A former French ambassador reviews a wealth of texts documenting Israel’s ugly history

In the 1980s in Israel, a new generation of men and women who had not lived through the Holocaust or the creation of their country came of age intellectually and embarked on a remarkable period of change. This change is indicative of how Israel’s intelligentsia has gradually matured to a point where it is now able to judge the country’s past without hang-ups, and free itself from the myths and taboos propagated by the country’s leaders.

The anti-conformism of this generation of intellectuals — which includes historians, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, journalists, filmmakers and artists — first made itself felt after the Six-Day War in 1967. Events since then have only fuelled their dissent: The occupation, Palestinian resistance, the coming to power of the religious, nationalist right in 1977, the growing influence of settlers and expansionist rabbis, and the worsening tensions between clerics and secular society have all played their part.

“Religious people often talk about Tel Aviv as if it were Sodom and Gomorrah,” says Michel Warshawski, a leader of the radical wing of the peace movement, “whereas for secular Israelis, Jerusalem is the ‘Tehran of the ayatollahs.'”

Peace with Egypt in 1979 raised hopes of a final peace settlement, but these hopes were dashed in 1982, with the invasion of Lebanon. This invasion, widely seen as Israel’s first offensive war, was launched on what turned out to be a false prospectus. Contrary to the Israeli government’s claims, the Palestine Liberation Organization — which Menahem Begin and Ariel Sharon set out to destroy — had not behaved provocatively. Indeed, it had shown signs of readiness to compromise, and in any case did not pose a serious threat to Israel’s existence.

At the time, many Israelis were shocked by their army’s extreme brutality and the high death toll among the Palestinian and Lebanese population. The worst atrocities, the terrible Sabra and Shatila massacres, were committed with the full knowledge of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

These events provoked an unprecedented response: Around 400,000 protestors took to the streets of Tel Aviv. Five hundred officers and soldiers deserted. And the refusnik movement was born, as young people refused to serve in the army, first in Lebanon and then in the Occupied Territories. The “purity of arms” which Israel had boasted of since its birth was seriously undermined.

Unintentionally, young historians further contributed to the discrediting of Israel’s self-image. From official archives, which were declassified in 1978 under Israel’s 30-year rule, they discovered that the conduct of the Israeli forces before and during the war of 1948 departed significantly from the idealized propaganda version. Simha Flapan, a fervent Zionist right up to his death, was the first to make use of official documents in a book that exposed the seven main myths that have been used to dupe the public for decades.

Dominique Vidal’s book, written with Sébastien Boussois, is the first to set out and analyze the conclusions of the so-called new historians. They are the first researchers since the foundation of the state of Israel to base their work not on secondary sources, as their predecessors did, but on documents from unimpeachable sources such as the archives of the cabinet, the army, the Palmach (shock troops), Zionist organizations, and the diaries of David Ben Gurion, who held the posts of defense and prime minister.

The book describes the circumstances which led to war with the Arabs, pays special attention to the role of Ben Gurion, which is ambiguous to say the least, and devotes a chapter to Benny Morris, the most prominent of the new historians and author of “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Question,” (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Vidal and Boussois refer to Morris as schizophrenic because of the gulf between his quest for historical truth and his political position on the far right. The book also examines Ilan Pappé’s most recent book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine ,” (Oneworld Publications, 2006), which provoked a furor in Israel that forced its author — like so many others — to resign from the University of Haifa and go into exile at a British university.

Pappé is not the first dissident intellectual (nor is he likely to be the last) to leave his country to escape the suffocating atmosphere reserved for “lepers” such as him. But unlike his predecessors, it is much harder to dispute his versions of events, because they are so much more detailed. Pappé has had access to documents from 60 years of Israeli archives (unlike most of his colleagues who only had access to 40 years’ worth).

Pappé has also made use of the work of Palestinian historians in his writing, often for eyewitness accounts. He has collected the testimony of survivors of ethnic cleansing — a source thus far studiously avoided by his fellow historians, either through an instinctive rejection of such material or through mistrust, or, more prosaically, because of their ignorance of the Arabic language. Such eyewitness accounts are all the more valuable as, so far, no Arab country has opened its archives to researchers.

Ultimately, the points of difference between Pappé and Morris are not substantial. Both maintain that the 1948 war was not a David and Goliath struggle as is claimed, since the Israeli forces were clearly superior to their adversaries in both manpower and weaponry. Even at the height of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were only a few thousand poorly equipped Palestinian fighters, supported by some Arab volunteers from the Fawzi al-Qawuqji liberation army.

