In the Beginning
In the Middle East, the past bears upon the present with special
intensity. Sixty years on, the Arab-Israeli war of 1948—which
Palestinians call al-nakba, or the catastrophe, and Israelis
call the War of Independence—still nourishes irreconcilable
interpretations of the conflict it inaugurated. However one reads the
story of that confrontation—as stirring national liberation or as
deliberate ethnic cleansing, as immaculate conception or original
sin—this first chapter in an ongoing drama determines how one regards
Israel itself. A new book, the most comprehensive so far on the
subject, pairs this most contentious war with Israel's most contentious
historian.
In the turbulent wake of his much-discussed 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Benny
Morris, a kibbutz-born, Cambridge-educated professor of history at
Ben-Gurion University, surfaced as the most influential of Israel's
revisionist New Historians. Aided by newly opened Israeli archives,
this group of younger scholars, including Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, and
Ilan Pappe, called into question the country's cherished founding
myths, and the assumptions of its collective memory.
Much to the delight of Israel's post-Zionist intelligentsia, Morris
claimed that a policy advocating "transfer" of Palestinians was built
into Zionism, which he described in Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001
(2001), as "a colonizing and expansionist ideology and
movement...intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and
supplanting the Arabs." In blaming Israel—and its first prime minister,
David Ben-Gurion, whom he painted in Machiavellian shades—for the mass
exodus of Palestinian refugees, Morris sought to expose a darker side
of the story of 1948.
For this unmasking, Morris earned much praise from the Left. Edward
Said, for instance, lauded him for showing "that it was a sequence of
Zionist terror and Israeli expulsion that were behind the birth of the
Palestinian refugee problem." Just as predictably, Morris drew fire
from mainstream Israeli historians like Shabtai Teveth, who dismissed
Morris and the New Historians as peddling a "farrago of distortions,
omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications."
After the failed Camp David summit in 2000, however, when Yasser
Arafat turned down Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's offer of a
Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and launched a
second, bloodier intifada of suicide bombings, Morris
abruptly revised his revisionism. He began to acknowledge a long thread
of obduracy, folly, and rejection that ran through the entire history
of Palestinian nationalism—"a rejection, to the point of absurdity, of
the history of the Jewish link to the land of Israel; a rejection of
the legitimacy of Jewish claims to Palestine; a rejection of the right
of the Jewish state to exist." The Palestinian leaders, he now saw,
sticking fast to their vision of a Greater Palestine, rejected every
compromise offered them, from the Peel Commission partition proposal of
1937 and the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 to the peace proposals offered
by Yitzhak Rabin at Oslo and Barak at Camp David.
Morris himself still advocated a Palestinian state, and considered
the Israeli settlement movement misguided. But if in the 1990s he
believed that the Palestinians had finally accepted the need for a
compromise to achieve a two-state solution, by following the thread of
their tenacious rejection of negotiated accommodation he now
reluctantly concluded that they had all along ultimately sought
Israel's destruction. Morris became, in other words, a symbol of the
Israeli Left's disillusionment.
Morris's about-face did not find favor in the eyes of his erstwhile
colleagues. "Morris flipped out as a result of three years of
terrorism," Segev said. Pappe denounced Morris's "abominable racist
views," declaring that he "was never a proper historian" but a
"charlatan."
***
With its meticulous scholarship, Morris's latest book refutes
that charge. The story he tells hinges on three points. The first is
that from the Arabs' perspective the war of 1948 was not merely a
territorial dispute, but a battlefront in the struggle between Islam
and the West. Well before 1948, Arabs both inside and outside Palestine
came to see the Jewish community there not only as an infidel presence
in the heart of the Middle East, but as a beachhead of Western
imperialism, embodying all the sins they imputed to the West. (The same
view, two decades later, informed the Palestine Liberation Organization
Covenant, which accused Israel of being "a geographic base for world
imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland.")
Accordingly, Morris paints the backdrop to the war by drawing from
the palette of the jihadi rhetoric that preceded it. Imams across the
Arab world, he says, alluded to the hadith (oral tradition)
which teaches that "the day of resurrection does not come until Muslims
fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and
until the trees and stones shout out, ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind
me, come and kill him.'" Undeterred by the fact that in 12 centuries of
Muslim rule Palestine had never been treated as a distinct political
territory by its rulers, they now pressed the Crusader analogy into
service, invoking Saladin's liberation of Palestine from the
Christians.
