously considering re-examining the thesis and maybe even taking Katz's degree away - as is now demanded from the Alexandroni Brigade lawyer to the university. He adds: "I have listened to 60 hours of tapes [of personal testimony on the massacres] which I have and which are available to anyone who wishes to listen to them. [...] I can say to those who are interested in my opinion that the above paragraph [Teddy Katz conclusion as appeared in the press] stands valid and unchanged after one listens to the tapes. [...] Dr. Ilan Pappe concludes: "There is no reason in the world why the University of Haifa would even consider reexamining the work or retracting Katz's degree. It should stick to its shameful policy of non-interference in the case of Teddy Katz. [...] I hope some of you [readers of this open letter on this list serve] agree with me. I need your support. Do not fear: this is not a dictatorship. It is the bastion of free speech in Israel."
Katz is currently considering appealing the ruling.
(Information compiled from The Committee for the Teddy Katz report,
Ha'aretz daily and the ALEF site)
4)-----cut here for interview with Professor Pappe--------------------
---------
The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1947-1951, I.B.
Tauris, London & New York, published in 1992.
Q. With people like Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Simha Flappan and others, you are a prominent (and the most controversial) member of the school of "new historians" in Israel. Could you summarize the major trends of the contribution of the new Israeli historians to the Israeli narrative?
A. It is an intellectual movement that started ten years ago, not only of historians, but also of people who deal with culture, academicians, journalists, artists, novelists, etc, who looked critically at Israel's past. I would say they adopted major chapters in the Palestinian interpretation, narrative, of the past. The particular aspect of the historians' work is that they did it with the help of archives and with their professional expertise, and that added a certain validity in the eyes of the public to these interpretations. Because, in the past, you could have heard the same arguments made by Palestinians or by very extreme Israeli leftists, but this time the very same things were substantiated by historic research works.
There are several topics that those new academics, intellectuals, researchers dealt with. The major chapter in 1948. It's what they are known for. They undermined some of the major foundation's myths of Israel. First, they didn't accept that there was a war between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. "The few against the many". They claimed there was a parity on the battlefields and even, as the war progressed, there was an advantage to the Jewish and then Israeli forces. Additionally, they found out that the most efficient Arab army -- the Jordanian Army -- had a secret agreement with the Jews/Israelis prior to the war. "Collusion across the Jordan", as Avi Shlaim put it (the title of his famous book). That understanding -- a division of Palestine between the Jordanians and the Jews, instead of between the Jews and the Palestinians -- to a large extent determined the fate of the war. Then they undermined the myth of the Arabs voluntary flight. They claimed with various degrees of conviction that the Arabs were expelled, that mass expulsions took place in 1948, and then Israel did everything to prevent the return of the refugees.
And, lastly, they undermined the myth of "Israel the peace-seeker". They said that there was a chance to peace after 1948 but that was missed because of Israel's intransigence and inflexibility, rather than because of the Arab inflexibility. (That was my major contribution.)
The new history, now in Israel, doesn't only deal with 48. It analyzes Zionism as a colonialist phenomenon from the late 19th century. It goes on to revisit the fifties: they are very critical on both domestic and foreign security policy of Israel in those years. The myth till 1967 was that Israel was a small isolated country surrounded by hostile enemies. It was also undermined: they claimed that Israel was quite aggressive, capable of leading powerful policies. And, domestically, Israel discriminated against its Arab citizens as it did, on similar ground, discriminate against the Jews it absorbed from Arab countries.
So far, the last topic is the attitude of the Jewish community in Palestine during the mandatory years toward the Holocaust. It's a very touchy subject. The Zionist leadership came out as very pragmatic and it put the interest of the Jewish community in Palestine above that of the Jewish community in Europe even in the time of absolute danger as happened during WWII.
How do you see the answer given to the new historians by the "old" historians like Shabtai Tevet, Anita Shapira, Efraim Karsh or Itamar Rabinovich?
The first reaction was rather derogatory, claiming that this work is not professional, shouldn't be taken notice of. Then the second wave of reactions said that the work is indeed important but it rejected its findings. I can understand these historians, not so much Ephraim Karsh who was the most vicious of all in his attacks. In my case, for example, they dispute everything! They seem to accept Benny Morris more easily than me. I am not surprised: Benny Morris' conclusion is more relieving. For example, when he says about the fate of Palestinians in 48 "à la guerre comme à la guerre", I claim that it was more like an ethnic cleansing.
It is precisely because of that very conclusion that you appear to be so controversial in your country, isn't it? Because you say "There was a unwritten Zionist plan to expel the Arabs of Palestine in 48"...
Absolutely. They were cautious enough not to write it although there was this "plan D" (Dalet), that reveals enough of the systematic expulsion. The idea was prepared by the Jewish military forces in March 1948. In that plan, they defined a very important principle: any Arab village or neighborhood that would not surrender to the Jewish forces, that would not raise the white flag, would be uprooted, destroyed and the people expelled. I think they knew well that there was very little chances for more than five or six villages to surrender. Why should they surrender, especially after (the massacre of) Deir Yassin in April and the big fright in the Arab community? In fact, only four villages rose the white flag. All the rest were potentially an object of expulsion. I must add that a few other neighborhoods rose the white flag but it didn't help them... All this is very clear. We have to remember that the UN partition plan of November 1947 would have left an equal number of Jews and Arabs in the Jewish state. This contradicted the idea of a Jewish state. So they had to make sure that as few Arabs as possible were still there. And that's what happened.