Even when the Arab states intervened on May 15, 1948, their forces were still far inferior to those of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization that later formed the core of the IDF, which was able to keep drawing on reinforcements. Morris and Pappé agree that the Arab forces invaded Palestine reluctantly as a last resort, not in order to destroy the fledgling Jewish state, which they knew they were incapable of doing, but to prevent Israel and Transjordan — “in collusion” according to historian Avi Shlaim — from carving up the territory granted to the Palestinians under the United Nations plan of November 29, 1947.

“I have no doubt we are capable of occupying all of Palestine,” Ben Gurion, the father of the Jewish state, had written to Moshe Sharett (Israel’s second prime minister, who served between Ben Gurion’s two terms) in February 1948, three months before the Arab-Israeli war began — and a few weeks before the delivery of massive consignments of arms sent via Prague by the USSR. This boast did not stop him from claiming publicly that Israel was threatened by a second Holocaust.

In the first week of the war in May 1948, carried away by news of Israeli victories, according to Pappé, Ben Gurion wrote in his diary: “We shall establish a Christian state in Lebanon… We shall break Transjordan, bomb its capital, destroy its army… We shall bring Syria to its knees… Our air force will attack Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo, and this will avenge our ancestors who were oppressed by the Egyptians and the Assyrians in Biblical times.”

In similar fashion, Morris and Pappé demolish the Israeli leadership’s carefully maintained myth that the Palestinians left their homes voluntarily, in response to calls from the Arab authorities and radio stations (these broadcasts are entirely the inventions of Israeli propaganda, as complete recordings made at the time by the BBC reveal). In fact, the two historians confirm what has been known since the end of the 1950s: It was the Israeli authorities who forced the Palestinians to flee their land through blackmail, threats, brutality and terror.

They diverge, however, over the meaning of these expulsions: for Benny, they are simply “collateral damage.”

“All’s fair in love and war,” he explained, adding more recently and somewhat cynically, that Ben Gurion ought to have kept going until the very last Palestinian was gone. Where Morris sees an exodus resulting from war and “not the intention of either Jew or Arab,” Pappé shows that the ethnic cleansing was planned and executed in order to extend Israel’s territory — in effect to Judaize it.

And with reason. For although the Zionist leadership had publicly approved the UN plan, in reality they thought it intolerable. Their consent was just a tactic, as several documents in the archives and Ben Gurion’s own diary show.

True, they had been granted more than half of Palestine. The rest was to be returned to the indigenous Arabs, who were twice as numerous as the Jews. However, they viewed the territory earmarked for Israel as too small for the millions of immigrants its leaders hoped to attract. Moreover, 405,000 Palestinian Arabs would have lived there alongside 558,000 Jews, who would have accounted for just 58% of the population of the future Jewish state. Thus Zionism risked losing its very raison d’être: “making Palestine as Jewish as America is American and England is English,” in the words of Haim Weizmann, who went on to become Israel’s first president.

That is why thoughts of the transfer (in plain terms, expulsion) of the indigenous Arabs haunted the Zionist leaders, who debated the question endlessly — usually behind closed doors.

At the end of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl had suggested that the Ottoman sultan should deport the Palestinians to clear the way for Jewish colonization. In 1930, Weizmann tried to persuade the British, who held the Mandate for Palestine, to do the same.

In 1938, following the proposal of a tiny Jewish state accompanied by a transfer of some Arabs, envisaged by a British commission under Lord Peel, Ben Gurion declared before the executive committee of the Jewish Agency: “I am in favor of an obligatory transfer, a measure which is by no means immoral.”

The war of 1948 was to offer him his chance to put his plan into action by launching an offensive designed to uproot the indigenous population six months before the Arab armies intervened. To facilitate this process, Pappé has revealed, Ben Gurion had a file created by the Jewish Agency in 1939 on all the Arab villages, which was regularly updated throughout the 1940s. It recorded demographic and economic facts as well as political and military information.

Pappé analyzed in detail the measures to which the Israeli forces resorted. They make chilling reading, even if they are reminiscent of atrocities committed during ethnic cleansings carried out by other peoples from late antiquity on. The statistics produced by the historian are telling: in a few months, several dozen massacres and summary executions were recorded. Out of a thousand villages, 531 were destroyed or converted to accommodate Jewish immigrants. Eleven ethnically mixed towns were purged of their Arab inhabitants.

