Arabs Rewriting History

Arab reaction from 1949 shows Israel isn’t exclusively responsible for refugee problem.

By Alexander Joffe, Asaf Romirowsky

The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said called Palestinians “the victims of the victims.” As the September deadline for the Palestinian “Unilateral Declaration of Independence” approaches, and the certain endorsement by the United Nations General Assembly, it is worth asking again who originally victimized the Palestinians. Today, of course, the unanimous consensus among Palestinians, and the Arab and Muslim worlds, is that it was Israel that, in 1948, attacked and expelled Palestinians. But who did Palestinians blame for their fate in 1949?

The two largest Palestinian communities in the US are located in Dearborn Michigan and Jacksonville Florida. On December 15th, 1949 the Michigan Arab newspaper As Sabah (literally the Morning Tribune) published an editorial on the question of the Palestine Arab refugees:

“What is the crime of the refugees in the eyes of the lords of Arabia who stand by and watch the misery of the refugees, and who suck the blood of the poor and needy-without shame before God and the world? Yes the poor refugees committed the crime of listening to those deceivers, they believed the liars, and went to the extreme foolishness of leaving their homes, counting on their deceitful leaders to bring them back! And because of what is happening to the Palestine refugees, Arab public opinion is changing little by little to support the Jews in Israel where not a single Arab dies from starvation and cold! And if there should be another war, it should be against the Arab leaders, the princes and kings who brought this catastrophe upon the poor people of Palestine.”

The editorial’s analysis regarding Arab public opinion favoring Israel was incorrect, to say the least. But the claim that Palestinians fled their homes in response to Arab leaders has been controversial since the events occurred. The Palestinians of Michigan in 1949 thought this was the case.

In October 1949, Palestinian intellectual Musa Alami wrote: “What concerned (the Arab states) most and guided their policy was not to win the war and save Palestine from the enemy, but what would happen after the struggle, who would be predominant in Palestine, or annex it themselves.”

British testimonials

But in addition to the usurpation of the Palestinian cause, which upset As Sabah’s editorialists, there was another dimension. British officials on the scene at the time, hardly pro-Zionist, were convinced that Palestinian leaders were steadily abandoning their people. In December 1947 the High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham reported that “panic of (the) middle class persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country." He added later in April 1948, “In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing.”

In June 1949 Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo reported that the refugees “express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. “We know who our enemies are,” they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes…I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.”

Israeli officials maintained from the beginning that a majority of the Palestinians were encouraged to flee by their own leaders and those of Arab states, who then abandoned them before or in the midst of battle. This has long been dismissed by Palestinians and their supporters as Zionist propaganda. But British officials on the scene and opposed to Israel, and Palestinians in America, would not have simply parroted their enemy’s assessment.

The implications of this long-forgotten editorial, and all the other statements, are in the first instance that Israel does not bear full and exclusive responsibility for the Palestinian refugee situation – the Arab states and the Palestinians themselves do too. This also puts their upcoming “Unilateral Declaration of Independence” into a wholly different light.

In effect, Palestinian leaders have asked the United Nations for yet another opportunity to turn the clock back to give them another chance at achieving statehood that could have been theirs in 1948 or even in 1938. Meanwhile, some Palestinian officials have begun floating the idea of returning to the 1947 partition plan, the same plan that their predecessors rejected summarily in 1947. When do these chances run out? In the process, as their predecessors did in 1949, they blame everyone but themselves for not having achieved their goals to date.

A culture without a sense of responsibility for its own decisions, that blames others for its own decisions and at the same time perpetually demands that its maintenance is someone else’s responsibility, is not likely to create a stable, functioning nation-state. Any new Palestinian state would be an instant pauper, utterly dependent on aid, primarily from the American taxpayer.

Little wonder then that at least some Palestinian leaders are trying to back off from the Unilateral Declaration of Independence. The “deceivers” that Palestinian Americans of 1949 railed against are ultimately their own leaders and other Arab states. Until new leaders can be found for both, and a new culture of responsibility and self-reliance installed, little progress will be made.

Alexander H. Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky are the authors of "A Tale of Two Galloways: Notes on the Early History of UNRWA and Zionist Historiography,” published in the journal Middle Eastern Studies



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The Acre Prison Break

Acre was conquered by the Ottomans at the beginning of the 16th century. The governor of Galilee, Ahmed al-Jazzar, developed the town, building a fortress and markets and turning it into the 'main gateway' to Eretz Israel (Palestine). Under the British Mandate, the fortress served as a jail, where underground fighters were imprisoned and where eight Irgun fighters went to the gallows. Acre prison was the most highly-guarded fortress in the country; surrounded by walls and encircled to the east and north by a deep moat; the sea to the west. It was located in the heart of an Arab town with no Jewish inhabitants.