Back to the old historians, I would say they are more suspicious of my ideological trappings than that of Benny Morris, also because I am more relativist. I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings, but so what? I mean it is the case for everybody.
Both Morris and you worked on the same issues, established the same facts and yet you failed to draw the same conclusions (Morris keeps on claiming that even though there was expulsion of thousands Arabs, one cannot say that there was ever a master-plan of mass expulsion)...
Morris is more positivist: if it is only implicit, not written, he doesn't want to raise it in his books. I think historians should go further than that. The nature of the discussion is that: Morris says that even if someone says he wants to expulse you from your house and you run away because you know that it is what he wants to do, this is not called expulsion. I regard it as expulsion. I regard the transfer of people from one neighborhood in Haifa to another as transfer, not as dislocation: it is an experience of refugeehood which is more difficult sometimes than leaving your town altogether for you to see daily the people who took your house.
So these are the kinds of disagreement. I claim that they also stem from ideological positions, not just from facts. I am more anti- Zionist if you want, and Morris still regards himself as Zionist, may be this is where the difference lies.
You said somewhere that you were "non-Zionist"...
No, I meant "post-Zionist". Because, to be really anti-Zionist would mean leaving Israel altogether: if you want to serve the Palestinians, you have to leave. If you help them from inside Israel, then you do allow Jews to fulfill their dream on a homeland. This is an important message to the Palestinians as well: there are five millions Jews there, you cannot return the clock backwards, you must take them into account. Whether they came there as a result of an act of injustice or not, they are part of the reality.
Most of the Palestinians seem now ready to accept the two-state solution...
Yes. But it is more difficult for Israel because 20% of the Israelis are Palestinian, so it's a bi-national state. On the other hand one will have another bi-national state, Palestine, because I don't see any Israeli government ever evicting the settlers, a large and very hostile Jewish population. In the long run, it will affect the two- state solution, and we will have to have only one state.
But this is still very unpopular in Israel...
Of course! They have a vision of a peace plan that doesn't include a genuine sovereign Palestinian state, but bantustans while no single settlement would be dismantled, the whole of Jerusalem for themselves, no dealing with the refugees problem: in that case, why should they oppose the idea of partition? But tell them that the partition means full sovereign Palestinian state with an army and so on, eviction of the settlements, partitioning Jerusalem, some right of return for the refugees, and you will see what they think of the partition!
Let's go back to 1948. Mr David Bar-Ilan recently wrote, as many conservatives think, that the responsibility of what happened must be put on the Palestinian shoulders because they refused the UN partition plan...
This is an amazing accusation. Because, in 1947, the UN proposed a solution which was accepted only by one side, the Jewish one. And, in the history of the United Nations, usually, if you don't have an agreement of both sides, you don't implement that solution. There, the story began to turn bad. The fact is that you force the solution on a majority of the people living in Palestine who oppose that solution, then you shouldn't be surprised that they opposed even by force. This has nothing to do with the expulsion of the Palestinians, which was not the result of the rejection of the partition plan but the result of the Jewish leadership exploiting that situation to implement an ideology of transfer. It was clear to the Zionist leadership that without the uprooting of the local population it would be impossible to implement the dream of a Jewish nation-state. The policy toward the partition plan has very little to do with policy of the expulsion: one did not lead to the other. What happened is that the Jewish community waited for the right moment and exploited the right moment to the full.
The Israeli argument goes on by saying that the Palestinian leadership missed a historic opportunity when it rejected the partition plan...
May be they did. But even if it is a viable argument -- and I don't think so -- you don't expel an entire population because it has a stupid leadership. But we don't even have the right to say they were wrong to refuse the partition. They viewed Zionism as a colonialist movement. And there are very little reasons not to understand that point of view. Just imagine the Algerian national movement agreeing in the fifties to divide Algeria into two states, between them and the white settlers ("les pieds-noirs")! Who would have said to the Algerian leadership "Don't miss the historic chance!"? Of course, the Palestinians had other problems, they had patriarchal, feudal structures, familial loyalties above national ones. But it has very little to do with Israel which deliberately expelled the local population. And, if you want a solution today, Israel has to take into account that act, in terms of compensation and in terms of return. Without that, there will be no just solution for the Palestine problem. This is a very simple truism which Israelis refuse to accept.
Israelis in general or mostly the leadership?
Israelis in general because of the leadership. But I think it will change. The other day, a prominent member of the Labor party, Moshe Katz, leading the Palestinian committee of the Labor party, raised the idea of the return of 100,000 Palestinians. Was it a trial balloon of (Prime minister) Barak? I hope it was, but I doubt it [Katz initiative was rapidly and strongly rebuked by his party, B.L.]. Barak says it is only a humanitarian problem to which Israel has nothing to contribute. Katz' proposal has something to do with the new kind of post-Zionist taking which takes place also in the Labor party. It's a good sign.
Three new textbooks were recently introduced in the Israeli schools. Some people are very angry, saying that those books would "undermine the feeling of justice of the Zionist project, going to the point that they question the Jewish right to the Land of Israel" (novelist Aharon Megged said this is "a moral suicide leaving our children without all what made us proud of Israel")...