On Ben Gurion’s instructions, all 70,000 of the Palestinian inhabitants of Ramleh and Lydda, including children and old people, were forced from their homes at bayonet point in the space of a few hours in mid-July 1948. Yigal Allon and future Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was then a high-ranking officer in the military, ran the operation. Rabin wrote about it in his memoirs published in the United States, though they were later censored in the Hebrew edition. Numerous refugees died of exhaustion en route, as they were driven towards the Transjordanian border.

There had been similar scenes in April 1948, in Jaffa, when 50,000 of its Arab citizens had to flee, terrorized by particularly intense artillery bombardment from the Irgun, a militant Zionist organization, and fearful of more massacres.

This is what Morris calls the “atrocity factor.”

These horrors are all the more unjustifiable since a large number of Arab villages, by Ben Gurion’s own admission, had declared their willingness not to fight the partition of Palestine. Some had even reached non-aggression agreements with their Jewish neighbors. That was the case in the village of Deir Yassin, where the irregular forces of the Irgun and the Lehi nevertheless massacred a large part of the population with the tacit agreement of the Haganah, according to Flapan.

In total, 750-800,000 Palestinians were forced into exile between 1947 and 1949, and lost their land and property. According to an official Israeli estimate, the Jewish National Fund seized 300,000 hectares of Arab land, much of which was given to kibbutzim.

The operation could not have been better planned: The day after the vote on December 11, 1948, on the famous resolution on the “right to return” by the U.N. General Assembly, the Israeli government adopted the Emergency Absentees’ Property law which, added to the law on the cultivation of abandoned lands of 30 June 1948, retrospectively legalized seizures and forbade the victims of seizures from claiming any compensation on returning home.

Despite the protests from some members of the Israeli government, shocked by the brutality of the ethnic cleansing, Ben Gurion — who had not himself given an explicit written order — did nothing to stop it. Nor did he openly condemn it. He limited himself to condemnation of the raping and pillaging which the Israeli soldiers carried out, though they benefited from complete impunity.

What is most astonishing is the silence of the international community, which has lasted for decades although international observers, including those from the U.N., were aware of the atrocities.

This makes it easier to understand why the Palestinians commemorate the naqba (catastrophe), rather than celebrate the Israeli war of independence.

Avi Shlaim, a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and author of “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World,” (Allen Lane and WW Norton, 2000) has demolished yet another myth: that of an Israel devoted to peace but confronted with belligerent Arab states bent on its annihilation. The title of his book is taken from the doctrine of the father of the ultranationalist right. In 1923, Zeev Jabotinsky declared that there should be no negotiations over a peace accord until the Jews had colonized the whole of Palestine behind a wall of iron, since the Arabs only understood the logic of force.

By adopting this doctrine, Israel’s political and military leaders on both the right and the left have managed to sabotage successive peace plans. Reckoning that time is on their side, and claiming, in the words of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, that Israel has no “partner for peace,” the leaders in Jerusalem chose to wait for their adversaries to accept Israel’s territorial expansion and the splitting-up of a hypothetical, demilitarized Palestinian state, which is condemned to become a collection of Bantustans.

Shlaim’s book was a bestseller when it was published in English in 2000, and was translated into several languages, but had to wait five years before appearing in Hebrew. Most Israeli publishers deemed it to be of little interest.

Shlaim recognizes the legitimacy of the Zionist movement and of Israel’s 1967 borders.

“On the other hand,” he says, “I entirely reject the Zionist colonial project beyond that border.”

Almost all of the historians, sociologists, novelists, journalists and filmmakers who belong to the new wave of the intelligentsia are Zionists of a new sort — known as post-Zionists. They share a desire to espouse the cause of peace by establishing historical truth and recognizing the wrongs done to the Palestinians.

To get a sense of the scale of the change that has taken place since the 1980s, it is worth reading the research carried out by Sébastien Boussois in Israel among new historians and their opponents. Some observers have concluded that the advent of a stable Israel at peace with its neighbors will depend in large part on the impact these intellectuals have on Israeli society and especially its political class.

This is how Yehuda Lancry, former Israeli ambassador to France and the United States, put it:

“The ‘new historians,’ even a radical such as Ilan Pappé, bring light to the dark region of the Israeli collective consciousness and pave the way for a stronger adherence to mutual respect for and peace with the Palestinians.

Their work, far from representing a threat to Israel, does their country honor. And more: It is a duty, a moral obligation, a prodigious assumption of a liberating enterprise in order that the fault lines, the healthy interstices, necessary to the integration of the discourse of the Other, may take their place in Israeli experience.”  

Eric Rouleau is a journalist and former French ambassador. Translated by George Miller.