Despite these factors, the underground never ceased to plan their escape. The turning point came when an Arab inmate, in charge of supplying oil to the kitchen, related that while working in the oil storeroom (in the south wall of the fortress), he had heard women's voices. This was reported to Eitan Livni, the most senior Irgun prisoner, who deduced that the south wall of the prison bordered on a street or alley in the Old City. The information was conveyed by underground post to the Irgun General Headquarters, with a proposal that the wall of the oil storehouse be exploited for a break-in to rescue the Irgun inmates.

Amichai Paglin (Gidi), chief operations officer, toured Acre disguised as an Arab, and after thorough scrutiny of the area, concluded that a break-in was indeed possible. After discussions at headquarters, Livni received a letter stating that it was possible to breach the wall from outside, but that the success of the operation depended on the ability of the prisoners to reach the south wall on their own. To that end, explosives, detonators and a fuse were smuggled into the jail by the parents of prisoners, who were permitted to bring their sons delicacies, such as jam, oil, and fruit. The explosives were smuggled in inside a can, under a thick layer of jam. A British sergeant opened the can and examined its contents. When he poked inside, he felt hard lumps (in fact gelignite), but accepted the story that the jam had not gelled properly. The detonators and the fuse were concealed in the false bottom of a container of oil, which was also thoroughly examined. The sergeant poked in a long stick to examine the level of the oil, but since the fuse and the detonators were less than one centimeter thick, he did not notice the false bottom.

At that time, 163 Jews were being held in Acre prison (60 of them Irgun members, 22 Lehi and 5 Haganah, the remainder felons) and 400 Arabs. The Irgun General Headquarters decided that only 41 could be freed (30 Irgun members and 11 Lehi members) because it was technically impossible to find hiding places for a larger number of fugitives. Eitan Livni was given the task of deciding who was to be freed and who would remain in jail (the Lehi prisoners chose their own candidates for escape).

The break-in was planned for Sunday, May 4, 1947 at 4 pm. The day before, the fighters met at a diamond factory in Netanya. A map was pinned up and the briefing began. The first speaker was Amichai Paglin, who explained the plan in detail. He was followed by Dov Cohen (Shimshon), who had been appointed commander of the operation. He revealed that the fighters would be disguised as British soldiers and instructed them to conduct themselves in Acre like 'His Majesty's troops'.

After the fighters had been assigned to their units, they were all given an 'English' haircut. The next day, they were taken to Shuni, a former Crusader fortress (between Binyamina and Zichron Yaakov), then serving as a settlement for the Irgun supporters. Twenty of them wore British Engineering Corps uniforms, while three were dressed as Arabs. After they had been briefed and armed, they set out in a convoy of vehicles including a 3-ton military truck, two military vans with British camouflage colors, and two civilian vans. The convoy was headed by the command jeep, and Shimshon, dressed as a be-medalled British captain, sat beside the driver.

When the convoy reached Acre, the two military vans entered the market, while the truck waited at the gate. Ladders were removed from one of the vehicles and the 'engineering unit' went into the Turkish bath-house in order to 'mend' the telephone lines. They climbed the ladders to the roof adjacent to the fortress wall, and Dov Salomon, the unit commander, helped his deputy, Yehuda Apiryon, to haul up the explosive charges and to hook them to the windows of the prison.

At the same time, the two blocking squads had scattered mines along the routes leading to the site of the break-in. One three-man squad was commanded by Avshalom Haviv and the second consisted of two fighters, Michaeli and Ostrowicz.

An additional three-man squad, disguised as Arabs, was positioned north of Acre, and when the operation began they fired a mortar at the nearby army camp. The command jeep halted at the gas station at the entrance to the new town, laid anti-vehicle mines and set fire to the station.

While these units were taking up positions outside the fortress, the plan was being put into effect inside the prison. At 3pm, the doors of the cells were opened for afternoon exercise. Those prisoners who were not scheduled to escape went down to the courtyard to create a diversion, while the escapees remained in their cells. They were divided into three groups, each in a separate cell.

At 4:22 pm. a loud explosion shook the entire area, as the wall of the fortress was blasted open.



The first group of escapees leap out of their cell and ran down the corridor towards the breach in the wall. They had to push their way through a crowd of Arab prisoners who ran out of their cells in panic and blocked their path. The first escapee, Michael Ashbel, attached explosive charges to the locks barring the gate of the corridor, and lit the fuse. There was an explosion, and the gate blew open. The second gate was blown open in the same way, opening the route to freedom. At that moment, the second group went into action; they created an obstruction by igniting kerosene mixed with oil. The ensuing fire blocked the escape route, so that the guards could not reach it. The third group threw grenades at the guards on the roof, who fled. In the confusion created by the explosion, the gunfire and the fire, 41 prisoners made their way to freedom.

