The '48 Nakba and the Zionist Quest for Its
Completion
Ilan Pappe—October 30, 2002
This article originally
appeared on Between the
Lines at http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2002/oct/Ilan_Pappe.htm.
This article is based upon the transcript
of a lecture presented by Dr. Pappe to the Right to Return Coalition—Al
Awda UK, held at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London
on Monday, September 16, 2002. It is hereby published after receiving
Dr. Pappe’s consent and editorial remarks.
I have come here to present the
comprehensive story of the history of the expulsion and ethnic cleansing
of the Palestinians in 1948 and its relevance to the present and future
agenda to peace in Palestine.
For Israelis, 1948 is a year in which two things happened which contradict
each other: On the one hand, it was the climax of Jewish aspirations
to have a state or to fulfill a long dream of returning to a homeland
after what they regarded as 2000 years of exile. In other words, it
was considered a miraculous event that only positive adjectives could
be attached to, and that you could only talk about and remember as a
very elated kind of event. On the other hand, it was the worst chapter
in Jewish history. Jews did in 1948 in Palestine what Jews had not done
anywhere for 2000 years prior. The most evil and most glorious moment
converged into one. What Israeli collective memory did was to erase
one side of the story in order to co-exist or to live with only the
glorious chapter. It was a mechanism for solving an impossible tension
between two collective memories.
Because so many of the people who live in Israel lived through 1948,
this is not a distant memory. It is not the genocide of the Native Americans
in the United States. People know exactly what they did, and they know
what others did. Yet they still succeed in erasing it totally from their
own memory while struggling rigorously against anyone trying to present
the other, unpleasant, story of 1948, in and outside Israel. If you
look at Israeli textbooks, curricula, media, and political discourse
you see how this chapter in Jewish history - the chapter of expulsion,
colonization, massacres, rape, and the burning of villages - is totally
absent. It is not there. It is replaced by a chapter of heroism, glorious
campaigns and amazing stories of moral courage and superiority unheard
of in any other histories of people’s liberation in the 20th century.
So whenever I speak of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, we
must remember that not just the very terms of “ethnic cleansing”
and “expulsion” are totally alien to the community and society
from which I come and from where I grew up; the very history of that
chapter is either distorted in the recollection of people, or totally
absent.
Now, when you start reading the diaries of the leaders of Zionism, and
researching their ideologies and ideological trends since the movement’s
conception in the late 19th century, you see that from the very beginning
there had been the realization that the aspiration for a Jewish state
in Palestine contradicts the fact that an indigenous people had been
living on the land of Palestine for centuries and that their aspirations
contradicted the Zionist schema for the country and its people. The
presence of a local society and culture had been known to the founding
fathers of Zionism even before the first settlers set foot on the land.
Two means were used in order to change the reality in Palestine, and
impose the Zionist interpretation on the local reality: the dispossession
of the indigenous population from the land and its re-populating with
newcomers - i.e. settlement and expulsion. The colonization effort was
pushed forward by a movement that had not yet won regional or international
legitimacy and therefore had to buy land, and create enclaves within
the indigenous population. The British Empire was very helpful in bringing
this scheme into reality. Yet from the very beginning of Zionist strategy,
the leaders of Zionism knew that settlement is a very long and measured
process, which may not be sufficient if you want to revolutionize the
reality on the ground and impose your own interpretation. For that,
you needed something more powerful. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of
the Jewish community in the 1930s and later the first Prime Minister
of Israel, mentioned more than once, that for that [imposing your interpretation
on the ground] you need what he called “revolutionary conditions”.
He meant a situation of war - a situation of change of government, a
twilight zone between an old era and the beginning of a new one. It
is not surprising to read in the Israeli press today that Ariel Sharon
thinks that he is the new Ben Gurion who is about to lead his people
into yet another revolutionary moment - the war with Iraq - in which
expulsion, and not a political settlement, can be used to further, indeed,
to complete the process of de-Arabizing Palestine and Judaizing it,
which had begun in 1882.
