The Idea of Israel (44 page)

Klein, who accepts Israeli policy towards the 1948 POWs as unavoidable, notes in passing that intelligence officers had permission to decide on the spot which Palestinians captured in military operations could be executed immediately – a reference that corroborates Palestinian oral recollections of summary executions in occupied villages and neighbourhoods throughout Palestine. Although Klein does report cases of barbarism and executions in the POW camps themselves, he states that these were not the norm and attributes excesses to the major logistical problems that become inevitable when thousands of men are taken prisoner. In his section titled ‘Guards of the Camp’ (
Shomeri Hamahanot
), he also notes that most of the camp guards were members of the Stern Gang and the Irgun, suggesting that if exceptional brutality occurred it came from the ‘extreme right’.
³⁹
According to Klein, anyone over the age of ten who appeared suspicious was a legitimate POW, and the troops were ordered to seize as many POWs as possible.
⁴⁰
While not directly expressing misgivings about the tender age of the child POWs – whom he sometimes refers to as children and sometimes as soldiers – he does appear to want to fend off potential criticism. Thus, we are given the rather extraordinary explanation that small children were captured as POWs only after their mothers had been expelled. This is undoubtedly true, since the Zionist forces separated all male children and adolescents above the age of ten from their mothers before expulsion as a matter of course, but the implication here seems to be that the capture and imprisonment of very young children was a humanitarian act to save them from being left on their own.
⁴¹
With regard to the entire concept of forced labour, Klein commends the Israeli army
for its efficient and purposeful use of the prisoners who fell into their hands. Most of the prisoners were Palestinian teenagers and young men in their early twenties, not soldiers, and were employed in hard labour.
⁴²
The following passage about the construction of labour camps – based on an IDF document that would not have been made available to critical scholars – is a good illustration of neo-Zionist historiography’s bland, matter-of-fact, technocratic approach, which contrasts so sharply with the moral indignation that such information would have occasioned in post-Zionist scholars even when not made explicit in their historical texts:

The occupational potential present in thousands of Arab POWs was enormous. The Israeli market suffered from a serious deficit in working hands and the military system was in urgent need of new [military] bases and many camps. [Furthermore,] the realisation that employing the POWs would solve some of the problems and needs of the IDF led to the decision to build two special labour camps for captives – one in Sarafand and the other in Tel Litvinsky [Tel Hashomer Hospital today]. The building of the camps was completed in September 1948. Another special labour camp was opened for several months in Umm Khalid near Netanya … The construction of labour camps was a significant quantum leap in the exploitation of manpower within the POWs, whose numbers kept growing.
⁴³

Finally, Klein commends the army for introducing order into the system and implies that the situation was beyond their control: ‘Although the young military system of the IDF was not prepared for this affair … it succeeded in organising itself in a reasonable manner and solving satisfactorily the problem of the prisoners’.
⁴⁴
By the end of October or early November 1948, the employment of POWs had been systematised, backed by procedures, orders, forms, and reports. Nowhere in Klein’s account is there any hint about the horrors described in the following first-hand account recorded in the immediate aftermath of the war by a Palestinian survivor:

We were loaded into waiting trucks … Under guard we were driven to Umm Khalid … and from there to forced labour. We had to cut and carry stones all day. Our daily food was only one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at night. They beat anyone who disobeyed orders. After fifteen days they moved 150 men to another camp. I was one of them. It was a shock for me to leave my two brothers behind. As we left the others, we were lined up and ordered to strip naked. To us this was most degrading. We refused. Shots were fired at us. When our names were read we had to respond ‘Sir’ or else. We were moved to a new camp in Al-Jalil village. There we were put immediately to forced labour, which consisted of moving stones from Arab demolished houses. We remained without food for two days, then they gave us a dry piece of bread.
⁴⁵

Klein says little about the camp conditions other than that the prisoners were well fed and paid for their work.
⁴⁶
As reference for this latter claim, he quotes an IDF document summarising what the army told a delegation of the International Red Cross, making no mention that the IRC documents, which juxtapose the IDF report with the testimonies of the inmates, give exactly the opposite impression.
⁴⁷
But at least he does not present the camp experience as something positive for those who lived through it. This is in contrast to the book’s editor, who in his general introduction to the collection comments with regard to Klein’s article that ‘some of them [the Palestinian POWs] must have been happy since they sometimes worked in places where they had earlier been employed by the British’.
⁴⁸

The neo-Zionist historiographical paradigm has now also been introduced into Israel’s educational system. In the late 1990s, two textbooks that hinted at the possibility of Palestinian expulsions in 1948 were under consideration for inclusion in the national curriculum, but after heated debate in the Knesset’s education committee, they were rejected. What was taboo in 1999, however, has become legitimate since 2000, and the Ministry of Education’s official curriculum now uses a book that teaches pupils that the Israeli army began to expel Palestinians and destroy their villages to prevent their
return about a month and a half into the war. Given that the war is officially seen as having begun on 15 May, when the Arab armies entered Palestine (the implementation of Plan Dalet is not considered part of the war), a month and a half into the war would be early July.
⁴⁹
Even leaving aside the rather extraordinary explanation that the expulsions were initiated because the population was no longer leaving voluntarily, there is no historical data to support this version; in fact, all of the evidence presently available in the IDF archives attests to systematic expulsions having depopulated more than three-quarters of the refugees by July. But what is even more noteworthy is that the expulsions are now unambiguously acknowledged in the school curriculum.

