Last week I blogged about Commentary’s piece denying the Nakba, which was underwritten by the chairman of the New-York Historical Society– a landmark of Nakba denial, published in what was once a glory of Jewish intellectual tradition: Commentary, the magazine I grew up with, stacks of it, my parents didn’t throw it away. The article demonstrates how fealty to Israel is eroding Jewish intelligence, as it has forced some of the smartest people on the planet to devote themselves to alchemy, coming up with elaborate proofs that black is white.
One paragraph that particularly disturbed me said that "huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven [Commentary’s emphasis] from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces.. In Jaffa,
Palestine’s largest Arab city, the [Arab] municipality organized the
transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea…" In making this assertion, author Efraim Karsh denied the New Standard View, that the Zionists forced the Palestinians from Jaffa. He offered no evidence.
Having just attended a speech on the Nakba by Lila Abu-Lughod, an eminent
anthropologist at Columbia University, in which she stated that her
father had been "driven" out of Jaffa by Zionists, I posted about the Commentary piece, and a couple days later Commentary published an
annotated version online, including the following footnote to support Karsh’s claim re Jaffa:
See, for
example, Qiryati-Dafna to all fronts, “Occurrences in Jaffa,[Apr.] 11, 1948-[Apr.] 20, 0740,” May 2, 1948, IDFA 1949/8275/162; Palestine (Cunningham) to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, May 1,
1948, FO
371/68547/E5665/4/71.
The
first citation is a document in the Israel Defense Forces Archives,
the second in British Foreign Office records. I have no idea what these
documents say. One question I’d raise off the bat is
that the first refers to events in Jaffa between April 11 and 20.
The crucial days in the emptying of Jaffa were after April 23… I urge
Commentary to publish these documents in full, in the name of transparency.
I am not a scholar of the Nakba, I just rattle around on-line.
The most outrageous element of Karsh’s piece was his contempt for Arab informants; they don’t seem to count as witnesses for him. Going round the internet, I can show you
two sources for my belief that Arabs were driven out of Jaffa by
Zionist forces.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a leading Palestinian scholar now deceased, whose
experience his daughter Lila Abu-Lughod cited at that lecture, offers
the following story of his boyhood:
After the exams ended [at the beginning of April 1948] and we were free, some of the students volunteered to work for the National Committee [the Palestinian leadership body]. The committee had decided to levy a tax on every family who insisted on leaving. [emphasis mine] … I worked in a branch of the committee based in the headquarters of the Muslim Youth Association near the port of Jaffa. Our job consisted mainly of harassing people to dissuade them from leaving, and when they insisted, we would begin bargaining over what they should pay, according to how much luggage they were carrying with them and how many members of the family there were. At first we set the taxes high. Then as the situation deteriorated, we reduced the rates, especially when our friends and relatives began to be among those leaving.
We continued collecting this tax until 23 April, when the combined force of the Haganah and the Irgun succeeded in defeating the Arab forces stationed in the Manshiya quarter adjacent to Southern Tel-Aviv. On that day, as we realized that an attack on the center of Jaffa was imminent, I and my family decided that they had to be evacuated temporarily. We rented a van, into which we crammed all the women and young children and sent them to Nablus. I and my elder brother Yehia remained behind to defend our city.
Leaving the city had become difficult, as the Haganah had cut the land road, and the only way out was the sea with all its risks.
Abu-Lughod’s daughter Lila,
the professor of anthropology, states in the Jerusalem Quarterly that "great panic" began in Jaffa after news
reached the city of the massacre
at the village of Deir Yassin, on April 9, in which over 100
Arab civilians were killed by the Zionist Irgun.
Here is another piece, from Shukri Salameh, who I gather was an office worker:
Every night [in spring 1948, apparently] we woke up at the sound of shooting coming from the Eastern and Southern borders of Jaffa, i.e. from the directions of Agro-Bank and Bat Yam, Jewish Settlements. Sometimes it seemed so close to us that we had to sleep on the floor. Occasionally in the daytime Yvonne, my wife, picked up large bullets stuck on the outside of our stucco walls.
At about 4.00 a.m. on 25 April there was a distant sound of bomb
explosions from different directions of Jaffa. With the beginning of
daylight the sound was becoming louder. My younger clerk had ventured
downtown to explore but soon came back with a shrapnel wound in his
right thigh. It was not too deep and we administered first aid to the
cut. He told us that mortar bombs were dropping on the center of town
including some residential areas. The bombs were coming from Tel-Aviv
and Agro Bank and Bat Yam Jewish settlements. I contacted our travel
agent who had made flight reservations for us from Lydda airport to
Cairo. His wife was also scheduled to fly with us. He said all flights
were suspended indefinitely. Then I decided to drive out of the city in
my car. Our target was Amman, Transjordan, where my brother had moved
his family temporarily. I drove to the house of Edmond Rock, the
Honorary Consul of Transjordan to obtain visas to enter the Hashemite
Kingdom of Transjordan. He readily stamped our passports, whereupon I
made two attempts to drive out of the City and twice mortar bombs
exploded on the highway in front of us which compelled me to make a
U-turn and head back home.I drove to the safer sea harbor area and found a couple of hundred people assembled there with suit-cases and bundles of clothes. They were in a state of panic hoping that some boat would sail into the harbor and take them out. Among them were a few friends who approached our car and asked if we wanted to be included in lists they were preparing. My wife adamantly refused as she feared the sea. I drove back home and later I joined a couple of prominent figures to call Mr. Crosby, the British District Commissioner and ask if the British had already decided to surrender Jaffa as they seemed to have done with Haifa some two weeks earlier. [The Brits still were the authority in Palestine, for 2 more weeks]…
The thumping sound of mortar explosions was gradually becoming more distant. In the evening there was complete silence, but the experience had planted a sense of fear and despair in the hearts of everyone. We hardly slept that night and early in the morning I drove off with my wife and baby daughter out of the City along the only highway that leads to Sarafand and Ramleh. This was the main route to Jerusalem. As we passed in front of the Neter Jewish Agricultural Settlement we saw a large group at the entrance gazing at all the fleeing cars and trucks and laughing.
There is one question for Commentary. On what basis did it dismiss these readily-available statements?
P.S. I’m inaugurating a new category: Jaffa. Jaffa was once the largest Arab
city in Palestine, home to 70,000 Arabs, the heart of Palestinian
culture right on the Mediterranean next to the new Jewish city of Tel
Aviv. Jaffa was so Arab it was designated an Arab enclave inside the Jewish state under the ’47 U.N. Partition plan. I’m interested in other statements about what happened there during the Nakba.