Towards the end of the British Mandate, there was a need to make these
more theoretical and abstract ideas about expulsion into a concrete
plan. I have been writing about 1948 since 1980, and for much of that
time have been concerned with the question of whether there had or hadn’t
been a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians in 1948. Then I
realized, (largely as a result of what I have learned in the last two
years), that this was not the right track: neither for academic research
nor from more popular ideological research of what has happened in the
past. Far more important for ethnic cleansing is the formulation of
an ideological community, in which every member, whether a newcomer
or a veteran, knows only too well that they have to contribute to a
recognized formula: the only way to fulfill the dream of Zionism is
to empty the land of its indigenous population.
Master plans are not the most important component in preparing yourself
for that time of a revolutionary juncture or for the contingency plans
of how to practically make the idea of expulsion a reality. You need
something else: you need an atmosphere, you need people who are indoctrinated,
you need commanders in every link of the chain of command who would
know what to do even if they don’t have explicit orders when the
time comes. Most of the preparations before the ‘48 War were less
about a master plan (although I do think there was one). The commanders
were busy compiling intelligence files for each Palestinian village
for the use of Jewish commanders on all levels, so they would know how
wealthy and how important each particular village was as a military
unit etc. Armed with such intelligence, they were also aware of what
was expected from them by the man who stood at the top of the Jewish
pyramid in Palestine, David Ben Gurion and his colleagues. These leaders
wanted only to know how each operation contributed to the Judaization
of Palestine, and they made it perfectly clear that they did not care
how it was done. The expulsion plan worked very smoothly exactly because
there was no need for a systematic chain of command that had to check
whether a master plan was fully implemented. Anyone who has done any
research on ethnic cleansing operations in the second half of the 20th
century knows that this is exactly how ethnic cleansing is achieved:
by creating the kind of education and indoctrination systems that ensures
that every soldier and every commander, and everyone with his individual
responsibility, knows exactly what to do when they enter a village,
even if they haven’t received any specific orders to expel its
inhabitants.
Just recently, as a result of reading testimonies not only of Palestinians
but also of Israeli soldiers, it became clear to me that the master
plan, although significant in itself, pales in comparison to the whole
machinery of indoctrination of a community. In 1948, the Yishuv’s
[the pre-’48 Zionist community] population was a little more than
half a million, and before 1948 was even less. Those who had an active
role in the military aspects of their community knew precisely what
to do when the moment came and not one moment too soon.
But it should be remembered that the plan was successful not only because
of the ideological indoctrination. It was done under the eyes of the
UN, which had been committed ever since its General Assembly adopted
Resolution 181 to the safety and welfare of those ‘cleansed’.
The UN was obliged to protect the life of the Palestinian people who
were supposed to live in the areas allocated to the Jewish State (they
were meant to make up almost half of the population of the prospective
state). Out of 900,000 Palestinians living both in these areas and additional
areas occupied by Israel from the designated Arab states, only 100,000
remained. Within a very short period during the time in which the UN
was already responsible for Palestine, a massive expulsion operation
took place within a very short period of time.
We have yet to be told the most horrific stories of 1948, although so
many of us have been working as professional historians on that. We
haven’t talked about the rape. We haven’t talked about the
more than 30 or 40 massacres which popular historiography mentions.
We haven’t yet decided how to define the systematic killing of
several individuals that took place in each and every village in order
to create the panic that should produce the exodus. Is this a massacre
or not when it is systematically repeated in every village? It is quite
possible that some chapters will never be revealed, and many of them
do not depend on archives, but rather on the memory of people whom we
are loosing each day as vital witnesses. There were not specific orders
written, only an atmosphere that has to be reconstructed. A glimpse
into that atmosphere can be found on the bookshelves of almost every
house in Israel - in the official books that glorify the Israeli army
in its activity in 1948. If you know how to read them, you can see how
the Palestinians were de-humanized to such a degree that you could rely
on the troops, and that they would know what to do.