As early as 1899, the mufti of Jerusalem proposed that all Jews who
had come after 1891, the "new Crusaders," be expelled or harassed into
emigrating. In 1920, the pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi vowed to fight
"until Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or
becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country." In 1929, that
kind of rhetoric bore fruit: rioting Arabs killed about 130 Jews—a
massacre that would be repeated during the Arab revolt of 1936-39.
As war loomed nearer, the belligerent rhetoric intensified. In 1946,
a Baghdad newspaper called on Arabs to "annihilate all European Jews in
Palestine." "We will sweep them into the sea," Arab League
Secretary-General 'Abd al-Rahman Azzam announced just before the
invasion. The mufti of Egypt proclaimed jihad in Palestine as the duty
of all Muslims, and King Abdullah of Jordan pledged to rescue Islamic
holy sites.
Morris's portrait of the Arab politics of hatred brings us to the
second point that gives his narrative its inexorable motion: Arab
rejectionism. In 1937, after governing Palestine since the end of the
First World War, Britain convened the Peel Commission, which noted "the
general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare," and
recommended a partition of Palestine, granting Jews 20%, and Arabs more
than 70%. Arab leaders rejected the proposal, insisting on all of
Palestine. So too with Britain's 1939 White Paper, which severely
curtailed Jewish immigration, and promised Palestinian statehood within
ten years. The Arabs demanded instead immediate independence and
complete cessation of Jewish immigration.
In early 1947, the British had at last had enough, and resolved to
withdraw their 100,000 troops and officials. This prompted United
Nations Resolution 181, which once more proposed partition, with
Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international control. Although Zionist
leaders welcomed the new proposal, the Arab leaders opposed it, and
threatened war should the resolution pass.
When on November 29, 1947, two-thirds of the General Assembly voted
to approve partition, and thereby a Jewish state, the Arab delegations
declared the resolution invalid. In response, anti-Jewish mobs took to
the streets in Cairo, Damascus, and Bahrain. Seventy-five Jews were
killed in pogroms in Aden, Yemen. Ten synagogues were torched in
Aleppo, Syria. The Jews of Palestine, on the other hand, listened in
ecstasy to the broadcast from Flushing Meadows. In his diary,
Ben-Gurion wrote: "I looked at them so happy dancing and I could only
think that they were all going to war."
***
Circumstances proved Ben-Gurion right, though perhaps sooner than he
expected. The war that broke out the next day unfolded in two phases.
The first stage, lasting from November 30, 1947, to May 14, 1948,
amounted to a civil war marked not by pitched battles but by
small-scale guerrilla fighting that pitted Palestine's 630,000 Jews
against its 1.3 million Arabs.
When the fighting began, Palestine's Jews could field two or three
tanks, no combat aircraft, and almost no artillery. Yet although
outmanned and outgunned, their fledgling army—many of its soldiers
survivors of the Holocaust—fought fiercely. During the British Mandate,
they had raised a 35,000-member-strong militia, the Haganah, which
evolved into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in June 1948. With the aid
of the Palmach, its commando strike force (including the young Yitzhak
Rabin), the Haganah defended Jewish communities, freed illegal Jewish
immigrants from British prisons, blew up railway tracks and bridges,
and ran secret arms factories. "It must be emphasized," a Haganah
directive declared, "that our aim is defense and not worsening the
relations with that part of the Arab community that wants peace with
us." The Haganah competed with two more militant underground
paramilitary groups, both condemned by the mainstream Zionists: Ezel,
the military arm of the Revisionist part
y, with its 2,000-3,000 members under the command of Menachem Begin;
and the Lechi ("the Stern gang"), a tiny group of fewer than 500
fighters.
In this first stage of the war, the Haganah battled local militias
and the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), comprising volunteers from
Palestine, Syria, and Iraq who were trained in Syria and commanded by
the Iraqi general Ismail Safwat. The ALA's symbol was a dagger dripping
with blood, thrust into a Star of David. Aided by the likes of Fawzi
al-Kutub, who learned bomb-making from the Nazi SS during World War II,
the Arabs ambushed Jewish transports, attacked civilians, and assaulted
Jewish quarters of cities throughout the country.