I read the books. They indicate a willingness among educators in the ministry of Education in Israel to rewrite the past. It is also a good sign, that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. It still remains to be seen how the teachers will use the books in classrooms, we don't know yet. The move is part of the dissemination of the views of the new historians and other sections of the society. Another example is the "T'kuma" TV documentary program (1998). Of course I would have written it differently but still you can see the impact of our work. And the new textbooks are very different from the textbooks that I grew on! It also arose quiet a row in the Israeli public opinion.
You recently wrote in "Haaretz" that without an Israeli recognition of acts of past injustice, there will be no permanent solution with the Palestinians. Do you think Israel is going in that direction?
Not yet because the political system has not absorbed this solution. And unfortunately I think what we are going into now is a period in which everybody would talk about peace but on the ground this peace would be a substitution of one form of occupation by another. And it will take several years -- I don't know how many -- for people in the Palestinian side to realize that they were taken for a ride, and God knows how they will react.
The peace process is supposed to end within less than a year...
It is not a peace process. It is one of the reasons I am in Brussels: the Barak 's government got an international recognition as a peace- government. On the ground, it does not perform a peace policy. If people like me succeed in convincing that there is a problem with the peace process, that all the issues should be reopened for negotiation, may be we could prevent the next catastrophe. If we don't, it will take time but people will find out that declaring a permanent solution for the Palestine question in which only 60 % of the West Bank and of the Gaza strip are in Palestinian hands, in which all Jerusalem remains in Jewish hands, with no eviction of one Jewish settlement, with Israeli control of borders, water and economy in Palestine, and no solution for the refugee problem, all this cannot be called peace. I think there is a public illusion in the West that you have two opening positions here: the Israeli opening position, that I just described, and the Palestinian one, full independent and sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza, but this is not true. There is no Palestinian peace plan. The Americans, unfortunately the key here, understand the final stage of the peace process is how to convince the Palestinians to accept the Israeli dictate. This is what we call now "peace". And at the same time, Jewish settlements go on, silent transfer of Palestinians of Jerusalem goes on, the Palestinians are offered natural reserves instead of populated areas in the interim stages, Israel has just completed the plan today to build a ring road in East Jerusalem to complete Greater Jerusalem which is 10 % of the West Bank. And they would give Arafat another medal, so had the kings of bantustans in South Africa.
Arafat's kind of leadership is disputed but his reaction is to put the critics in jail as he did on the 27th of November to nine people who had signed a harsh petition against him...
Yes there is a problem. The Palestinian Authority, under pressure, does two bad things. One is to totally neglect the democratization and the building of a civic society, using the negociation with Israel as an excuse. Secondly, and probably more important, because it is frustrated by the balance of power, it plays a double game which is not working too well. On the one hand they try, courageously in a way, to put forwards some counterproposals to Israeli proposals, but on the other hand they play according to the Americans' tune because they've no one else's to play to. It gives a very ambivalent picture of their ability to rule. They use more often power than persuasion to deal with opposition and they may inflict a lasting damage on the Palestinian political life in the future that will not be easy to reverse.
In September, Mr Barak expressed regret in the name of the Israeli government for the suffering of the Palestinian people but at the same time he denied any sense of guilt or responsibility. That prompted Gideon Levy to answer in "Haaretz": "Are we not responsible for expulsing people, torturing people, erasing hundreds of villages, arresting ten of thousands without trial?..."
Gideon Levy was very right. But Barak didn't "regret", he only said "sorry" for them. He dissociated the suffering from the Israeli policy. But we are not only talking about policy in the past, we are talking about policy in the present. Israelis continue to inflict suffering on the Palestinians! They do it in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip. The only place where they almost stop doing it is in Israel itself, where the minority of Palestinian Israelis are now experiencing much better conditions than they did before.
It seems that, although they are generally well educated, Jewish Israelis don't really realize (or don't want to realize) what they did and still do to the Palestinian people. How do you explain that?
It is the fruits of a very long process of indoctrination starting in the kindergarten, accompanying all Jewish boys and girls throughout their life. You don't uproot easily such an attitude which was planted there by very powerful indoctrination machine, giving a racist perception of the other, who is described as primitive, almost non-existing, hostile -- he is hostile, but the explanation given is that he was born primitive, Islamic, anti-Semite, not that someone has taken his land. Add to this the experience of the young soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, where they have learnt to treat, like the first Zionist settlers, the Palestinians as part of the scenery, not as human beings. Palestinians are like desert, mosquitos: things you have to conquer by vision, energy, improvisation. The attitude to the Palestinians is the other coin of the Zionist success. We were so successful like those in the wild West. Otherwise, you would have had moral problems throughout the story! You can't have it. You solve that moral problem by saying these are not equal human beings who were uprooted, just savages part of the native population which we conquered as we conquered poverty, as we conquered hostile mosquitos. This is the main reason. The second reason is that much of the political capital of the Jewish state is based on moral superiority which is demanded by the name of the Holocaust. I am hated in Israel more than everyone else because I claim that I have a universal and not a Zionist lesson from the Holocaust. In the name of the Holocaust, I claim that Israel should be ashamed. If you lived in Israel, you would understand that it is really doing too much and may be I should be more cautious when I do it because this may be a U- turn for too many people. But this is exactly the problem. Although many things had been done to the Palestinians before the Holocaust, the Holocaust justifies everything, what has been done before or after it. Even someone great intellectual like Martin Buber could have said the most stupid sentence of all: "We had to do a small injustice in order to rectify a big injustice". How could you say this! Why should the one be connected to the other?
