The '48 Nakba & The Zionist
Quest for its Completion
a lecture by Dr. Ilan Pappe
www.bintjbeil.com/, October 2002
Dr. Ilan Pappe is a Profesor of History
at Haifa University. 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 Monday 16th September 2002. It is hereby published after
receiving Dr. Pappe's consent and editorial remarks. [BTL]_
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. _
Zionist Leaders' Strategy:_Settlement
and Expulsion
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. _
Mass Ideological Indoctrination_Behind
'48 Nakba
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. _
Israeli and Palestinian Leaders_Accept
the American Game:_Shrinking Palestine Physically & Morally
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. _
Agenda for Peace Activists_in the Shadow
of Transfer Scheme
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. _
Ilan Pappe page
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