As Morris shows, early ALA successes caused a sense of despair to
grip the Jewish community, especially in besieged Jerusalem. The first
victories also impeded international support for Jewish statehood.
Secretary of State George Marshall, for instance, reportedly said that
the U.S. may have erred in supporting partition. Warren Austin, the
American representative to the U.N., delivered an anti-partition speech
at the Security Council.
Desperate to persuade the world of the viability of a future Jewish
state, the Haganah shifted to an offensive stance; it started acting
less like a ragtag underground militia and more like a disciplined
army. As winter gave way to spring, the Haganah secured
roads—especially on the western approach to Jerusalem—took villages
which Arab militias had used as forward bases, and conquered Arab
neighborhoods in Haifa, Tiberias, Jaffa, and West Jerusalem.
On May 14, after five and a half months of guerrilla fighting, High
Commissioner Alan Cunningham left Jerusalem, bringing the British
Mandate to its formal close. That afternoon, Ben-Gurion declared the
establishment of the state of Israel. Minutes later, President Harry
Truman granted de facto recognition to the new country.
The second, full-scale stage of the war began the next day. Some
20,000 combat troops—Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Arab Legionnaires
from Jordan (led by experienced British officers)—poured into Israel,
bent on strangling the state at its birth. On the one hand, the
invaders enjoyed the initiative, the high ground, disproportionate
economic resources, and overwhelming advantages in heavy weapons and
firepower. (An August 1947 CIA report had predicted that if war broke
out, the Arab forces would triumph.)
On the other hand, the Arab armies were hampered by incompetence,
inadequate training, and disunity. Their war plan, Morris writes,
amounted to nothing more than a "multilateral land grab" on the part of
Arab leaders who gave no thought to Palestinian Arab aspirations, and
assigned them no role in the invasion. Jordan's King Abdullah, for one,
had no interest in a Palestinian state on his doorstep.
In the next few weeks, more Arab brigades rushed to battle.
Jordanian troops took the West Bank unopposed, beat back Israeli
attempts to take Latrun (which controlled access to Jerusalem),
indiscriminately shelled West Jerusalem, and captured the Jewish
Quarter of the Old City. (When Israel recaptured the Old City from
Jordan in 1967, all but one of the quarter's dozens of synagogues were
found destroyed.) The Egyptians began their campaign with air raids on
Tel Aviv (including an attack on the central bus station that killed 42
civilians). But the momentum of their ground assault from the south was
halted by settlements like Kibbutz Nirim—where 45 Haganah defenders,
armed only with light weapons, staved off an assault by nearly 500
infantry backed by artillery and armor—and Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, named
after Mordechai Anielewicz, hero of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The
Egyptians were eventually halted 18 miles short of Tel Aviv. The Iraqi
force, meanwhile, the largest in Palest
ine, took Samaria, and routed the Jewish opposition in Jenin. (The
Syrians fared worse: they thrust south of the Sea of Galilee, but were
defeated so badly that the Syrian defense minister and chief of staff
resigned within days.)
In mid-June, after a month of all-out fighting, a truce brokered by
Swedish aristocrat Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N.'s special mediator,
came into effect. Two weeks later, the Israelis agreed to a month-long
extension of the truce; the Arab League unanimously rejected it. When
fighting resumed in July, it became clear the IDF had taken better
advantage of the respite. "We spent the [truce] days as though we were
in our barracks in Cairo," an Egyptian officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser
reported. "Our laughter filled the trenches." Ten days later, a second
truce halted hostilities until October.
The war ended in armistice, not in peace. Beginning in October, the
IDF won decisive victories over the Egyptian forces in the south,
chasing them out of all Palestine except the Gaza Strip. In the end, it
added some 2,000 square miles to the 6,000 allocated by the U.N.
Partition Plan. To save its army, Cairo signed an armistice in
February. Jordan and Syria soon followed. These agreements would govern
Israel's borders until the 1967 Six-Day War. In the 1948 war's
aftermath, the defeated Arab leaders were not merely vilified. Egyptian
prime minister Nuqrashi and Jordan's King Abdullah were assassinated,
and King Farouk was overthrown.