The first group of escapees boarded a van and drove off, but the driver mistakenly drove towards Haifa, instead of Mount Napoleon. On the shore, a group of British soldiers who had been bathing in the sea opened fire on them. The driver tried to turn back, but hit the wall of the cemetery and the van overturned. The escapees ran towards a gas station, the soldiers pursuing them. Dov Cohen fired his Bren at them, but was mowed down by a volley of 17 bullets. Zalman Lifshitz, at his side, was also killed. When the firing stopped, five of the first group of 13 escapees were dead, six injured and only two were unscathed. The survivors were returned to jail.

The blocking unit, consisting of Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar and Yaakov Weiss, also suffered a mishap. They did not hear the bugle signal to withdraw and stayed put when the other units had already left Acre. After a protracted battle with British soldiers, they were caught and arrested. The second blocking unit, consisting of Amnon Michaeli and Menahem Ostrowicz, also failed to hear the bugle (which signalled withdrawal) and were likewise caught by the British.

The remaining escapees and members of the strike force in the truck and the second van escaped safely. They reached Kibbutz Dalia, abandoned their vehicles, and made their way on foot to Binyamina. There they were given refuge in the Nahlat Jabotinsky quarter and the following morning were dispersed throughout the country to pre-designated hiding places.

Haim Appelbaum of Lehi, wounded during the retreat, succeeded in boarding the last van, but died soon after. His body was left in the vehicle, and members of Kibbutz Dalia conveyed it to the burial society in Haifa the following day.

To conclude, 27 inmates succeeded in escaping (20 from the Irgun and seven from Lehi). Nine fighters were killed in clashes with the British army; six escapees and three members of the Fighting Force. Eight escapees, some of them injured, were caught and returned to jail. Also arrested were five of the attackers who did not make it back to base. The Arab prisoners took advantage of the commotion, and 182 of them escaped as well.

Despite the heavy toll in human lives, the action was described by foreign journalists as 'the greatest jail break in history'. The London Ha'aretz correspondent wrote on May 5:

The attack on Acre jail has been seen here as a serious blow to British prestige... Military circles described the attack as a strategic masterpiece.

The New York Herald Tribune wrote that the underground had carried out 'an ambitious mission, their most challenging so far, in perfect fashion'.

In the House of Commons, Oliver Stanley asked what action His Majesty's Government was planning to take 'in light of the events at Acre prison which had reduced British prestige to a nadir'.

Shortly after the Acre jail break, Andrei Gromyko, USSR representative to the UN, caused a sensation when he informed the stunned delegates that his country took a favorable view of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Three weeks after the jail break, the five Irgun fighters who had been captured after the operation were put on trial. Three of the defendants - Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss and Meir Nakar - were carrying weapons when they were caught close to the jail wall. They challenged the authority of the court and, after making political statements, were all sentenced to death.

The other two, Michaeli and Ostrowicz, were captured, unarmed, at some distance from the jail. Since there was a chance of saving them from the death penalty, the Irgun General Headquarters decided to conduct a proper defence procedure. The counsel for the defence succeeded in producing documents proving that the two were minors, and the court sentenced them to life imprisonment.

Irgun Fighters in British Uniform

Acre Prison

After-noon walk of Acre prisoners

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The Bombing of the King David Hotel

The King David Hotel in Jerusalem was built by the Moseri family, members of the wealthy and influential Jewish establishment in Cairo and Alexandria. They set up a shareholding company to finance its construction, consisting mainly of Egyptian businessmen and wealthy Jews from all over the world. The luxurious seven-storey building, with 200 rooms, was opened to the public in 1931. In 1938, the Mandatory government requisitioned the entire southern wing of the hotel, and housed the military command and the Mandatory government secretariat there. The British chose the King David for its central location and because it was easy to guard. They built a military communications center in the hotel basement and, for security reasons, added a side entrance linking the building to an army camp south of the hotel. Fewer than a third of the rooms were reserved for civilian use.

It will be recalled that after Black Sabbath (Saturday), Menahem Begin received a letter from Moshe Sneh (chief of the Haganah General Headquarters) with instructions to blow up the King David. After preparatory work and several postponements, Irgun fighters gathered at 7 am. on Monday, July 22, 1946 at the Bet Aharon Talmud Torah seminary in Jerusalem. They arrived one by one, gave the password and assembled in one of the classrooms. They realized that they were being sent on a mission, but none of them knew what the target was. Shortly afterwards, the senior command arrived and it was only when the briefing began that the assembled fighters discovered that they were going to strike at the King David Hotel.