Noam Chomsky was correct in his analysis that we in Palestine/Israel
and the Middle East as a whole were eagerly playing the American game
ever since they decided to take an active role in the peace process,
beginning in 1969 with the Rogers Plan, and then with the Kissinger
initiatives. Ever since then, the peace agenda has been an American
game. The Americans invented the concept of the peace process, whereby
the process is far more important than peace. America has contradictory
interests in the Middle East, which include protecting certain regimes
in the area that preserve American interests (therefore entailing paying
lip service to the Palestinian cause) while also has a commitment to
Israel. In order not to find itself facing these two contradictory agendas,
it is best to have an ongoing process which is not war and not peace
but something which you can describe as a genuine American effort to
reconcile between the two sides - and God forbid if this reconciliation
works. We were playing this game not only because the Americans invented
it, but also because the replacement of peace with a “peace process”
became the main strategy of the Israeli peace camp. When the peace camp
of the stronger party in the local balance of power accepts this interpretation
then the world at large follows suit.
Such a process, which can and should go on forever, coached by the only
superpower and supported by the peace camp of the stronger party in
the conflict, is presented as peace. One of the best ways of safeguarding
the process from being successful is to evade all the outstanding issues
at the heart of the problem. In such a way it was possible to erase
the events of 1948 from the peace agenda and focus on what happened
in 1967. The outstanding issue became the territories Israel occupied
in the 1967 war. The concept of “territories for peace”
was invented simultaneously in Tel Aviv, London, Paris and New York
for United Nations Resolution 242. It presents a very concrete variable,
in fact about 20% of Palestine, while wiping out the remainder 80% from
the formula and juxtaposes it against “peace”, which is
in fact the never-ending peace process. A process that was not meant
to bring a solution, let alone reconciliation. In return for a peace
process, the Palestinians would be allowed to talk about and maybe gradually
build something of a political entity on 20% of Palestine.
In 1988 [after the PNC accepted UN 242 in Algiers] and 1993 [at the
Oslo Accords] even the Palestinian leadership joined this game. No wonder
then that after Oslo, the American policy makers felt that they could
round up the whole story. They had Palestinian and Israeli leaderships
that accepted the name of the American game. This was the beginning
of the process, which culminated with the “the most generous Israeli
offer ever made about peace” in the Camp David summit in the summer
of 2000. Had this process been successful, history would have witnessed
not only the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948
but the eradication of the refugees, as well as of the Palestinian minority
in Israel, and maybe even Palestine, from our collective memory.
It was a process of elimination that succeeded to a certain extent,
were it not for the second uprising. I wonder what would have happened
had the second Intifada not broken out. If the Palestinian leadership
continued to partake in the ploy to shrink Palestine, physically and
morally, it would have succeeded. The second Intifada was trying to
stop this. Whether or not it will succeed, we do not know.
The problem for us as peace activists, is that any coordinated pressure
on Israel to stop its plans, can in an absurd way lead the Israelis
to accelerate their plans for wiping out Palestine, namely to feel that
the revolutionary circumstances have arrived. This is my greatest fear
for the second Intifada. I fully support it and regard it as a popular
movement determined to stop a peace process which would have destroyed
Palestine once and for all. The uprising, and certainly on top of it
the coming war against Iraq, have produced in the minds of Israelis
- of all walks of life not only within the circles of the Right-wing
camp - the idea that “we have reached yet another fortuitous juncture
in history where revolutionary conditions have developed for solving
the Palestine question once and for all.” You can see this new
assertion talked about in Israel: the discourse of transfer and expulsion
which had been employed by the extreme Right, is now the bon ton of
the center. Established academics talk and write about it, politicians
in the center preach it, and army officers are only too happy to hint
in interviews that indeed should a war against Iraq begin, transfer
should be on the agenda.
This brings me to chart what I think are three agendas of peace, for
anyone involved in supporting peacemaking in Israel and Palestine, otherwise
we may miss the train, so to speak.