Did you first become communist or "new historian"?
I have to correct something: I like life too much to be communist! I am socialist. True I am member of Hadash which is a front where you find the communist party to which I don't belong. You also find the non-Zionist Arab-Jewish group to which I belong. I think both my political commitment and historian known position developed simultaneously. And one supported the other. Because of my ideology I understood documents I saw in the archives the way I understood them, and because of the documents in the archives I became more convinced in the ideological way I took. A complicated process! Some colleague told me I ruined our cause by admitting my ideological platform. Why? Everybody in Israel and Palestine has an ideological platform. Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers.
I suppose you would agree with many Arabs who say a Jewish state cannot be a democratic state?
It can't. If the identity of people is connected to religion or ethnic group and not to citizenship, it means that any citizen who does not belong to that nationalism, religion or ethnicity is a second rate citizen. If you declare that the state belongs to one nation in a binational state, you immediately create a discriminative state which cannot be democratic. It is like in Belgium: if you declare the Belgian state exclusively Flemish or exclusively Walloon, it would not be declared a democratic state.
Israel would answer that many Arab states declare themselves "Islamic states"...
I criticize them as well...
You admit that most of Jewish Israelis don't share your views. Do you see things evolve soon?
In absolute term, you are right: we are a small group of people, but in relative numbers it has grown immensely. Two examples: when we started our work as new historians, there were only three of us. Morris, myself and Shlaim who was not even living in Israel. One day we were all three in my car driving to Jerusalem and I said: if we have now a lethal accident, this is the end of new history in Israel! Now, there is a proliferation of academicians and so one sharing those views. It is not a quantitative impressive fact, but it is a qualitative one because people at the heart of cultural production in Israel have been convinced by our views. Show me someone who works on TV or in a theater or in the film industry and even among the leading journalists (true, not everyone) who does not accept our point of view. Second example: the vote for Hadash. Again, it is ridiculous, but you have to understand that in 1992, only 2,000 Jews voted for Hadash, in 1996, 6,000 and in 1999, 15,000! Yes it's a long way. I used to say to my colleagues that if they are looking for quick results they are wrong. It may take twenty years, but Israel will change like South Africa. If apartheid could have been toppled down, then the negative aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict could eventually be removed. My fear is that, in case of crisis, the Israeli people in the middle would rather choose to join the nationalist camp. Surveys prove that it is the trend. People are asked: If you have only two choices, a theocratic non-democratic Jewish state or a democratic non-Jewish state, which one would you prefer? And a majority of the Jews -- about 60 % -- answer the non-democratic Jewish state. We have to work hard on this middle ground, people of the silent majority, people who don't have beliefs and are more worried about the daily concerns.
Voir aussi: <http://www.mideastfacts.com/loos_pappe.html>
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Nous ajoutons ce texte, tiré de nos archives:
[traduit de l'anglais par Christian Chantegrel]
Quiconque visitait l'académie israélienne au milieu des années 90 [Cette traduction est dégeulasse: "académie" veut dire "les universités"] devait sentir un vent frais d'ouverture et de pluralisme soufflant dans les couloirs d'une institution jusqu'alors figée, douloureusement loyale à l'idéologie sioniste dans tous les domaines de la recherche touchant à la réalité d'Israël, passée ou présente. Cette atmosphère nouvelle a permis aux chercheurs de revoir l'histoire de 1948, et d'admettre certaines des affirmations palestiniennes à propos de la guerre. Elle a mis à jour certaines connaissances qui ont changé, de façon spectaculaire, l'image historiographique des débuts d'Israël. Dans les milieux de la nouvelle recherche, l'Israël d'avant 1967 n'était plus un petit pays sur la défensive et le seul état démocratique du Moyen Orient ; il était alors décrit comme une puissance qui opprimait sa minorité palestinienne, discriminait ses citoyens juifs arabes et menait une politique d'agression envers les états voisins de la région. La critique universitaire transcendait les tours d'ivoire pour atteindre d'autre media, culturels comme le théâtre, le cinéma, la littérature, la poésie, et même des documentaires télévisés ainsi que des manuels du système scolaire officiel.
De nos jours, il faudrait au visiteur, beaucoup d'imagination et de détermination, pour trouver la moindre trace de cette ouverture ou de ce pluralisme parmi les principales conséquences ou, devrions-nous dire, victimes, de la dernière Intifada en Israël. Le déclin de ce qui fut appelé un jour la "gauche israélienne" a fait partie des répercussions immédiates de l'Intifada. La "gauche" était la partie de l'opinion publique juive qui, à différents degrés de conviction et d'honnêteté, défendait des positions pacifistes sur la question de la Palestine. Depuis 1967, ses membres déclaraient être partisans du retrait des territoires occupés ; ils acceptaient, aux côtés d'Israël, un état palestinien, avec pour capitale Jérusalem-est, et ils parlaient de la nécessité de garantir les droits civiques de la minorité palestinienne en Israël même.