After the weapons had been distributed, the first unit - the group of "porters" - commanded by Yosef Avni, set out. Their assignment was to reach the hotel by bus and to wait at the side entrance so as to assist in unloading the explosives from the van when it arrived. All six "porters" were disguised as Arabs so as to avoid arousing suspicion. The strike force left next in a van loaded with seven milk-churns, each containing 50 kilograms of explosives and special detonators. The commander of the operation, Yisrael Levi (Gidon), rode in the van dressed as a Sudanese waiter, while his deputy, Heinrich Reinhold (Yanai), and the other members of the unit, were dressed as Arabs. The van drove through the streets of Jerusalem, its tarpaulin cover concealing the milk-churns and the passengers, and halted at the side entrance of the hotel, through which foodstuffs were brought into the basement 'La Regence' restaurant. The fighters easily overcame the guards by the gate and hastened to the basement, where they searched all the rooms, and assembled the workers in the restaurant kitchen. They then returned to the van, brought the milk-churns into the restaurant, and placed them beside the supporting pillars . Gidon set the time fuses for 30 minutes, and ordered his men to leave. The staff gathered in the kitchen were told to leave the building 10 minutes later to avoid injury.

During the withdrawal from the basement, heavy gunfire was levelled at the group and two fighters were injured. One of them, Aharon Abramovitch, later died of his wounds.

After exiting the hotel, Gidon summoned two women fighters who were waiting nearby, and ordered them to carry out their mission. They ran over to a nearby telephone booth, and delivered the following message to the hotel telephone operator and to the editorial office of the Palestine Post:

I am speaking on behalf of the Hebrew underground.
We have placed an explosive device in the hotel.
Evacuate it at once - you have been warned.

They also delivered a telephone warning to the French Consulate, adjacent to the hotel, to open their windows to prevent blast damage. The telephone messages were intended to prevent casualties.

Some 25 minutes after the telephone calls, a shattering explosion shook Jerusalem, and reverberated at a great distance. The entire southern wing of the King David Hotel - all seven storeys - was totally destroyed. For reasons unclear, the staff of the government secretariat and the military command remained in their rooms. Some of them were unaware of events, and others were not permitted to leave the building, thus accounting for the large number of victims trapped in the debris.

For ten days, the British Engineering Corps cleared the wreckage, and on July 31 it was officially announced that 91 people had been killed in the explosion: 28 Britons, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and 5 others.

The success of the Jewish underground in striking at the heart of British government in Palestine, and the high toll of victims, sent shock waves through England and the rest of the world. At first, the Mandatory government denied having received a telephone warning, but testimony submitted to the interrogating judge made it clear beyond a doubt that such a warning had in fact been given. Moreover, the Palestine Post telephone operator attested on oath to the police that, immediately after receiving the telephone message, she had telephoned the duty officer at the police station. The French Consulate staff opened their windows as they had been told to by the anonymous woman who telephoned them, and this was further evidence of the warning.

It is almost impossible to recapitulate what occurred in the government secretariat offices in the half hour preceding the explosion, but all the evidence suggests that there were numerous flaws in the security arrangements in the King David, and that a series of omissions occurred. The telephone warning was disregarded, and although the warning signal was given, an all-clear was sounded shortly before the explosion. These facts indicate that there were serious errors in the decision-making process and that internal communication did not function properly.

The heads of the Jewish Agency were stunned. They feared that the British would adopt even more severe retaliatory measures than on Black Sabbath, and hastened to denounce the operation in the strongest terms. The statement they issued the following day expressed "their feelings of horror at the base and unparalleled act perpetrated today by a gang of criminals." Even David Ben-Gurion, who was then in Paris, joined the chorus of condemnation, and in an interview to the French newspaper 'France Soir', declared that the Irgun was "the enemy of the Jewish people".

The denunciation by the Jewish Agency totally ignored the fact that the bombing of the King David was carried out as part of the activities of the United Resistance, and on the explicit instructions of Moshe Sneh. At the request of the Haganah, the Irgun issued a leaflet accepting responsibility for the operation. It stated, among other things:

[...]
e. The telephone warnings were given at 12:10-12:15. And if it is true, as the British liars have announced, that the explosion occurred at 12:37, they still had 22 minutes at their disposal in order to evacuate the building of its residents and workers.
Therefore responsibility for loss of life among civilians rests solely with them.

f. It is not true that the persons who delivered the warning spoke 'on behalf of the United Resistance' (as the press reported)... On this matter, we are refraining at present from making any further statement, but it is possible that - in the context of the savage and dastardly incitement - it will be necessary to issue such a statement at the appropriate time.

g. We mourn the Jewish victims; they too are the tragic victims of the tragic and noble Hebrew war of liberation
[...]