The first agenda is the most urgent one: we must all take the danger
of a recurrence of the 1948 ethnic cleansing very seriously. This is
not just paranoia when I directly - not indirectly - link the
war against Iraq with the possibility of another Nakba. Take it seriously,
believe me. There is a serious Israeli conceptualization of the situation
in which Israeli leaders say to themselves, “we have a carte blanche
from the Americans. The Americans will not only allow us to cleanse
Palestine once and for all, they even will help create the window of
opportunity for implementing our scheme. We will be condemned by the
world, but this will be short-lived and eventually forgotten. This is
a rare opportunity to ‘solve’ the problem.”
The second agenda is the immediate one, and that is ending the occupation.
We should be very careful in adopting the American, the Israeli Peace
Now, and I’m sorry to say, the Palestinian Authority discourse
about a two-state solution. Because the two-state solution nowadays
is not the end of the occupation but continuing it in a different way.
It is meant to be the end of the conflict with no solution to the refugee
problem and the complete abandonment of the Palestinian minority in
Israel. Anybody who has not learned this after the Oslo Accords has
a problem of understanding and interpreting reality. We have to make
sure that the idea of peace is not hijacked by people who are seeking
indirect ways of continuing the present situation in Palestine. This
is not easy because the western media has already adopted within its
main vocabulary that anyone who wants to present himself as a peacemaker
or as a supporter of peace, must talk about a two-state solution.
Only after the occupation ends can we talk about what it entails. Then
it is possible to discuss the political structure best needed to prevent
a reoccupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But it should be
clear that the political structure needed to end the conflict is a different
one. It has to be one that enables us to end refugeehood and the apartheid
policies against the Palestinians inside Israel. We have to be sure
not to get caught in the same cul de sac that Yassir Arafat found himself
in Camp David when he was asked to equate the end of occupation (when
it wasn’t even the end of occupation) with the end of the conflict.
Finally, and this is our third agenda, we have to keep on thinking about
how to devise concrete plans for making the Right of Return feasible
and for making possible the end of discrimination against Palestinians
in Israel. These are the two pillars of a comprehensive settlement and
they have to be specified. I think it is quite clear that we haven’t
done that job yet: we are still stuck with slogans of the 1960’s,
of a secular democratic state. These slogans have to be updated according
to the reality of 2002. What was meant in the 1960’s by a secular
democratic state is a possible vision for the distant future. Our focus
on the urgent and immediate agenda should not absolve us from long-term
strategies. What people need to hear from us are concrete plans, even
if they sound utopian given the situation on the ground. This is a delicate
enterprise which entails not only creating a political culture and structure
that would rectify past evils, and prevent another catastrophe, but
also one which would not inflict another evil, or replace the past evil
with a new one. We are not calling for the expulsion of the Jews. We
do want the Right of Return. We do want equal rights for the Palestinian
citizens.
I think many of us who think in such a long-term span would like to
see one state or a political structure which has one state in it. But
you cannot disseminate these ideas by just giving highlights, nuggets
or slogans. There needs to be a very serious and detailed presentation
of such a solution, to convince people of its feasibility.
Finally I want to come back to where I started. In the collective Israeli
memory there are two 1948s: one is totally erased, and one is totally
glorified. But there is a young generation in Israel - and I have ample
opportunities to meet with young audiences - who may prove to have a
potential to look differently at the reality in the future. The fact
that you have generations of young people who are basically willing
to listen to universal principles, provides the opportunity to break
the mirror and show them what really happened in 1948, and what is going
on in 2002. I think we shall eventually find partners, even to our wildest
dreams, on how a solution should look like. The problem is of course,
that while we do this - educate, disseminate information etc. - the
government of Israel is preparing a very swift and bloody operation.
If it succeeds, even our best dreams and energies would be wasted.
The article comes from the latest
issue of Between the Lines,
a magazine produced in Israel/Palestine by Dr. Tikva Honig-Parnass and
Toufic Haddad. They have a website at www.between-lines.org
and their email is btl@palnet.com.