Nombreux sont ceux qui, dans ce groupe, à la veille de la présente Intifada, ont confessé publiquement et en privé combien ils avaient eu tort de faire confiance aux palestiniens et sans hésitation ont voté Sharon aux élections de février (soit en votant directement pour lui, soit en bloquant une troisième candidature à la place de Barak, qui lui, avait promis de se joindre au gouvernement d'unité nationale de Sharon après les élections). Les principaux "gourous" et dirigeants de ce groupe ont exprimé leur "déception" quant aux citoyens palestiniens d'Israël -- avec qui, disent-ils, ils avaient conclu une "alliance historique". Le boycott des élections de février 2001 par les palestiniens israéliens, a été la goutte d'eau qui a fait déborder le vase de ce "pacte historique."
La dessiccation de la scène israélienne, sur le plan culturel, intellectuel et académique d'une part, et la disparition d'une voix politique morale qui accepte au moins le droit palestinien à l'indépendance et l'égalité, sinon le droit au retour, d'autre part, ont été deux processus simultanés et extrêmement rapides. On aurait pu s'attendre à un lent processus de réflexion et de déduction, surtout dans les cercles universitaires et intellectuels. Mais ce qui s'est passé ressemble plutôt à une ruée frénétique, accompagnée de bruyants soupirs de soulagement, pour se débarrasser des quelques minces couches de démocratie, moralité et pluralisme qui avaient recouvert l'idéologie et les pratiques sionistes au cours des ans. Le retrait hâtif de la terminologie pacifique et morale du discours public et la disparition de toute vision alternative éloignée du consensus sioniste sur la question palestinienne -- tout met en lumière l'aspect superficiel du discours et la faiblesse du camp de la paix israélien avant l'intifada.
Les analystes israéliens attribuent à un traumatisme authentique le phénomène dont nous sommes témoins. L'origine du choc a été attribuée à trois facteurs : l'insistance d'Arafat sur le droit au retour, le rejet par l'Autorité Palestinienne des offres généreuses de Barak à Camp David et le soulèvement violent. Mais ces explications ne sont pas valables, comme le reconnaîtrait nombre de ceux qui les mettent en avant. Arafat n'a jamais renoncé au droit du retour -- de fait, il ne le pouvait pas, même s'il avait désiré le faire. Il a ouvertement et constamment insisté sur ce point depuis les accords d'Oslo. Quant à la fable des offres généreuses faites à Camp David, il semble, comme Shlomo Ben Ami et Yossi Beilin l'ont admis récemment, que de telles offres n'aient été faites qu'à Taba, et encore, du bout des lèvres, puisque toutes les parties concernées savaient que Barak était "plombé" et n'avait aucun pouvoir pour les appliquer. De plus, de nombreux israéliens "de gauche" ayant lu les rapports américains sur Camp David, traduits en hébreu dans le journal Haaretz, savaient qu'à Camp David on a présenté à Arafat un dictat qu'il ne pouvait accepter en aucun cas. Les a-t-il réellement déçus par son incapacité à s'opposer, dans les territoires occupés, à la colère populaire due à l'impasse dans laquelle les deux parties avaient été acculées, et qui, pour les palestiniens signifiait la continuation de l'occupation ?
Les grands prophètes de ce camp, A B Yehoshua et Amos Oz, ont averti longtemps avant le soulèvement que si la paix n'aboutissait pas à Camp David, alors la guerre s'installerait. Il n'y a pas eu d'élément de surprise ; les références à une déception viennent du fait que les gens de gauche se sont empressés de rejoindre le centre ou la droite, où ils ont été reçus à bras ouverts comme des enfants égarés revenant d'un long exil, avant même de se donner le temps d'examiner le déroulement des faits.
Il apparaît maintenant que ceux qui, comme l'auteur de cet article, avaient signalé que les accord d'Oslo n'étaient rien de plus qu'un arrangement politique et militaire visant à remplacer l'occupation israélienne par une autre forme de contrôle, avaient raison.
Oslo n'a apporté aucun changement significatif dans les interprétations israéliennes (de gauche et de droite) du passé, du présent et du futur de la Palestine. Aux vues de la gauche comme de la droite, la majeure partie de la Palestine revenait à Israël et il n'y avait pas de droit au retour -- tout l'unique espoir de survie des juifs résidait dans un état sioniste, sur la plus grande partie possible de la Palestine, avec aussi peu que possible de palestiniens. La discussion se situait au niveau de la tactique, pas des buts. La tactique "modérée" a été présentée aux palestiniens à Oslo comme une proposition "à prendre ou à laisser", en échange de quoi les palestiniens étaient supposés abandonner toute velléité de revendication supplémentaire. Cela n'a pas marché. Pour un temps, on a pu croire que cela fonctionnait, étant données l'implication importante du président Clinton, les impressions données par les dirigeants palestiniens qu'ils s'agissait bien d'un processus de paix, enfin la somnolence du monde arabe. Israël a récolté les dividendes sans rien payer en retour.