A year later the Irgun issued the following statement:

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE KING DAVID HOTEL

[...]
On July 1 - two days after the British raid on the National Institutions and on our towns and villages -we received a letter from the headquarters of the United Resistance, demanding that we carry out an attack on the center of government at the King David Hotel as soon as possible...

Execution of this plan was postponed several times - both for technical reasons and at the request of the United Resistance. It was finally approved on July 22...

Notwithstanding this, days later, Kol Yisrael broadcast a statement - in the name of the United Resistance - abhorring the high death toll at the King David caused by the actions of the 'dissidents'...

We have kept silent for a whole year. We have faced savage incitement, such as this country has never before known. We have withstood the worst possible provocations - and remained silent. We have witnessed evasion, hypocrisy and cowardice - and remained silent.

But today, when the United Resistance has expired and there is no hope that it will ever be revived... there are no longer valid reasons why we should maintain our silence concerning the assault against the center of Nazi-British rule - one of the mightiest attacks ever carried out by a militant underground. Now it is permissible to reveal the truth; now we must reveal the truth. Let the people see - and judge.

July 22, 1947.
[...]

The Hebrew press, and the Haganah publications, continued to condemn the Irgun in the strongest possible terms. They were echoed by the British press, which was briefed by the Mandatory government. However, the effect of the British denunciations was blunted to a large extent by the publication of instructions issued by General Sir Evelyn Barker (British army commander in Palestine) several hours after the explosion. He ordered all the Jewish places of entertainment, restaurants, shops and Jewish homes - "out of bounds for all British officers and soldiers". The instructions ended by saying that:

"The aim of these orders are to punish the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, namely by striking at their pockets"

Barker's letter reached the Irgun's intelligence service and was immediately made public in Palestine and throughout the world. The antisemitic tone of the letter greatly embarrassed the British government and diverted public opinion from the attack on the King David Hotel. Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the letter and the London Daily Herald wrote, among other things, that if General Barker had in fact written the letter, he was demonstrating his unsuitability for his position.

The order was officially rescinded two weeks after it was issued, but the damage to the British cause in Palestine could not be erased.

However, as a result of Black Sabbath, the moderates now held the upper hand, and at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive in Paris on August 5, 1946, it was decided to terminate the armed struggle against the British in Palestine. This marked the end of the glorious ten-month period when all the Jewish forces in Eretz Israel (Haganah, Irgun and Lehi) fought together against foreign rule.

The terminating of the armed struggle provoked considerable resentment among many members of the Haganah, and Yitzhak Sadeh (commander of the Palmach) gave vent to this emotion in his article "Proposal and Response" in Ahdut Ha'avoda, October 15, 1946 which he signed Noded (Wanderer).

There will be no capitulation, because there is nobody to order capitulation, and should such a person be found, he would find nobody to carry out the order.

The Haganah focused its efforts on bringing in illegal immigrants, and in order to appease those activists in the Haganah ranks who continued to favor armed struggle, it sanctioned the sabotaging of British naval vessels which were hunting down illegal immigrants. Thus, on August 18, 1946, Palmach fighters sabotaged the Empire Haywood and two days later damaged the Empire Rival, the two ships used for deporting immigrants from Haifa to Cyprus.

When the United Resistance ceased to exist, the Irgun and Lehi continued the armed struggle alone. The Irgun was now both morally and materially stronger than ever before. Support for its cause had grown, since the United Resistance had legitimized its activities. The number of recruits increased, and its stock of weapons and ammunition was expanded as a result of its acquisitions from British army depots. Free of the restrictions imposed by the Haganah command, the Irgun now intensified its anti-British activities.

King David Hotel after the explosion

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The Nakba Obsession

THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL NARRATIVE IS THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE TO PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

by Sol Stern

A specter is haunting the prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — the specter of the Nakba.

The literal meaning of the Arabic word is "disaster"; but in its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism). The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians' backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land's native people.

Every year, on the anniversary of Israel's independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western racism and colonialism.

There is only one just compensation for the long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their allies: turning the clock back to 1948.

This would entail ending the "Zionist hegemony" and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees — not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well — would be allowed to return to Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and all the villages that Palestinian Arabs once occupied.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it's also, as it happens, a myth — a radical distortion of history.

