When my parents were born (1917-1919), 96% of the people of Palestine were
Arab Palestinians and only 4% were Jewish. When I was born (early 40's), 67%
of the population of Palestine were Arabs, inspite of the British collusion
with Zionist leadership to bring in immigrants into Palestine, both legally
and illegally. We left our country as refugees because my parents were
scared of massacres perpetrated by the Irgun and Stern terrorists, like the
massacre of Deir Yassin. That's why Palestinians consider the creation of
Israel on their homeland in 1948 as a CATASTROPHE, not a celebration:
It is the story of the heinous expulsion of the Palestinian people, through
ethnic cleansing, from their only homeland, Palestine.
In this article, Ilan Pappe sheds more light on the bigger picture and a
looming repetition of the catastrophe of '48.
The '48 Nakba & The Zionist Quest for its Completion
(Nakba means "Catastrophe" in Arabic)
Writer: Ilan Pappe
Source: Between The Lines
Date: October 2002 Issue
I have come here to present the comprehensive story of the history of
the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and its
relevance to the present and future agenda to peace in Palestine.
For Israelis, 1948 is a year in which two things happened which
contradict each other: On the one hand, it was the climax of Jewish
aspirations to have a state or to fulfill a long dream of returning to a
homeland after what they regarded as 2000 years of exile. In other
words, it was considered a miraculous event that only positive
adjectives could be attached to, and that you could only talk about and
remember as a very elated kind of event. On the other hand, it was the
worst chapter in Jewish history. Jews did in 1948 in Palestine what Jews
had not done anywhere for 2000 years prior. The most evil and most
glorious moment converged into one. What Israeli collective memory did
was to erase one side of the story in order to co-exist or to live with
only the glorious chapter. It was a mechanism for solving an impossible
tension between two collective memories.
Because so many of the people who live in Israel lived through 1948,
this is not a distant memory. It is not the genocide of the Native
Americans in the United States. People know exactly what they did, and
they know what others did. Yet they still succeed in erasing it totally
from their own memory while struggling rigorously against anyone trying
to present the other, unpleasant, story of 1948, in and outside Israel.
If you look at Israeli textbooks, curricula, media, and political
discourse you see how this chapter in Jewish history - the chapter of
expulsion, colonization, massacres, rape, and the burning of villages -
is totally absent. It is not there. It is replaced by a chapter of
heroism, glorious campaigns and amazing stories of moral courage and
superiority unheard of in any other histories of people's liberation in
the 20th century. So whenever I speak of the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine in 1948, we must remember that not just the very terms of
"ethnic cleansing" and "expulsion" are totally alien to the community
and society from which I come and from where I grew up; the very history
of that chapter is either distorted in the recollection of people, or
totally absent.
Zionist Leaders' Strategy:
Settlement and Expulsion
Now, when you start reading the diaries of the leaders of Zionism,
and researching their ideologies and ideological trends since the
movement's conception in the late 19th century, you see that from the
very beginning there had been the realization that the aspiration for a
Jewish state in Palestine contradicts the fact that an indigenous people
had been living on the land of Palestine for centuries and that their
aspirations contradicted the Zionist schema for the country and its
people. The presence of a local society and culture had been known to
the founding fathers of Zionism even before the first settlers set foot
on the land.
Two means were used in order to change the reality in Palestine, and
impose the Zionist interpretation on the local reality: the
dispossession of the indigenous population from the land and its
re-populating with newcomers - i.e. settlement and expulsion. The
colonization effort was pushed forward by a movement that had not yet
won regional or international legitimacy and therefore had to buy land,
and create enclaves within the indigenous population. The British Empire
was very helpful in bringing this scheme into reality. Yet from the very
beginning of Zionist strategy, the leaders of Zionism knew that
settlement is a very long and measured process, which may not be
sufficient if you want to revolutionize the reality on the ground and
impose your own interpretation. For that, you needed something more
powerful. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in the
1930s and later the first Prime Minister of Israel, mentioned more than
once, that for that [imposing your interpretation on the ground] you
need what he called "revolutionary conditions". He meant a situation of
war - a situation of change of government, a twilight zone between an
old era and the beginning of a new one. It is not surprising to read in
the Israeli press today that Ariel Sharon thinks that he is the new Ben
Gurion who is about to lead his people into yet another revolutionary
moment - the war with Iraq - in which expulsion, and not a political
settlement, can be used to further, indeed, to complete the process of
de-Arabizing Palestine and Judaizing it, which had begun in 1882.