Le "camp de la paix" en Israël avait des ennemis : ceux qui, à droite, et particulièrement les colons, trouvaient même cette tentative superflue. Au nom de dieu et de la nation, ils préféraient utiliser la force brutale pour imposer la réalité sioniste à toute la Palestine. Du fait de ces opposants et de leur violence, le camp d'Oslo a eu son martyr (Yitzhak Rabin) ; fort de ses victimes, ses partisans ont été convaincus qu'ils se battaient pour la paix. En fait, ce pourquoi ils se battaient était la création d'un Bantoustan, un protectorat sur la plus grande partie de la Cisjordanie et de la bande de Gaza. En retour, ils ont voulu obtenir des palestiniens une déclaration de "fin du conflit". Tout cela n'a pas exigé une réaffirmation du rôle et de la responsabilité d'Israël dans le nettoyage ethnique opéré en 1948, ni une révision des politiques de terreur dans les territoires occupés, ni la remise en question de son refus d'accorder aux palestiniens un état pleinement souverain sur au moins 22% de la Palestine (la Cisjordanie et la bande de Gaza dans leur totalité).
Cela a aussi donné l'illusion que la gauche israélienne avait obtenu la "sionisation" de la minorité palestinienne en Israël, comme faisant partie de l'accord global. Il a fallu du temps à la minorité palestinienne et à ses dirigeants pour comprendre qu'un plan de paix final impliquait la continuation, sinon l'aggravation, des politiques et pratiques discriminatoires contre la minorité dans l'état juif. De même que les palestiniens à Camp David ont été poussés à accepter "la mère de toutes les conciliations" -- ce qui signifiait ne plus avoir aucune demande dans le futur -- les palestiniens citoyens d'Israël devaient abandonner toute aspiration à transformer Israël en un état pour tous ses citoyens ainsi que tout espoir de le "dé-sioniser."
Quand l'Intifada a éclaté dans les territoires occupés et dans la communauté palestinienne à l'intérieur d'Israël, on a pu voir les limites très étroites du camp juif véritablement pour la paix. Il avait toujours été restreint, mais avec l'aide des media internationaux, du discours de paix américain et du fanatisme de la droite israélienne, il avait semblé assez important pour justifier des espoirs d'une solution juste et complète pour tout le Moyen Orient.
Cette illusion a fait long feu. Maintenant, le temps est venu d'évaluer à nouveau, de façon beaucoup plus sobre et réaliste, comment le camp véritable de la paix dans la société juive peut se regrouper et avoir un impact sur la question palestinienne. Il devrait permettre aux rares personnes engagées de parler plus ouvertement de leur soutien à la lutte palestinienne pour l'indépendance -- même si, de nos jours, un pareil soutien passe pour de la trahison aux yeux de la plupart des israéliens. Il devrait énoncer ouvertement la nécessaire dé-sionisation d'Israël comme seul moyen d'arriver à la paix et à la réconciliation avec le peuple palestinien. Il devrait non seulement soutenir le droit au retour des palestiniens, mais aussi proposer des moyens pratiques de le mettre en oeuvre. Il devrait abandonner les dissensions et disputes mesquines qui caractérisent les mouvements de gauche, et réaliser que la tache principale est d'empêcher les israéliens de faire un massacre, à la fois chez les palestiniens des territoires occupés et chez ceux qui vivent en Israël. Enfin, il devrait produire et publier de nouvelles idées audacieuses sur comment construire, dans le futur, une structure politique pour une situation qui rend inadaptée l'idée de deux états, étant donnée la distribution démographique des palestiniens et des juifs entre le Jourdain et la Méditerranée. Ces nouvelles structures pourraient prendre la forme d'un état bi-national, ou séculier démocratique, ou quelque chose dans ce genre.
Tout ceci peut se révéler trop difficile, mais chacune des propositions ci-dessus est une priorité et la tache de convaincre autant de juifs que possible à suivre de telles directions, à la fois pour des raisons fonctionnelles et morales, peut être accomplie uniquement de l'intérieur de la communauté juive. L'urgence d'écarter certains risques est telle que, en attendant, la gauche israélienne non sioniste devrait pousser la communauté internationale à intervenir pour protéger du danger l'existence des palestiniens, dans les territoires occupés et dans Israël. Pour le moment, ce groupe, malgré toute sa bonne volonté, n'
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by Ilan Pappe
Al Ahram
May 17, 2002
As a Jewish child, born in Haifa in the early 1950s, I did not encounter the term Nakbah (catastrophe), nor was I aware of its significance. Only in my high- school days did the term make its first appearance. There were three Israeli Palestinian pupils in my class, and we all participated in joint and guided tours around Haifa and in its vicinity. In those days, there was still evidence of Arab Haifa in the Old City: beautiful buildings, remnants of a covered market later destroyed by the Israelis in 1948, mosques and churches.
These relics testified to the city's more glorious past. Many of these residues of the past are gone now, demolished by the bulldozers of an ambitious city mayor who has erased any urban characteristics that could point to the city's Arab past. But in those days there were quite a few Arab houses squeezed between the modern concrete buildings. The guides on the school tours used to refer to them as Hirbet Al-Shaych, a vague reference to an Arab house from an unidentified period. My Palestinian classmates muttered that these were houses left from the 1948 Nakbah, but they did not dare to challenge their teachers, nor did they expand on what they meant.
Later, as a young doctoral student at Oxford University I chose 1948 as the subject of my thesis. I wrote on British policy in that year, but incidentally discovered evidence in the Israeli and British archives that, when put together, gave me for the first time a clear idea of what the Nakbah had been about. I found strong proof for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine, and I was taken aback by the speed at which the judaisation of the formerly Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods was carried out.