If words have any meaning, it is certainly accurate to describe the outcome of the 1948 war as a catastrophe for the Palestinians. Between 600,000 and 700,000 men, women, and children — even more, depending on who is telling the story — left their homes. Palestinian civil society disintegrated. At the war's end, the refugees dispersed to the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, and neighboring Arab countries. Many lived in tents, eking out a bare subsistence, and were then denied the right to return to their homes by the new State of Israel.

During the 1948 war and for many years afterward, the Western world — including the international Left — expressed hardly any moral outrage about the Palestinian refugees. This had nothing to do with Western racism or colonialism and much to do with recent history. The fighting in Palestine had broken out only two years after the end of the costliest military conflict ever, in which the victors exacted a terrible price on the losers.

By that, I don't mean the Nazi officials and their "willing executioners," who received less punishment than they deserved, but the 11 million ethnic Germans living in Central and Eastern Europe — civilians all — who were expelled from their homes and force-marched to Germany by the Red Army, with help from the Czech and Polish governments and with the approval of Roosevelt and Churchill. Historians estimate that 2 million died on the way. Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent was divided into two new countries, India and Pakistan; millions of Hindus and Muslims moved from one to the other, and hundreds of thousands died in related violence. Against this background, the West was not likely to be troubled by the exodus of a little more than half a million Palestinians after a war launched by their own leaders.

In the 1940s, moreover, most of the international Left actually championed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was widely noted that the new state would be led by self-proclaimed socialists. Statehood for the Jews was supported by the Soviet Union and by the Truman administration's most progressive elements. The Palestinians were also compromised by the fact that their leader in 1948, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, had been a Nazi collaborator during the war.

In fact, I. F. Stone, the most revered left-wing journalist of the day, was one of the most influential American advocates for the Zionist cause. I have in my possession a book by Stone called This Is Israel, distributed by Boni and Gaer, a major commercial publisher at the time. The book, based on Stone's reporting during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, has become a collector's item by virtue of the fact that Stone's fans want to forget that it ever existed. Of the four adoring biographies of the great muckraker published in the last decade, only one even mentions that Stone wrote This Is Israel — and then shrugs off its significance in a few paragraphs.

It's obvious why the book would be embarrassing to today's leftist critics of Israel and Zionism. It opens with a foreword by Bartley Crum, the prominent American lawyer, businessman, and publisher of PM, the most widely read progressive newspaper of the 1940s. Crum evokes "the miracles [that the Israelis] have performed in peace and war.... They have built beautiful modern cities, such as Tel Aviv and Haifa on the edge of the wilderness.... They have set up a government which is a model of democracy." His friend and star correspondent, Izzy Stone, has "set down what he knows and what he has seen, simply, truthfully and eloquently."

We Americans, Crum concludes, "can, through this book, warm ourselves in the glory of a free people who made a two thousand year dream come true in their own free land."

Accompanied by famed war photographer Robert Capa's iconic images of male and female Israeli soldiers, Stone's text reads like a heroic epic. He writes of newborn Israel as a "tiny bridgehead" of 650,000 up against 30 million Arabs and 300 million Muslims and argues that Israel's "precarious borders," created by the United Nations' November 1947 partition resolution, are almost indefensible.

"Arab leaders made no secret of their intentions," Stone writes, and then quotes the head of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam: "This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades."

Palestinian leaders reminded Stone of the fascists he had fought with his pen since the Spanish Civil War. He ticks off the names of several Nazi collaborators prominent among the Arab military units that poured into Palestine after passage of the UN's resolution. In addition to the grand mufti, they included the head of the Arab Liberation Army, Fawzi el-Kaukji, who took part in the fascist revolt against the British in Iraq in 1940 and then escaped to Berlin, where he recruited Balkan Muslims for the Wehrmacht.

Another Palestinian military commander, Sheik Hassan Bey Salameh, was a "former staff officer under Rommel," Stone writes. "Salameh had last appeared in Palestine in 1944 when he was dropped as a Reichswehr major for sabotage duties." For good measure, Stone adds, "German Nazis, Polish reactionaries, Yugoslav Chetniks, and Bosnian Moslems flocked [into Palestine] for the war against the Jews."

And how does Stone explain the war's surprising outcome and the sudden exodus of the Palestinian Arabs? "Ill-armed, outnumbered, however desperate their circumstances, the Jews stood fast." The Palestinians, by contrast, began to run away almost as soon as the fighting began. "First the wealthiest families went," Stone recounts. "While the Arab guerrillas were moving in, the Arab civilian population was moving out."

Stone blames the grand mufti for giving explicit orders to the Palestinians to abandon Haifa, which had the largest Arab community of any city assigned to the Jewish state under the UN's partition plan.

