Germany Was Obliged to Own Up To The Shameful Era in its History. Israel Has Yet To Do The Same.
It’s misleading to view Bibi Netanyahu and his far-right government as an aberration in Israel’s history. The horrific scenes in Gaza and the West Bank are part of a process of “ethnic cleansing” that –in fits and starts—has been going on since before the Zionist State was founded.
“Ethnic Cleansing?” Before you turn away in outrage and disbelief…read on.
The “cleansing” is detailed in minute detail in formerly secret Israeli archives and carefully chronicled by Israeli revisionist historians. But there’s an irony here.
Though the world insisted that Germany own up to the horrors of the Holocaust—Israel –and most of its supporters—have yet to acknowledge the Zionist State’s own shameful history. (Consider your reaction to the charge.)
The official story of Israel’s founding is that, after being decimated by the Holocaust, the Jews were finally able to return to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. It had been vouched to them by God, the Balfour Declaration, and the United Nations. But instead of welcoming them, the Arabs violently opposed the UN’s decision. As violence broke out, the leaders of the surrounding Arab States told the Palestinians to flee temporarily; they would return with the conquering Arab armies.
They were wrong. Though outnumbered and outgunned, the courageous Jewish David defeated the Arab Goliath. Naturally, the new rulers of Israel refused to allow the more than 700,000 Palestinians who had fled to return. After all, they were traitors.
Their lands and property were seized. Jewish pioneers continued transforming a largely barren land inhabited by a few wandering Bedouins into a flourishing nation of verdant farms, orchards, and thriving cities. The Jewish rulers of Israel repeatedly extended the hand of peace. Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political deadlock that still persists.
That was what I learned as a young Canadian Jew. That is what I was also told when I first went to Israel in 1958. Like most Jewish visitors, I was blown away by what I saw and the tales I heard. I went on to become President of the Harvard Zionist Organization.
Only many years later, doing reports for CBS 60 Minutes on Israel, I began to learn the truth: The heroic saga epitomized by Leon Uris’s “Exodus” was a sanitized version of a much more tawdry tale.
In the late 1980s, a small group of Israeli revisionist historians began to unearth that story through interviews and access to secret government files. They came to portray Israel’s leaders as ruthless as they were determined, with a definite racist bent. And the Jewish state’s establishment was something less than a miraculous victory of hopelessly outnumbered underdogs. The revisionist historians confirmed many of the charges of Palestinian leaders. Accusations that had been ignored by most Western journalists and scoffed at by Israeli officials.
The problem was there from the start. Facing virulent anti-Semitism in Europe, the Zionist leader, Theodore Hertzl, proposed establishing a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, then ruled by the Turks. Hertzl realized there was s problem: someone else was already living there—the Arabs, with 95% of the population. As he wrote in his diary in 1895 with a stunning display of chutzpah, the Zionists would have to go about their work cautiously.
“We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it employment in our own country….Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi wrote (in “The Hundred Years War on Palestine”), “He [Hertzl] knew perfectly well that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood and sovereignty there with the rights and well-being of the country’s Indigenous inhabitants.”
Indeed, on March 1, 1899, Yusuf Diya, the former mayor of Jerusalem, sent a prescient letter to Hertzl. He understood the motivations for Zionism but warned that Palestine already had an indigenous population that would never accept being superseded… He concluded with a heartfelt plea, “In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”
It was not to be. Successive Zionist conferences in Europe were candid about the fact that, for a Jewish state to be successful, the majority of the Arabs who lived there would have to be driven out.
When the Balfour Declaration was issued on November 2, 1917, pledging British support in establishing a homeland for the Jews, the Jewish population of Palestine numbered some 56,000, against an Arab population of 600,000 or less. As another revisionist historian, Avi Shlaim, wrote [in “The Iron Wall,” “The promise by the British not to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the Arabs “had a distinctly hollow ring about it since it totally ignored their political rights.”
As was the case throughout the Middle East, the Palestinians were developing a sense of nationhood. One of the driving forces was the threat they felt from mounting Jewish immigration. Their reactions became increasingly violent as it became evident the British were fully supporting the Zionist cause.
Golda Meir, who ultimately began Israel’s fourth Prime Minister, frequently dismissed the Palestinians as never being a nation, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.
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Though Meir scoffed at the idea of a Palestinian people, David Ben Gurion, who became Israel's first Prime Minister, did not.
In 1938, he delivered a brutally frank speech to fellow Zionists. “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors, and they defend themselves… The country is theirs because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view, we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice.”
Nevertheless, Ben Gurion was determined to push ahead with the Zionist project, as he wrote to his son in 1937. “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment to make it happen, such as a war.”
Which is precisely the process that Israel’s revisionist historians unearthed. Given access to formerly secret government and military files, they found fatal cracks in the founding myths of their country. One flaw is that there never was a mortal threat to the fledgling Jewish state from the massed Arab armies of seven Arab countries. The Arab forces were disorganized and poorly equipped. In the case of Jordan, they were also dealing secretly on the side of Israel. Despite the frantic warnings from Jewish leaders of a second Holocaust in the making, Israel’s forces were never seriously at risk.
Another fact unearthed by historians is that during the turbulent months before the declaration of the Jewish state, there were never any calls by Arab leaders for the Palestinians to leave their villages and return with the conquering Arab armies.
So why did they flee? They fled out of panic from sanguinary Jewish attacks on their neighborhoods and villages. Attacks that ultimately were designed to do just that—to provoke a massive flight of Palestinians. That cleansing has continued, on and off, to this day.
The vicious process is detailed in depth by another revisionist historian, Ilan Pappe. His searing indictment--the “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”-- makes for shocking reading for those who would still prefer to regard Israel as an innocent victim.
As Pappe describes it, the cleansing operations began in early December 1947, seven months before the UN’s partition agreement was to go into effect. At the time, the Palestinians still made up a two-thirds majority; the other third were Jewish immigrants--most recently arrived from Eastern Europe.
Only 5.7% of the land was owned by Jews, yet the UN had accepted a plan to partition the country into two states, which totally ignored the ethnic composition of the country’s population. The Palestinians would be entitled to no more than ten percent of the land. Instead, the Zionist movement was given a state that stretched over more than half of the country. One of the UN’s arguments was that the Jews deserved their new country because of the Holocaust.
That Arabs were outraged. Ben Gurion understood why.
“If I were an Arab leader,” he said, “I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come, and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
The UN decision was a recipe for disaster.
But the feuding and feckless Arab leaders had no choice. In 1948, it was the Jews who were the Goliath. The Jewish fighters represented 500,000 versus a few thousand poorly armed and disorganized local Arabs. The British had already destroyed the Palestinian leadership and its defense capabilities when they violently suppressed a Palestinian revolt in 1939.
“The UN resolution 181, wrote Walid Khaliidi, “was a hasty act of granting half of Palestine to an ideological movement that declared openly already in the 1930s its wish to de-Arabise Palestine. …And this Resolution 181’s most immoral aspect is that it included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine…”By drawing the map as they did, the UN members who voted in for the partition resolution contributed directly to the crime that was to take place.”
Ben Gurion was not displeased when the Arab states rejected the Partition Plan. That meant that the final borders of the new state were still to be set. “The boundaries,” said Ben Gurion, “will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution. As would the fate of the Arabs living in it.”
To plan how that force would be wielded, Ben Gurion created a “Consultancy” – a small coterie of advisors, politicians, and military men, with no proper minutes of meetings. They would decide the actions to take. In Ben Gurion’s words, “to disregard the partition map and to use force to ensure `Jewish majority and exclusivity in the country.
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To carry out that process, over the next few months, according to Ilan Pappe, Jewish forces performed massacres in more than thirty Arab villages and neighborhoods. They slaughtered or imprisoned thousands of men, women, and children and provoked a wave of terror that drove more than a hundred thousand to flee the country.
I’ll be writing about that in my next Substack.
In 1965 I visited Dachau concentration camp. I was quite amazed that nothing was hidden nor glossed over by the Germans. The camp was left intact. Nice place to visit with ones bride on our honeymoon! The term Final Solution has a parallel in Israel/ Palestine relations since the Balfour Declaration. And yet so soon after the Nazi defeat. Can you imagine China or Russia admitting to and preserving for history., dastardly deeds done within their borders?