The Idea of Israel (18 page)

Shlaim focused on the secret negotiations between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Transjordan until 1949) and the Zionist leadership. His book
Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine
followed these negotiations
from the moment they began in the 1930s until their culmination in a tacit understanding that allocated to Jordan parts of Palestine that the UN defined as the future Arab state in its partition resolution of November 1947.
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This pre-1948 war agreement neutralised the Jordanian army and confined its activity to the Jerusalem area. In many ways, Shlaim showed that this tacit understanding explained the Jewish success on the battlefield. The Jordanians had the only modern army in the Arab world; it had battle experience and included a strong contingent of British officers. The Arab Legion was thus the ablest Arab army, and so its neutralisation and limitation to one front, the Jerusalem front, removed a serious threat to the existence of the young state. The claim of a prior agreement also forms an important chapter in the Palestinian narrative.

In my own career as a historian, the 1982 war loomed large. It was an assault that ended in the loss of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese, and culminated in the brutal Israeli occupation of Beirut. The massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila by Christian Phalangists, with the full knowledge of the occupying Israeli army, caused hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews to demonstrate, for the first time in the state’s history, against an ongoing army operation.

I was born in Israel in 1954 and graduated from the Hebrew University in 1979. During the research phase of my doctorate studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford, the 1982 war broke out. I had been working on British policy during the 1948 war. In the resulting book,
Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951
, I relied mainly on British documents released in the 1980s.
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In so doing, I completed the picture of collusion drawn by Avi Shlaim by highlighting Britain’s part in it.

In classical Zionist historiography, Britain was mainly pro-Hashemite and played a highly negative role. But it turned out that even the ‘villain’ Ernest Bevin opposed the idea of an independent Palestinian state and supported, as did the rest of his staff, the partitioning of post-Mandatory Palestine between the Jews and the Hashemites, which he viewed as the best means of safeguarding British interests in the area. Shlaim and I thus corrected the demonised image of Britain in Israeli collective memory; we showed Britain’s behaviour
to have been neutral in the conflict and even, on various occasions, pro-Israeli.
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But in
Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict
I accuse British forces of indifference towards the dispossession of the Palestinians. The British troops watched the expulsion of the Palestinians and at times, such as in Haifa and Jaffa, played a dubious role by exerting pressure of their own on the resident population to leave or be exposed to the Zionist occupation, undefended by the British. As a result, they facilitated the transfer of the Palestinians from both these cities.

I have also shown that the British intelligence documents reaffirm Flapan’s refutation of the story that the war of 1948 was fought between an Arab Goliath and a Zionist David. The British chiefs of staff wrote a highly detailed assessment of the balance of power on the eve of the war, which was to be sent to the cabinet in London. It was based mainly on reports submitted by the various British advisers to the heads of the Arab armies at the time. Each in turn, the Arab armies were assessed as being unable to endure for more than a brief period on the battlefield.
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For a book I wrote shortly afterwards,
The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951
, I also excavated available Arab documentation of the war.
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I looked at the reports of the military commanders to their political masters, in which they drew a dismal picture of their armies’ level of preparation, commitment, and ability to perform on the battlefield. As I have shown, this led the Arab League, and most of the Arab leaders to request the international community to prolong the Mandate over Palestine and to seek a new peace plan. But the massacre at Deir Yassin, in which 250 innocent civilians were slaughtered on the north-western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains, together with the forced depopulation of most of the Palestinian towns, pushed public opinion towards a demand for action in Palestine. In any case, the international community disregarded these desperate calls and insisted that only the UN partition plan was the way forward. And yet, as I showed, one day before the actual war broke out, most Arab leaders were still trying to avoid a military operation that they knew only too well would end in a fiasco. The final decision to enter Palestine was taken on May 14, 1948.

In addition, I confronted one of the main arguments raised against Flapan: that his depiction of the balance of power as favouring the Zionist side could not be right because of the high number of Jewish casualties in the war (one per cent of the community). In fact, considerable numbers of casualties were caused by local and civil clashes during the period preceding the war itself; regular Arab troops were not involved in these confrontations, and therefore the losses could not have been attributed to their firepower or superiority. I also stressed that Ben-Gurion’s policy of trying to defend isolated settlements led to some unnecessary and desperate battles that did not necessarily reflect the overall balance of power. Finally, I argued that the great number of casualties in the battle for Jerusalem and its vicinity could have been avoided, since the parties involved (the Jordanians and the Israelis) had already reached non-aggression arrangements regarding other fronts in Palestine.
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The balance of power was further enhanced in Israel’s favour due to a successful diplomatic campaign. The achievements on that front were attributable to a rare cooperation between the two warring superpowers in 1947, with each for its own reasons supporting the Zionist cause against the Palestinians.

The Truman administration was probably the first ever to succumb to the power of a Jewish lobby (although in those days there was no AIPAC or a structured effort). In February 1948 the administration was still giving serious consideration to replacing the partition plan with a new scheme that would extend the Mandate over Palestine for an additional five years and would seek a new solution. But this approach was abandoned after prominent Jewish leaders visited the president in the White House to exert pressure on him. Although his secretary of state, George Marshall, was not enthusiastic about the creation of a Jewish state, his military strategists hoped it would become an asset in the ensuing Cold War. I have also shown that Truman was moved by his visit to the Holocaust sites and that he accepted the Zionist contention that the best response to the atrocity was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

As for the Soviet Union, it hoped that the Jewish state would be on its side in the Cold War because of the prominent role played
by socialist parties in the Jewish community – Israel’s second-largest party, Mapam, respected Stalin and his policies, and Stalin’s death became an official day of mourning for the Kibbutz Movement. The Communist Party was also very loyal to Moscow, and some of its members helped the Hagana purchase weapons in the Eastern bloc (Britain and France had imposed an embargo on arms sales to both sides).