What is most revealing about the book is the issue that Stone does not write about: the fate of the refugees after their exodus. Stone undoubtedly shared the conventional wisdom at the time: that wars inevitably produced refugees and that the problem was best handled by resettlement in the countries to which those refugees moved. Stone surely expected that the Arab countries to which the Palestinian refugees had moved would eventually absorb them as full citizens. That outcome wouldn't be perfect justice, but it would limit Palestinian suffering and open the doors to a reasonable and permanent settlement of the conflict.

Stone also knew that Israel was in the process of absorbing an almost equal number of impoverished Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, most of whom had been forced out of their homes and lost all their property in places where they had lived for hundreds of years.

A Jewish refugee from an Arab country arrives in Israel, 1949.
Stone could never have foreseen that for the next 62 years, the Palestinians would remain in those terrible refugee camps — not just in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but in Lebanon, Syria, and present-day Jordan as well. Nor could Stone have imagined that not one Arab country would move to absorb the refugees and offer them citizenship, or that the Palestinians' leaders would insist on keeping the refugees locked up in the camps for the purpose of dramatizing their Nakba narrative.

Stone's reporting on the 1948 war has turned out to be a pretty decent "first rough draft of history," to quote publisher Philip Graham's definition of journalism.

But that's a judgment that Stone himself discarded, as the Left gradually abandoned Israel over the next 30 years and accepted the Palestinians' portrayal of their nakba as the Nakba — a capitalized instance of world-historical evil.

In Stone's later writing about the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was at pains to forget what he had said in This Is Israel. Moving in lockstep with the Left, he had turned into a scathing critic of Israel by 1967, castigating the Zionists for "moral myopia" and lack of compassion in The New York Review of Books. His turnabout was so complete that by 1979, the West's foremost champion of the Palestinians, Edward Said, paid homage to Stone and to Noam Chomsky as two of the few Jewish intellectuals who had "tried to see what Zionism did to the Palestinians not just once in 1948, but over the years." The Columbia University scholar obviously didn't know about, or didn't want to know about, This Is Israel.

Revisionist historiography also appeared to nullify Stone's earlier journalism. Starting in the mid-1980s, a group of self-styled "new historians" in Israel began debunking (or to use their favorite term, "deconstructing") the official "Zionist narrative" about the 1948 war and the foundation of the state.

The most influential of the revisionist historians was Benny Morris, whose 1987 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem became an international sensation. Using a trove of documents in the Israeli state archives, Morris showed that not all the Palestinian refugees fled their homes in panic or were ordered out by their leaders. For example, during fierce battles between Israeli and Arab forces around the strategic towns of Lydda and Ramla, the Israelis expelled thousands of Arab residents and put them on the road to the West Bank. Morris also presented documented cases of atrocities by some Israeli soldiers and revealed that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had discussed the feasibility of "transferring" Arabs out of the areas assigned to the Jewish state by the UN.

Yet unlike most of his left-wing revisionist colleagues, Morris asserted that the Palestinian calamity and the refugee problem were "born of war, not by design."

Morris was — and is — a committed Zionist of the Left.

He believed that his work as a truth-telling historian might have a healing effect, encouraging Palestinian intellectuals to own up to their own side's mistakes and crimes. The process might lead to some reconciliation, perhaps even to peace. But Morris was shocked when Palestinian leaders launched the second intifada, with its campaign of suicide bombings, just as President Clinton offered them a generous two-state solution at Camp David. Morris was also dismayed to discover that his scholarship on the 1948 war was being used by Palestinian activists and Western leftist academics to build up the Nakba myth.

In a 2008 letter to the Irish Times, he wrote:

Israel-haters are fond of citing — and more often, mis-citing — my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections.... In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947, [the Palestinians] launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes.... On the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities....

Most of Palestine's 700,000 "refugees" fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramla, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops.

The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became "refugees" — and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee) — was not a "racist crime"... but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves.

Coming from the dean of Israeli revisionist historians, this was a significant rejection of the Nakba narrative and, incidentally, an endorsement of Stone's forgotten book.

Earlier this year, another pathbreaking work of historical scholarship appeared that, if facts mattered at all in this debate, would put the final nail in the coffin of the Nakba myth. The book is Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East program at King's College London. Karsh has delved deeper into the British and Israeli archives — and some Arab ones — than any previous historian of the period. He deftly uses this new material to seal the case that the Nakba was, to a large extent, brought on by the Palestinians' own leaders.

For example, using detailed notes kept by key players in Haifa, Karsh provides a poignant description of an April 1948 meeting attended by Haifa's Arab officials, officers of the nascent Israeli military, Mayor Shabtai Levy, and Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British military commander of Haifa.

Levy, in tears, begged the Arab notables, some of whom were his personal friends, to tell their people to stay in their homes and promised that no harm would befall them.