After thoroughly examining the history, geography, and civics textbooks addressing the 1948 war that are part of the curriculum, educator Daniel Bar-Tal concluded that the Zionist view of the conflict predominates and that the works convey an image of Jewish victimhood and a negative stereotyping of the Arabs.
⁵⁰
Other authors corroborate the finding that Zionism pervades the pedagogy that deals with 1948.
⁵¹

The transformation in the Zionist discourse is well illustrated by juxtaposing two quotes from Anita Shapira with regard to the expulsion of the Palestinians. In a 1999 review in the
New Republic
, she wrote:

The Arab panic led to exodus, and to the collapse of the institutions of Palestinian society. The more the magnitude of the exodus became clear, the more admissible and attractive the idea seemed to Israeli leaders and military commanders – not because the Zionist movement had been planning such an evacuation all along, but because a remote option (even if there were some who harboured such hankerings) gained acceptance in the context of the behavior of both sides during the war.
⁵²

Five years later, the Palestinian exodus depicted by Shapira as a ‘remote option’, barely contemplated by the Israeli political and military leadership as late as spring 1948 (even though some may
have ‘harboured hankerings’ for it) could suddenly be presented concretely and no longer qualified as contingent on the behaviour of the Arab side. In her 2004 biography of Yigal Allon, for example, Shapira wrote that he ‘was the most consistent supporter of transferring the Palestinians and even committed massive expulsions in the war of independence’ and ‘had no hesitation in expelling the Arab population en masse’. She also approvingly quotes Allon’s statement at a public lecture in 1950 that an ‘eternal justification’ (that is, the eternal right of the Jewish people to a homeland without ‘aliens’) validated the massive expulsion of the Palestinians. To this, she added that he ‘did his best not only to occupy the land of Israel, but also to depopulate it’.
⁵³

The extent of the official or mainstream embrace of the reality of the expulsions as something positive, as the necessary prelude to the attainment of Jewish rights, is also well illustrated by the fact that the ‘virtual campus’ of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology, an NGO that partners with, among other bodies, Israel’s Ministry of Education, carries numerous references to the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.

In yet another example of facts formerly denied but now embraced, in the late 1990s the new historians had successfully demolished the characterisation of the 1948 war as a Jewish David against the Arab Goliath, a myth that was crucial for developing both contempt for Arabs and Palestinians and for cultivating a sense of invincibility of almost metaphysical proportions. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the IDF released two documents revealing that the Israeli forces had a military advantage of two to one during the 1948 war, a fact now widely accepted but presented in a way that strengthens rather than weakens faith in this mythology. The following quote from Leah Segal of the neo-Zionist school of thought is a good illustration.

[These documents] teach us that 1948 was not a war of the few against the many. This is an undeniable fact today. But why do people claim that it debunks the myth of the few against the many? How did an army representing 65,000 people defeat armies that represented 35 million people? The answer is it was ‘a war between quality and quantity’.
⁵⁴

Any other interpretation, she adds, is from the school of historians ‘such as Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim’, who willingly became the spokespeople of Palestinian propaganda.

It is evident, then, that the transition in Israel from a hopeful period of peace to the pessimism of war has been reflected in professional historiography and ideological debates within Israeli Jewish society. As noted in the previous chapter, this was part of a more general trajectory travelled by the idea of Israel, as a historical narrative, since the appearance of the ‘new history’. The post-Zionist critique of Israel’s past and present conduct, sometimes to the point of questioning the fundamental legitimacy and moral validity of the Zionist ideology, was replaced by a neo-Zionist stance which strongly adheres to the basic tenets of classical Zionist ideology.

This vacillation indicates ideology’s powerful hold on scholarly Israeli historiography. The contribution of ideology was already evident in the early 1990s, when the scholarly debate in Israel regarding what happened in 1948 was conducted not only on the academic stage but even more so in the public arena, where a discourse of patriotism and humanism was often employed to justify both positions. That the professional Israeli historiography of 1948 is so clear an example of the biased nature of the historiographical enterprise arises from the central role of 1948 in the national narratives of both Palestinians and Israelis. The Zionist movement regards 1948 as a miraculous year, whereas the Palestinians regard it as a cataclysmic catastrophe, having produced both the State of Israel and the Palestinian refugee problem. Both issues will remain open as long as the conflict continues.

A review of the reversals of fortune of post-Zionism and the concomitant ascendance of neo-Zionism in the research on 1948 can serve other purposes besides demonstrating how ideology impacts academics in agitated societies such as Israel. First, it can provide a barometer of intellectual and cultural orientation of Jewish society in Israel, aspects which are often neglected at the expense of the
near-exclusive focus on government policies and military strategies as the only determinants of a state’s position on a given reality. Second, it confirms once again that the struggle over memory will remain a crucial factor in shaping the conflictual reality of Israel and Palestine and will impact the chances for any future reconciliation.

As a final footnote, I would add that the currently prevailing consensus in Israel, with its many justifications of whatever happened during the 1948 war, has far-reaching political implications. It reveals an Israel unwilling to reconcile with the past and with the Palestinians, an Israel overly confident that its policies of ethnic cleansing and dispossession can be morally justified and politically maintained as long as there are Western academics and politicians who are reluctant to apply the same set of values and judgements to the Jewish state that they have applied, quite brutally, to countries in the Arab and Muslim world.

EPILOGUE

Brand Israel 2013

The Domestic Front

I
n 2010 the Israeli minister of culture and sport, formerly the minister of education, Limor Livnat, initiated an award for Zionist-oriented art. The prize would be given to artists who have produced a work that reflect Zionism, Zionist values, the history of the Zionist movement, or the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. It would be given ‘in all fields of culture – performing arts, plastic arts, and cinema’, said the minister, ‘in a bid to make it clear that we are against boycotts and in favour of Zionist culture’.
¹