These villages, from which the Palestinian population had been evicted in 1948, were renamed and resettled within a matter of months. This picture contrasted sharply not only with what I had learned at school about 1948, but also with what I had gathered as a BA student in Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, even though quite a few of my courses dealt with the history of Israel. Needless to say, what I found also contradicted the messages conveyed to me as a citizen of Israel during my initiation in the army, at public events such as Independence Day, and in daily discourse in the country's media on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When I returned home to Israel in 1984 to begin an academic career, I discovered the phenomenon of Nakbah denial in my new environment. It was in fact part of a larger phenomenon -- that of excluding the Palestinians altogether from local academic discourse. This was particularly evident, and bewildering, in the field of Middle Eastern Studies in which I had commenced my career as a lecturer. Towards the end of the 1980s, as a result of the first Intifada, the situation improved somewhat, with the Palestinians being introduced into Middle Eastern Studies as legitimate subject matter. But even then this was done mainly through the eyes of academics who had been Intelligence experts on the subject in the past, and who still had close ties with the security services and the IDF [Israeli Defence Force]. Thus, this Israeli academic perspective erased the Nakbah as a historical event, preventing local scholars and academics from challenging the overall denial and suppression of the catastrophe in the world outside the universities' ivory towers.
For a short while at the end of the 1980s, several academics, including myself, caught public attention by publishing scholarly books that challenged the accepted Israeli version of the 1948 War. In these books, we accused Israel of expelling the indigenous population and of destroying the Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods. Although our early works were hesitant and cautious, and mine were not even translated into Hebrew, it was still possible to gather from them that the Jewish State was built on the ruins of the indigenous people of Palestine, whose livelihood, houses, culture and land had been systematically destroyed.
Public response in Israel at the time moved between indifference to the total rejection of our findings. Only in the media and through the educational system did we succeed in directing people towards taking a new look at the past. However, from above, the establishment did everything it could to quash these early buds of Israeli self-awareness and recognition of Israel's role in the Palestinian catastrophe, a recognition that would have helped Israelis to understand better the present deadlock in the peace process.
The struggle against the denial of the Nakbah in Israel then shifted to the Palestinian political scene in the country. Since the 40th anniversary of the Nakbah in 1988, the Palestinian minority in Israel has associated, in a way that it never did previously, its collective and individual memories of the catastrophe with the general Palestinian situation and with their predicament in particular. This association has been manifested through an array of symbolic gestures, such as memorial services during Nakbah commemoration day, organised tours to deserted or formerly Palestinian villages in Israel, seminars on the past, and extensive interviews with Nakbah survivors in the press.
Through its political leaders, NGOs and media, the Palestinian minority in Israel has been able to force the wider public to take notice of the Nakbah. This re-emergence of the Nakbah as a topic for public debate was also helped by the climax of the Oslo negotiations -- the Camp David summit meeting between the then Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak and Arafat in the summer of 2000. The false impression at the time, which had it that the end of the conflict was about to be achieved, placed the Nakbah and Israel's responsibility for it at the top of the Palestinian list of demands. And, despite the collapse of the summit meeting, mainly due to an Israeli wish to enforce its point of view on the Palestinian side, for a while the catastrophe of 1948 was brought to the attention of a local, regional, and to certain extent global, audience.
Not only in Israel, but also in the United States, and even in Europe, it was necessary to remind those concerned with the Palestine question that this conflict did not only entail the future of the occupied territories, but also that of the Palestinian refugees who had been forced from their homes in 1948. The Israelis had earlier succeeded in sidelining the issue of the refugees' rights from the Oslo Accords, an aim helped by ill-managed Palestinian diplomacy and strategy.
Indeed, the Nakbah had been so efficiently kept off the agenda of the peace process that when it suddenly appeared on it, the Israelis felt as if a Pandora's box had been prised open in front of them. The worst fear of the Israeli negotiators was that there was a possibility that Israel's responsibility for the 1948 catastrophe would now become a negotiable issue, and this "danger" was, accordingly, immediately confronted. In the Israeli media and parliament, the Knesset, a consensual position was formulated: no Israeli negotiator would be allowed even to discuss the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the homes they had occupied before 1948. The Knesset passed a law to this effect, and Barak made a public commitment to it on the stairs of the plane that was taking him to Camp David.
The media and other cultural institutions were also recruited to discourage discussion of the Nakbah and its relevance to the peace process, and it was in this atmosphere that I became involved in the Tantura Affair. This erupted after an MA student at my university, Haifa, exposed an hitherto unknown massacre, one of the largest yet known, carried out during the 1948 War by Israeli forces in the Palestinian village of Tantura. This student was taken to court in December 2000 accused of defamation, and later, in November 2001, he was expelled from the university for daring to add yet further evidence of Israel's responsibly for the Palestinian catastrophe. The court system, it transpired, thus willingly joined the denial process.