The Zionists desperately wanted the Arabs of Haifa to stay put in order to show that their new state would treat its minorities well. However, exactly as Stone reported in This Is Israel, the Arab leaders told Levy that they had been ordered out and even threatened by the Arab Higher Committee, chaired by the grand mufti from his exile in Cairo. Karsh quotes the hardly pro-Zionist Stockwell as telling the Arab leaders, "You have made a foolish decision."

In describing the battle for Jaffa, the Arab city adjoining Tel Aviv, Karsh uses British military archives to show that the Israelis again promised the Arabs that they could stay if they laid down their arms. But the mufti's orders again forbade it. In retrospect, it is clear that the mufti wanted the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa to leave because he feared not that they would be in danger but that their remaining would provide greater legitimacy to the fledgling Jewish state.

Unfortunately, no amount of documentation and evidence about what really happened in 1948 will puncture the Nakba narrative.

The tale of dispossession has been institutionalized now, an essential part of the Palestinians' armament for what they see as the long struggle ahead. It has become the moral basis for their insistence on the refugees' right to return to Israel, which in turn leads them to reject one reasonable two-state peace plan after another. In the meantime, the more radical Palestinians continue to insist that the only balm for the Nakba is the complete undoing of the historical crime of Zionism — either eliminating Israel or submerging it into a secular democratic state called Palestine. (The proposal is hard to take seriously from adherents of a religion and a culture that abjure secularism and allow little democracy.)

Nor will the facts about 1948 impress the European and American leftists who are part of the international Nakba coalition. The Nakba narrative of Zionism as a movement of white colonial oppressors victimizing innocent Palestinians is strengthened by radical modes of thought now dominant in the Western academy. Postmodernists and postcolonialists have adapted Henry Ford's adage that "history is bunk" to their own political purposes.

According to the radical professors, there is no factual or empirical history that we can trust — only competing "narratives." For example, there is the dominant establishment narrative of American history, and then there is the counter-narrative, written by professors like the late Howard Zinn, which speaks for neglected and forgotten Americans. Just so, the Palestinian counter-narrative of the Nakba can now replace the old, discredited Zionist narrative, regardless of actual historical facts. And thanks to what the French writer Pascal Bruckner has called the Western intelligentsia's new "tyranny of guilt" — a self-effacement that forbids critical inquiry into the historical narratives of those national movements granted the sanctified status of "oppressed" — the Nakba narrative cannot even be challenged.

This makes for a significant subculture in the West devoted to the delegitimization of Israel and the Zionist idea.

To leftists, for whom Israel is now permanently on trial, Stone's 1948 love song to Zionism has conveniently been disappeared, just as Trotsky was once disappeared by the Soviet Union and its Western supporters (of whom, let us not forget, Stone was one). Thus Tony Judt can write in The New York Review of Books — the same prestigious journal in which Stone began publishing his reconsiderations of Zionism — that Israel is, after all, just an "anachronism" and a historical blunder.

Several years ago, I briefly visited the largest refugee camp in the West Bank: Balata, inside the city of Nablus. Many of the camp's approximately 20,000 residents are the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of the Arab citizens of Jaffa who fled their homes in early 1948.

Balata residents mark Nakba Day, May, 2009.
For half a century, the United Nations has administered "Balata as a quasi-apartheid welfare ghetto."

The Palestinian Authority does not consider the residents of Balata citizens of Palestine; they do not vote on municipal issues, and they receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation. The refugee children — though after 60 years, calling young children "refugees" is absurd — go to separate schools run by UNRWA, the UN's refugee-relief agency. The "refugees" are crammed into an area of approximately one square kilometer, and municipal officials prohibit them from building outside the camp's official boundaries, making living conditions ever more cramped as the camp's population grows. In a building called the Jaffa Cultural Center — financed by the UN, which means our tax dollars — Balata's young people are undoubtedly nurtured on the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors' homes by the Mediterranean Sea.

In Balata, history has come full circle.

During the 1948 war, Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini insisted that the Arab citizens of Haifa and Jaffa had to leave, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state. Now, the descendants of those citizens are locked up in places like Balata and prohibited from resettling in the Palestinian-administered West Bank — again, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state, this time by removing the Palestinians' chief complaint. Yet there is a certain perverse logic at work here. For if Israel and the Palestinians ever managed to hammer out the draft of a peace treaty, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, would have to go to Balata and explain to its residents that their leaders have been lying to them for 60 years and that they are not going back to Jaffa. Which, to state the obvious again, is one of the main reasons that there has been no peace treaty.



Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

This article is archived at http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_nakba.html.