Towards the end of the British Mandate, there was a need to make these
more theoretical and abstract ideas about expulsion into a concrete
plan. I have been writing about 1948 since 1980, and for much of that
time have been concerned with the question of whether there had or
hadn't been a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians in 1948.
Then I realized, (largely as a result of what I have learned in the last
two years), that this was not the right track: neither for academic
research nor from more popular ideological research of what has happened
in the past. Far more important for ethnic cleansing is the formulation
of an ideological community, in which every member, whether a newcomer
or a veteran, knows only too well that they have to contribute to a
recognized formula: the only way to fulfill the dream of Zionism is to
empty the land of its indigenous population.
Mass Ideological Indoctrination
Behind '48 Nakba
Master plans are not the most important component in preparing
yourself for that time of a revolutionary juncture or for the
contingency plans of how to practically make the idea of expulsion a
reality. You need something else: you need an atmosphere, you need
people who are indoctrinated, you need commanders in every link of the
chain of command who would know what to do even if they don't have
explicit orders when the time comes. Most of the preparations before the
'48 War were less about a master plan (although I do think there was
one). The commanders were busy compiling intelligence files for each
Palestinian village for the use of Jewish commanders on all levels, so
they would know how wealthy and how important each particular village
was as a military unit etc. Armed with such intelligence, they were also
aware of what was expected from them by the man who stood at the top of
the Jewish pyramid in Palestine, David Ben Gurion and his colleagues.
These leaders wanted only to know how each operation contributed to the
Judaization of Palestine, and they made it perfectly clear that they did
not care how it was done. The expulsion plan worked very smoothly
exactly because there was no need for a systematic chain of command that
had to check whether a master plan was fully implemented. Anyone who has
done any research on ethnic cleansing operations in the second half of
the 20th century knows that this is exactly how ethnic cleansing is
achieved: by creating the kind of education and indoctrination systems
that ensures that every soldier and every commander, and everyone with
his individual responsibility, knows exactly what to do when they enter
a village, even if they haven't received any specific orders to expel
its inhabitants.
Just recently, as a result of reading testimonies not only of
Palestinians but also of Israeli soldiers, it became clear to me that
the master plan, although significant in itself, pales in comparison to
the whole machinery of indoctrination of a community. In 1948, the
Yishuv's [the pre-'48 Zionist community] population was a little more
than half a million, and before 1948 was even less. Those who had an
active role in the military aspects of their community knew precisely
what to do when the moment came and not one moment too soon.
But it should be remembered that the plan was successful not only
because of the ideological indoctrination. It was done under the eyes of
the UN, which had been committed ever since its General Assembly adopted
Resolution 181 to the safety and welfare of those 'cleansed'. The UN was
obliged to protect the life of the Palestinian people who were supposed
to live in the areas allocated to the Jewish State (they were meant to
make up almost half of the population of the prospective state). Out of
900,000 Palestinians living both in these areas and additional areas
occupied by Israel from the designated Arab states, only 100,000
remained. Within a very short period during the time in which the UN was
already responsible for Palestine, a massive expulsion operation took
place within a very short period of time.
We have yet to be told the most horrific stories of 1948, although so
many of us have been working as professional historians on that. We
haven't talked about the rape. We haven't talked about the more than 30
or 40 massacres which popular historiography mentions. We haven't yet
decided how to define the systematic killing of several individuals that
took place in each and every village in order to create the panic that
should produce the exodus. Is this a massacre or not when it is
systematically repeated in every village? It is quite possible that some
chapters will never be revealed, and many of them do not depend on
archives, but rather on the memory of people whom we are loosing each
day as vital witnesses. There were not specific orders written, only an
atmosphere that has to be reconstructed. A glimpse into that atmosphere
can be found on the bookshelves of almost every house in Israel - in the
official books that glorify the Israeli army in its activity in 1948. If
you know how to read them, you can see how the Palestinians were
de-humanized to such a degree that you could rely on the troops, and
that they would know what to do.
