Gershom Gorenberg–author of an excellent piece on East Jerusalem expansion at TAP–has a somewhat-literary theory of history as random. Everything is a mess and it is a fallacy to discern intention in events. No big actors are pulling strings. A lot of individuals, many of them good people, many of them maddened, come running on to the stage, and only later can we find a pattern. But no one in the event is really that responsible. Thus he termed the colonization enterprise an "accidental empire," in his book by that name, thereby cutting the Israeli government a break on its acceptance of the religious ideology that propelled the thirst for the Jordan River.
Now in this review of Benny Morris's book, 1948, in the New York Review of Books, Gorenberg suggests that the Nakba was also an accident. A "tragedy," but a haphazard one.
Gorenberg largely accepts Morris's view that there was no plan for ethnically-cleansing Palestine of Palestinians in 1948.
Responding to immediate crises, the Haganah launched local operations.
These actions added up to a shift toward taking the offensive and in
retrospect roughly fit Plan D [expulsion]. Nor was there a plan for ethnic
cleansing of the country. Villagers sometimes fled as soon as Haganah
units approached.
That's his sole reference to ethnic cleansing. Then the Israeli government saw what had happened, Gorenberg says, and came around to the idea.
In a subsequent meeting in September [1948] the cabinet rejected an immediate
return and left the refugee question to be resolved when formal peace
was achieved. In practical terms, this was a decision to make the
exodus permanent. It was the critical moment when confusion, panic, and
ad hoc choices gave way to a deliberate, fateful policy.
Confusion, panic and ad hoc–that's Gorenberg's read on history.
The problem with Benny Morris's method in 1948, and Gorenberg's take on it, is, in a word, Israeli-centrism. Morris has long sought to dignify a questionable historical process: throwing out Palestinian
memories of the Nakba because they are unreliable oral history while
relying on Israel archives because they were contemporary
documentation. In his book, (as I complained earlier) Morris has almost exclusively cited Israeli military documents
to arrive at the general conclusion that the Arab expulsion of the '48
war
was just an unfortunate concomitant of military actions. But imagine if his standard
were enforced in the case of the Holocaust Memorial. How many pages of
wrenching testimony that we accept as true would be disallowed? Elie Wiesel wrote Night 10 years after his father died in Auschwitz; does anyone question his version of events?
Gorenberg basically accepts the Morris method. While he is frequently critical of Morris, and notes that the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba is as different from the Israeli one as night and day, he doesn't tell us much about the Palestinian narrative. He does not mention three hugely-important events: the Deir Yassin massacre on April 10, 1948, which shocked and terrified Palestinians everywhere; and the emptying out of the key cities of Jaffa and Haifa through the spring of 1948. "One had to be there to describe the numbing shock and confusion that immobilized the Palestinian people who suddenly found themselves totally under Zionist control," Fay Afaf Kanafani has written about the emptying of Haifa by Zionist gangs, one of which she observed coming down her street. "How could anyone bring the war and its artillery into a civilian home?" Her book speaks of the fog of war, yes, but says that the Zionists laid siege to Haifa. On this site I've written about Palestinians literally being forced into the sea in Jaffa as the city was emptied of nearly 70,000 Arab inhabitants by Zionist militias over a week or two in late April. The noted anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has documented the "barrel-bombs" that were rolled down into the city to terrify the population and hasten the expulsion (in Nakba, a book the New York Review of Books seems to have missed.)
Menachem Begin, a Holocaust survivor, led the Irgun when it conquered Jaffa. This was no accident. Jaffa had been promised to the Arabs under the '47 Partition Plan, but seizing it was necessary, Begin said, because Jaffa was likely "the chief instrument–in the attempt to subjugate the Jews." Begin wrote that Deir Yassin helped the Jews, by causing the Arabs to flee. More recently, Shlomo Ben-Ami has written that "a panic-stricken Arab
community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be
carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred." Ilan Pappe has looked at the pattern of these events and reached the logical conclusion that there was a conscious decision by leaders of the Jewish community to cleanse Palestine.
But there is no inkling of this pattern in Gorenberg's review. And meanwhile, he approvingly cites Anita Shapira, a Zionist historian– who in a bitter dialogue with Palestinian grad student Saif Ammous
at Columbia University Hillel two years ago over the Nakba, threw up her hands and said it was a "tragedy." Very similar to Gorenberg's passive
view of the matter.
This understanding of history seems forcibly naive to me–and narrow. Gorenberg's review includes an excited discussion of Israeli historiography and the impact of the New Historians, as if we should continue to celebrate the (hugely-important) Israeli discovery of the 1948 expulsion of refugees nearly 30 years after the historians made that discovery, but 60 years after the Palestinians knew of it.
Gorenberg describes Morris's awakening:
"Yitzhak Rabin, at the time a member of the
Knesset and former prime minister, bluntly described [in his memoirs] his own actions in 'driving out' the Arabs of Lydda and Ramle, towns conquered by the IDF
in July 1948. A cabinet-level censorship committee blue-penciled the
offending paragraphs—which nonetheless were published in The New York Times. In the early 1980s, Benny Morris was given access to the archives of
the Palmah, the pre-independence underground army that became the core
of the IDF. There he found Rabin's order to expel Lydda's Arabs."
Well good for Benny Morris. But an American readership deserves to be informed that in 1978, years before Morris's epiphany, the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington published the book, To Be an Arab in Israel, by Fouzi El-Asmar, an Israeli-American-Palestinian writer. El-Asmar's book is not listed in Morris's bibliography, nor does Morris cite it.
But El-Asmar was 10 and living in Lydda when 3/4 of the Palestinians were driven out of the area. Palestinians were "removed" from Lydda, he says, by columns of Jewish soldiers who (amid some fighting) shouted, "Go, go to King Abdallah!" The Israelis were directing the Palestinian population to walk to Jordan, or to go to a military camp, from which they would be taken to Jordan. El-Asmar's family stayed because his father was an employee of the railways; and the boy watched as men with trucks removed all the furniture from the Arab houses in the city.
Not long after the removal of all of the furniture from the houses in Lydda, Jewish families began to be housed there. They would choose a house they liked and move into it. The Arabs were not allowed to leave their own ghetto without a permit from the authorities, and the most infuriating thing for us was that our area and the other areas in Lydda which were inhabited by Arabs were under military command, while the rest of the city in which Jews lived, was not. We were not allowed out without special permits until the early fifties, while the Jews, of course, were free to walk anywhere except in our neighborhood. Every time I asked why this was being done, I would hear the answer, 'Because we are Arabs,' and I always thought to myself, What does it mean, 'We are Arabs?' This is our country, and the houses in which Jews live today were until a short while ago lived in by Arab owners who had built them with the sweat of their brows, and from whom all I hear now is messages to their relatives over the radio.
I don't expect Morris, a rightwinger, to be open to this record of suffering. But I would hope for a glimmer of it from Gorenberg, a sensitive writer. Of course both writers are Israelis, and understandably have some degree of investment in the Israeli narrative.
The issue for American readers is: As our society tries to bring its enlightened experience of minority rights to bear on Israel/Palestine, why is that elite venues like The New York Review of Books and Yale University Press maintain an investment in the Israeli narrative? (Yale has also published Morris's latest book, in which he states that Palestinians value life less than Israelis do).
The Nakba happened 61 years ago. As Rabbi Alissa Wise said the other night, it is bound up in Jewish history. It's time Americans heard the Palestinian side of the story.