This year, as I look back over the attempts that I have made, together with those of others, to introduce the Nakbah onto the Israeli public agenda, what emerges is a very mixed picture. I can now detect cracks in the wall of denial and repression that surrounds the Nakbah in Israel, coming about as a result of the debate on the "new history" in Israel and the new political agenda of the Palestinians in Israel. The new atmosphere has also been helped by a clarification of the Palestinian position on the refugees issue towards the end of the Oslo Peace Process. As a result, now, in mid-2002, it is, after more than 50 years of repression, more difficult in Israel to deny the expulsion and destruction of the Palestinians in 1948. However, this relative success has also brought with it two negative reactions, formulated after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
The first reaction has been from the Israeli political establishment, with the Sharon government, through its minister of education, beginning the systematic removal of any textbook or school syllabus that refers to the Nakbah, even marginally. Similar instructions have been given to the public broadcasting authorities. The second reaction has been even more disturbing and has encompassed wider sections of the public. Although a very considerable number of Israeli politicians, journalists and academics have ceased to deny what happened in 1948, they have nonetheless also been willing to justify it publicly, not only in retrospect but also as a prescription for the future. The idea of "transfer" has entered Israeli political discourse openly for the first time, gaining legitimacy as the best means of dealing with the Palestinian "problem".
Indeed, if I were asked to choose what best characterises the current Israeli response to the Nakbah, I would stress the growing popularity of the Transfer Option in Israeli public mood and thought. The Nakbah -- the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine -- now seems to many in the centre of the political map as an inevitable and justifiable consequence of the Zionist project in Palestine. If there is any lament, it is that the expulsion was not completed. The fact that even an Israeli "new historian" such as Benny Morris now subscribes to the view that the expulsion was inevitable and should have been more comprehensive helps to legitimise future Israeli plans for further ethnic cleansing.
Transfer is now the official, moral option recommended by one of Israel's most prestigious academic centres, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Herzeliya, which advises the government. It has appeared as a policy proposal in papers presented by senior Labour Party ministers to their government. It is openly advocated by university professors, media commentators, and very few now dare to condemn it. And, lately, the leader of the Majority in the American House of Representatives has openly endorsed it.
A circle has thus been closed. When Israel took over almost 80 per cent of Palestine in 1948, it did so through settlement and ethnic cleansing of the original Palestinian population. The country now has a prime minister who enjoys wide public support, and who wants to determine by force the future of the remaining 20 per cent. He has, as did all his predecessors, from Labour and Likud alike, resorted to settlement as the best means for doing this, adding the destruction of independent Palestinian infrastructure. He senses, and he may not be wrong in this, that the public mood in Israel would allow him to go even further, should he wish to repeat the ethnic cleansing not only of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, but if necessary also that of the one million Palestinians living within the pre-1967 Israeli borders.
The Nakbah thus is no longer denied in Israel; on the contrary, it is cherished. However, the full story remains to be told to the Israelis, as there may still be some among that state's population who are sensitive about their country's past and present conduct. This segment of the population should be alerted to the fact that horrific deeds were concealed from them about Israeli actions in 1948, and they should be told, too, that such deeds could easily now be repeated, if they, and others, do not act to stop them before it is too late.
* The writer is a professor of political science at Haifa University and a notable member of Israel's New Historians.
<http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly>
Note from the editor
As Dr Ilan Pappe notes in his article, written for Al-Ahram Weekly on the occasion of the anniversary of the Nakbah, an MA student at Haifa University in Israel was expelled from the university in November 2001 for exposing a hitherto- unknown Israeli massacre carried out against the Palestinian residents of the village of Tantura during the 1948 War.
Now it is Dr Pappe's turn to be expelled, as the Israeli authorities crack down on freedom of speech, threatening academic freedom within the country's universities.
In a letter circulated last week, Pappe writes that the Dean of the Humanities Department of Haifa University has demanded his expulsion from the university as a result of the strong stand he took in support of the student and of academic freedom.
"Judging by the way things have been done in the past," Pappe writes, "the verdict has already been decided ... A fair trial does not exist, and hence I do not even intend to appeal against this McCarthite charade."
Dr Pappe, who holds a doctorate in history from Oxford University and is one of Haifa University's best-known and most-respected historians, appeals in his letter to the international academic community "not to prevent my expulsion, since Israeli academia has decided to support the government and help silence any criticism."
Rather, he calls upon universities worldwide to debate a boycott of Israeli institutions, given their contempt for basic principles of academic freedom and for dispassionate research.
"Many of you have access to the world's media," he writes in his letter, calling upon researchers and scholars everywhere to help "expose the already dismal picture and false pretence of Israel being the "only democracy in the Middle East."
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Nous n'aurons garde de minimiser l'intérêt des recherches historiques du professeur Pappé. Mais comme il le dit lui-même, l'horreur de la création de l'Etat juif était connue, d'abord de ceux sur qui la catastrophe s'était abattue, et aussi de ceux qui n'étaient pas intellectuellement asservis au sionisme, même sous les formes bénines qu'il adopte dans les intelligentsia européenne, par exemple le grand histoirien Arnold Toynbee. Seulement pour accorder foi au récit des Arabes, des réfugiés palestiniens, il fallait une liberté intellectuelle qui est à peu près totalement absente des milieux dit intellectuels.
Enfin, il faudrait rendre à César et dire que le démontage des mythes fondateurs d'Israël a été fait magistralement, non pas par un universitaire, mais par un syndicaliste, Simha Flapan, dans un livre qui a eu du mal à se faire lire, The Birth of Israel, Myths and Realities, paru à New York en 1987. Malheureusement Flappan est mort au moment où son livre sortait des presses.
Les attaques contre ceux qui sont surnommés
les "nouveaux historiens" ou les "révisionnistes"
remplissent déjà plusieurs fort volumes. Par exemple:
Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History, 2nd revised
edition, 1997, Frank Cass, est un cas particulièrement
répugnant.
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