On May 8, Israelis will celebrate their independence; on May 15 Palestinians will protest their dispossession and dispersion in “al-naqba”, the catastrophe caused by Israel’s capture of 78 per cent of geographic Palestine.
Israelis portray their “war of independence” as a desperate struggle of a small, outnumbered and outgunned community against the might of massed Arab armies. The Israeli state proclaimed at midnight on May 15, 1948, they argue, miraculously survived while the Palestinians living in the areas seized by Israel either fled or were told to leave by Arab governments so as to clear the field of battle.
But Palestinians argue their towns, villages and urban neighbourhoods were attacked and ethnically cleansed while the Arab armies which belatedly intervened were overwhelmed by Israel’s larger and better-armed underground army, the Haganah.
The Palestinian version of events of 60 years ago has been upheld by a group of Israeli scholars, who call themselves the New Historians. One of the early figures in this group was Benny Morris, whose seminal work on how Palestinians became refugees was execrated by angry Israeli academics who remained loyal to Israel’s official version.
A recent, more comprehensive book on 1948, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is by a younger member of the New Historians, Ilan Pappe, an Oxford-trained scholar who gained access to letters and official documents of the period. He reveals that ethnic cleansing was adopted by the Zionists during the years of British rule and quotes David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first premier, as calling for “compulsory transfer” of Palestinians in 1938.
He writes that the “final touches” were put to the master plan, Plan D (“Dalet” in Hebrew) on March 10, 1948, by 11 senior figures and several young fighting men at a meeting at the “Red House” in Tel Aviv.
Under the master plan, 531 Palestinian village and 11 urban centres were erased and their inhabitants dispossessed and dispersed.
Moshe Dayan, one of the officers who carried out this policy, later summed up the result of the 1948 war in an address to fellow Israelis: “There is not one single place in this country that did not have a former Arab population ... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist”.
The contraposition of the two versions of history is important today because Israel holds that it is not responsible for the flight and fate of 7,50,000 Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants, cannot allow their repatriation, and will not pay compensation for their losses. Furthermore, Israel has adapted the 1948 Plan Dalet strategy to the territories occupied in 1967 by taking over Palestinian land, isolating communities, and destroying homes in order to compel many of those living there to emigrate.
Pappe’s purpose in exposing in documented detail the de-population of the country which became Israel was to force Israel and Israelis to admit and take responsibility for the wrong done to the Palestinians, halt today’s policy of dispossession and “creeping transfer”, and agree to create a bi-communal state where Israelis and Palestinians are equal citizens. In the view of Pappe and a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians, Israel’s planting of 4,50,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prevents the creation of a Palestinian independent state next to Israel.