This dual backing also ensured victory in the United Nations. ‘The world’ was not ‘against us’, as the Israeli myth declared. In fact, the world opposed the basic Palestinian demand to recognise their demographic majority as a basis for the creation of an independent state in Palestine. Generally speaking, the Zionists succeeded in persuading large segments of world opinion to accept the idea of Israel as the best response to the horrors of the Holocaust. Against such a claim, even able Palestinian diplomats – and there were not many in those days – could hardly win the diplomatic game, as was faithfully reflected in the UN Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP.
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Taken together, these points showed that the success of the Jewish side was explained by the overall parity of forces on the ground, the understanding with the Transjordanians, and international support and pressure. Clearly, victory had not been delivered by some kind of miraculous good fortune, as the official historiography would have it.

In my book I also took some issue with Benny Morris’s analysis of the making of the refugee problem. It was a scholarly debate that turned bitter in the next century. For purposes of the future marketing of the idea of Israel, the myth of the Palestinians’ voluntary flight was the most important myth challenged by the ‘new historians’. This is why many of the documents on the expulsions and atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers have been reclosed to the public.

Morris, as was pointed out, debunked this myth in his book. Nevertheless, he did not accept the Palestinian historiographical claim, first made by Walid Khalidi in 1961, that the expulsion was part of a master plan.
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This difference of opinion showed that there was still a gap between the Palestinian national narrative and the ‘new history’. It did not seem crucial at the time, but this distinction would later become perilous and would reveal Morris to be
more loyal to the Zionist narrative than he had seemed to be at first. The casting of blame and responsibility on Israel was not simply an argument about historical accuracy; it was also a debate about the solution to the refugee problem.
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For example, the intentional expulsion, which I have elsewhere called ‘ethnic cleansing’, located the Israeli actions in 1948 within the history of war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, with wider implications for a future solution of the problem.
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Later, Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem would become an important issue in the diplomatic war with the Arab world. World opinion – however elusive that term may be – while supporting Israel’s right to exist, nonetheless sympathised with the plight of the refugees. Moreover, even pro-Zionists could not ignore Israel’s responsibility for the problem, a problem that has been persistently shunned by Israeli governments to this day.

Lastly, my second book tackled the final myth that Flapan refuted: Israel’s relentless and unreciprocated search for peace. This chapter in the ‘new history’ was missing from the Palestinian narrative. I claimed that there was a genuine willingness on the part of most of the Arab governments, along with what was left of the Palestinian leadership, to negotiate a settlement over Palestine after the war. This agreement was based on the Arab acceptance of the 1947 partition recommendation and the repatriation of the refugees. Avi Shlaim, in another, later book,
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
(2000), further undermined Israel’s self-image as the relentless peace seeker and claimed that it had failed to exhaust opportunities for peace with its Arab neighbours from 1948 until our own time.
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Both of us showed that Israel did not extend its hand in peace, and in fact rejected such gestures on the part of a considerable number of Arab leaders. It was the intransigence of Ben-Gurion (his foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, had been more forthcoming) that had blocked the chances for peace in that era.

Two additional books should be mentioned. The first was Tom Segev’s
1949: The First Israelis
, which exposed documents that strengthened the major points made by the above-mentioned ‘new historians’ in our work. Segev was born in 1945 in Jerusalem to
German Jewish parents who arrived in Palestine in 1935; his father died in the 1948 war. After graduating from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he completed his academic studies at Boston University with a PhD on the commanders of the Nazi death camps. Since 1979 he has written for
Haaretz
; periodically he publishes books on the modern history of Israel. In his book
1949
, Segev collated documents that exposed the attitudes of the Jewish political and cultural élite to whoever was different from them, beginning with the way Palestinians in the occupied villages and towns were treated from the first moment of their surrender or occupation.
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The second book was published in 2002 but belongs to this slightly earlier group of works: Meron Benvenisti’s
Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since
1948.
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This work helped complete the historiographical picture of the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. Having been born in Jerusalem in 1934, Benvenisti was half a generation older than Morris, Shlaim, and I were. After a short initial academic career, he became involved in local politics in Jerusalem and served, from 1971 to 1978, as the deputy to the city’s legendary mayor, Teddy Kollek. He became internationally renowned for a project he conducted on Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, concluding that the settlements had become such a fait accompli that it would be impossible ever to dismantle them. As a result, he called for a binational state as the only feasible solution.
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In between writing, as he still does today on that particular issue, he wrote one book on the 1948 events. In it he explored the enthusiasm with which Israel erased the Palestinians’ abandoned villages and transformed them into cultivated land or new Jewish settlements. Archaeologists and architects also took part in the festivities by demonstrating that Arab villages were located on ancient biblical places and suggesting that the Jewish settlements built over them might carry a Hebrew name that sounded like the Arab name of the village, thereby creating a narrative that claims that a given site was first a Jewish place, in biblical times, before becoming Arabised for a time, and was now being properly redeemed. Thus, Lubya became Lavi, Saffuriya became Tzipori, and Maan remained Maan.