Israeli and Palestinian Leaders
Accept the American Game:
Shrinking Palestine Physically & Morally
Noam Chomsky was correct in his analysis that we in Palestine/ Israel
and the Middle East as a whole were eagerly playing the American game
ever since they decided to take an active role in the peace process,
beginning in 1969 with the Rogers Plan, and then with the Kissinger
initiatives. Ever since then, the peace agenda has been an American
game. The Americans invented the concept of the peace process, whereby
the process is far more important than peace. America has contradictory
interests in the Middle East, which include protecting certain regimes
in the area that preserve American interests (therefore entailing paying
lip service to the Palestinian cause) while also has a commitment to
Israel. In order not to find itself facing these two contradictory
agendas, it is best to have an ongoing process which is not war and not
peace but something which you can describe as a genuine American effort
to reconcile between the two sides - and God forbid if this
reconciliation works.
We were playing this game not only because the Americans invented it,
but also because the replacement of peace with a "peace process" became
the main strategy of the Israeli peace camp. When the peace camp of the
stronger party in the local balance of power accepts this interpretation
then the world at large follows suit.
Such a process, which can and should go on forever, coached by the only
superpower and supported by the peace camp of the stronger party in the
conflict, is presented as peace. One of the best ways of safeguarding
the process from being successful is to evade all the outstanding issues
at the heart of the problem. In such a way it was possible to erase the
events of 1948 from the peace agenda and focus on what happened in 1967.
The outstanding issue became the territories Israel occupied in the 1967
war. The concept of "territories for peace" was invented simultaneously
in Tel Aviv, London, Paris and New York for United Nations Resolution
242. It presents a very concrete variable, in fact about 20% of
Palestine, while wiping out the remainder 80% from the formula and
juxtaposes it against "peace", which is in fact the never-ending peace
process. A process that was not meant to bring a solution, let alone
reconciliation. In return for a peace process, the Palestinians would be
allowed to talk about and maybe gradually build something of a political
entity on 20% of Palestine.
In 1988 [after the PNC accepted UN 242 in Algiers] and 1993 [at the Oslo
Accords] even the Palestinian leadership joined this game. No wonder
then that after Oslo, the American policy makers felt that they could
round up the whole story. They had Palestinian and Israeli leaderships
that accepted the name of the American game. This was the beginning of
the process, which culminated with the "the most generous Israeli offer
ever made about peace" in the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000.
Had this process been successful, history would have witnessed not only
the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 but the
eradication of the refugees, as well as of the Palestinian minority in
Israel, and maybe even Palestine, from our collective memory.
It was a process of elimination that succeeded to a certain extent, were
it not for the second uprising. I wonder what would have happened had
the second Intifada not broken out. If the Palestinian leadership
continued to partake in the ploy to shrink Palestine, physically and
morally, it would have succeeded. The second Intifada was trying to stop
this. Whether or not it will succeed, we do not know.
Agenda for Peace Activists
in the Shadow of Transfer Scheme
The problem for us as peace activists, is that any coordinated
pressure on Israel to stop its plans, can in an absurd way lead the
Israelis to accelerate their plans for wiping out Palestine, namely to
feel that the revolutionary circumstances have arrived. This is my
greatest fear for the second Intifada. I fully support it and regard it
as a popular movement determined to stop a peace process which would
have destroyed Palestine once and for all. The uprising, and certainly
on top of it the coming war against Iraq, have produced in the minds of
Israelis - of all walks of life not only within the circles of the
Right-wing camp - the idea that "we have reached yet another fortuitous
juncture in history where revolutionary conditions have developed for
solving the Palestine question once and for all." You can see this new
assertion talked about in Israel: the discourse of transfer and
expulsion which had been employed by the extreme Right, is now the bon
ton of the center. Established academics talk and write about it,
politicians in the center preach it, and army officers are only too
happy to hint in interviews that indeed should a war against Iraq begin,
transfer should be on the agenda.
This brings me to chart what I think are three agendas of peace, for
anyone involved in supporting peacemaking in Israel and Palestine,
otherwise we may miss the train, so to speak.
The first agenda is the most urgent one: we must all take the danger of
a recurrence of the 1948 ethnic cleansing very seriously. This is not
just paranoia when I directly - not indirectly - link the war against
Iraq with the possibility of another Nakba.
Take it seriously, believe me. There is a serious Israeli
conceptualization of the situation in which Israeli leaders say to
themselves, "we have a carte blanche from the Americans. The Americans
will not only allow us to cleanse Palestine once and for all, they even
will help create the window of opportunity for implementing our scheme.
We will be condemned by the world, but this will be short-lived and
eventually forgotten. This is a rare opportunity to 'solve' the problem."
The second agenda is the immediate one, and that is ending the
occupation. We should be very careful in adopting the American, the
Israeli Peace Now, and I'm sorry to say, the Palestinian Authority
discourse about a two-state solution. Because the two-state solution
nowadays is not the end of the occupation but continuing it in a
different way. It is meant to be the end of the conflict with no
solution to the refugee problem and the complete abandonment of the
Palestinian minority in Israel. Anybody who has not learned this after
the Oslo Accords has a problem of understanding and interpreting
reality. We have to make sure that the idea of peace is not hijacked by
people who are seeking indirect ways of continuing the present situation
in Palestine. This is not easy because the western media has already
adopted within its main vocabulary that anyone who wants to present
himself as a peacemaker or as a supporter of peace, must talk about a
two-state solution.
Only after the occupation ends can we talk about what it entails. Then
it is possible to discuss the political structure best needed to prevent
a reoccupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But it should be
clear that the political structure needed to end the conflict is a
different one. It has to be one that enables us to end refugeehood and
the apartheid policies against the Palestinians inside Israel. We have
to be sure not to get caught in the same cul de sac that Yassir Arafat
found himself in Camp David when he was asked to equate the end of
occupation (when it wasn't even the end of occupation) with the end of
the conflict.
Finally, and this is our third agenda, we have to keep on thinking about
how to devise concrete plans for making the Right of Return feasible and
for making possible the end of discrimination against Palestinians in
Israel. These are the two pillars of a comprehensive settlement and they
have to be specified. I think it is quite clear that we haven't done
that job yet: we are still stuck with slogans of the 1960's, of a
secular democratic state. These slogans have to be updated according to
the reality of 2002. What was meant in the 1960's by a secular
democratic state is a possible vision for the distant future. Our focus
on the urgent and immediate agenda should not absolve us from long-term
strategies. What people need to hear from us are concrete plans, even if
they sound utopian given the situation on the ground. This is a delicate
enterprise which entails not only creating a political culture and
structure that would rectify past evils, and prevent another
catastrophe, but also one which would not inflict another evil, or
replace the past evil with a new one. We are not calling for the
expulsion of the Jews. We do want the Right of Return. We do want equal
rights for the Palestinian citizens.
I think many of us who think in such a long-term span would like to see
one state or a political structure which has one state in it. But you
cannot disseminate these ideas by just giving highlights, nuggets or
slogans. There needs to be a very serious and detailed presentation of
such a solution, to convince people of its feasibility.
Finally I want to come back to where I started. In the collective
Israeli memory there are two 1948s: one is totally erased, and one is
totally glorified. But there is a young generation in Israel - and I
have ample opportunities to meet with young audiences - who may prove to
have a potential to look differently at the reality in the future. The
fact that you have generations of young people who are basically willing
to listen to universal principles, provides the opportunity to break the
mirror and show them what really happened in 1948, and what is going on
in 2002. I think we shall eventually find partners, even to our wildest
dreams, on how a solution should look like.
The problem is of course, that while we do this - educate, disseminate
information etc. - the government of Israel is preparing a very swift
and bloody operation. If it succeeds, even our best dreams and energies
would be wasted.
Ilan Pappe
Dr. Ilan Pappe is a Profesor of History at Haifa University. This
article is based upon the transcript of a lecture presented by Dr.
Pappe to the Right To Return Coalition - Al Awda UK, held at the
School for Oriental and African Studies in London Monday 16th
September 2002. It is hereby published after receiving Dr. Pappe's
consent and editorial remarks. [BTL]