***
But a far more devastating result of the war, and the third
hinge of Morris's detailed account of it, remains the most contentious
today: the 700,000 Palestinian refugees it displaced. The Palestinians'
flight began on the first day of the war, in November 1947; Morris
estimates that during the civil-war stage 75,000 to 100,000 fled or
were displaced. The first to flee were Arab notables, who escaped to
Beirut, Damascus, and Amman; the Palestinians were deserted by their
own elites. (Morris also discusses the other refugee problem: the
600,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries after the war began.)
The largest wave of refugees, however, took flight between April and
June 1948. They fled for fear of getting caught up in the fighting, or
of living under Jewish rule, or because of the soaring prices and
unemployment brought about by the war. Others feared fellow Arabs who
considered traitorous anyone who accepted Jewish sovereignty. Others
were in effect driven away by their own leaders, or by the promises on
Arab radio that residents could return home as victors after the
imminent invasion by Arab countries.
In still other cases, Israeli soldiers, worried about a fifth
column, encouraged Palestinians to flee, or expelled them. They razed
some villages to prevent Arab forces from using them. But the Israeli
policy was inconsistent and ad hoc. In Lydda and Ramla, the IDF
expelled 50,000 residents (under orders issued by Rabin). In Isdud and
Khirbet Khisas, the IDF ordered inhabitants who had not already fled to
leave. At Majdal, by contrast, the IDF encouraged the villagers to
stay, and even asked those who had already left to come back. In Haifa,
Mayor Shabtai Levy pled with his city's Arabs to stay. In Acre, many
Arab residents did remain, and became Israeli citizens. The Galilee was
left with substantial Arab populations. (Today, 20% of Israel's
citizens are Arabs.)
Morris doesn't shrink from describing Israeli crimes—the looting of
Arab houses; the execution of dozens in the village of Dawayima;
massacres in the villages of Hule and Saliha along the Lebanon border;
the atrocities committed in April 1948 by Ezel and Lechi fighters in
the village of Deir Yassin, which included shooting unarmed prisoners.
Nor, for that matter, does Morris gloss over Arab massacres of Jews.
He describes the cruel deaths of the inhabitants of the Etzion Bloc,
south of Jerusalem, at the hands of the Arab Legionnaires to whom they
had surrendered. And he tells how in revenge for Deir Yassin, Arabs
ambushed a convoy of Jewish doctors, nurses, students, and academics on
their way to Hebrew University, burning them alive. Seventy-eight died.
But Morris suggests that Arabs simply had fewer opportunities to
commit atrocities; while Israelis captured hundreds of Arab villages
and towns over the war's course, the Arabs took fewer than a dozen
Israeli settlements. Each of those, however, was destroyed. More to the
point, Morris rejects the notion that the Haganah had a master plan for
the expulsion of the country's Arabs.
On the contrary, Zionist leaders took for granted the full equality
of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state. In a letter to his son
ten years before the war, Ben-Gurion wrote: "We do not wish and do not
need to expel Arabs and take their place. All our aspiration is built
on the assumption—proven throughout our activity—that there is enough
room for ourselves and the Arabs in Palestine." Ten years later, he
declared hopefully:
If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state...if the state
will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic,
social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust
will accordingly subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic,
Jewish-Arab alliance.
"By contrast," Morris concludes, "expulsionist thinking and, where
it became possible, behavior, characterized the mainstream of the
Palestinian national movement since its inception."
Due to the availability of copious Israeli archival materials and
the paucity of comparable Arab sources, Morris's book suffers an
inevitable foreshortening of perspective. It takes us inside Israeli
cabinet meetings, for instance, but cannot shed much light on internal
Arab deliberations. On the whole, however, 1948 is
dispassionate in its tone, meticulous in its research, patient in its
pace, and comprehensive in its scope. In presenting the first
Arab-Israeli war as a culmination of Arab resistance to the Zionist
enterprise, and in placing that war convincingly in the context of the
still raging confrontation between Islamism and the West, Benny
Morris's history furnishes a compelling view of the origins of a
conflict still very much with us. In ably following the thread of Arab
rejectionism that wends its tragic way to the present, and in
forcefully demonstrating that the Palestinian refugee problem was in
large part created by a war the Arabs had initiated and lost
, this book also offers an eloquent recovery of some political truths
about the Middle East that have grown lamentably obscure.
Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem.