The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  The third myth was that the Arab world was determined to destroy the Jewish state in 1948. First of all, explained Flapan, the Arab world was fragmented and did not have a unified policy on the question of Palestine. Iraq and Transjordan, important powers in the Arab world and both of them Hashemite kingdoms, were seeking an understanding with the new Jewish state. As a result, Ben-Gurion concluded a secret treaty with Jordan, under which the two sides agreed to divide Palestine between them after the British withdrawal from the country. In fact, that agreement had already been reported in two sources. One was the memoirs of Abdullah al-Tall, the Jordanian commander of the Jerusalem front, who had decided to disclose these secret details because he fell afoul of his masters in the early 1950s and had to flee to Egypt.15 The other source was Israel Baer, who was a strategic adviser to Ben-Gurion in 1948; his reason for betraying this secret was his arrest in 1961 on the charge of spying for the Soviet Union. While in jail he wrote a book titled Israel’s Security: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, in which he disclosed the existence of this treaty.16

  The fourth myth was that the Palestinians left their homes because they were told to do so by their leaders and the leaders of neighbouring Arab countries. There is ‘no evidence’ for such an allegation, declared Flapan. Furthermore, it made no strategic sense for the Arab side to demand such a flight, which would only have made the battlefield more complicated for them.17 The reason the Palestinians became refugees was that the Zionist leadership was determined to reduce their numbers by all possible means.18 Although Flapan had no access to official documentation and was only postulating that there were no direct orders of expulsion, he was convinced that there was no need for such orders, since the atmosphere was such that military commanders knew exactly what to do: namely, expel the Palestinians from their villages and towns.19

  Yet a fifth myth was that Israel was a David that miraculously defeated an Arab Goliath. Flapan was convinced that at any given stage in the confrontation of 1948 ‘the superiority of the Jew[ish forces] … was never in dispute’. In addition, the ‘Goliath’ was disunited and weakened by internal strife and animosity.20

  Flapan’s sixth and final myth was that Israel extended its hand for peace after the war and was rejected by the Arab states and the Palestinians. He refutes this assertion by pointing to the Lausanne Protocol, signed on 12 May 1949 by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel in an international peace conference on Palestine convened by the United Nations. That protocol set three principal guidelines for peace in Palestine: recognition of the earlier partition plan and therefore, the existence of Israel, the internationalisation of Jerusalem, and the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. Flapan further showed that there were serious initiatives for peace on the part of Syria and Jordan that were rejected by the Israeli government.21

  One year later, in 1988, in the liberal, American Jewish journal Tikkun, the historian Benny Morris discussed Flapan’s work along with his, mine, and that of Avi Shlaim as constituting a new wave in Israeli historiography concerning 1948, and he coined the term ‘the new history of Israel’.22 The term caught on and has been used ever since. The following year, in an article in Haaretz, the prominent Israeli historian Shabtai Teveth adopted the term ‘new history’ for the books we have written; he also rejected our findings and accused us of treason.23 This was the start of a long discussion on our findings, which led to a more general debate on the scholarly challenge of the idea of Israel and which is discussed in subsequent chapters. But in Israel at least, ‘new history’ until today refers to that group of historians who challenge the accepted version of the 1948 war.

  And yet this term, borrowed from the ‘new history’ in Europe, is misleading. The European ‘new history’ was an interdisciplinary effort to place diplomatic and élite history in a wider social and nonélite context. The Israeli ‘new historians’, in contrast, questioned only the élite analysis of politics. For this reason, they/we would more aptly be described as revisionists, in a sense similar to the revisionist school in American historiography on the Cold War. One difficulty with this term, however, is that it creates confusion with the Revisionist historians – namely, historians who belong to the Revisionist Zionist movement of the right.24 An additional problem with the term is that in Germany, France and Italy, ‘revisionist’ is also associated with those who tend to minimise the horror of the Holocaust or the Nazi-Fascist experience.

  In any case, what all our works had in common was that they jointly debunked the fundamental Israeli mythologies of the 1948 war. Let me now recap who we were and what were our motives, as well as our main contributions and how they related to the mainstream narratives on both sides.

  The ‘New Historians’

  Let us first look at the period during which we produced our challenge. The Israeli assault on Lebanon in June 1982 appeared to be a retaliation for the abortive assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London but was really an operation meant to destroy the PLO’s base in Lebanon. The assault failed to win public support in Israel itself, and thus became the first non-consensual war in Israel’s history.

  The oppositional public opinion concerning the war set a precedent. It branded the war in Lebanon as unnecessary and a war of choice. Questioning the logic or justification for a war had hitherto been taboo. For professional historians, the assault on Lebanon was a watershed, as it opened up the inquiry into Israel’s previous wars. Further doubts arose, especially among the intellectual and cultural élite, when the First Intifada – an unarmed uprising in the occupied territories – was brutally crushed by the Israeli army in 1987.

  The Palestinians now appeared, not as the enemy, but as the victim: the weaker party in the balance of power. The First Intifada was a clash between an army and a civilian population, and consequently it reminded at least some of us of the clashes of 1948. Many confrontations during the 1987 uprising took place in the refugee camps of 1948 and were seen by the Palestinians themselves as part of the same struggle they had been involved in ever since their dispossession forty years earlier. Thus the 1980s brought back, for both sides, memories of the 1948 war. And for some of us it also triggered new thinking about the past.

  The work on 1948 was executed while an inevitable comparison was consciously or unconsciously affecting our reconstruction of the past. The attitudes and policies of 1987 looked relevant to the 1948 war. That even the mainstream Israeli press called the situation in 1987 a war with the Palestinians and explored the similarities to 1948 only accentuated the fact that what was done and condemned in 1987 had already been done in 1948. As for the atrocities Israel had committed in Lebanon, we felt unable to identify with the war’s goals and plans, even though we were all Zionists in one way or another. Additional doubts, for myself, and I think as well for the other two ‘new historians’, appeared when we found ourselves unable to identify with the brutal Israeli response to the uprising in the occupied territories that broke out in December 1987.

  Benny Morris was born in Israel in 1948 to an Anglo-Jewish family. His father was an Israeli diplomat serving in various Western posts, including the United Nations in New York, where Morris spent much of his youth. He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and finished his PhD studies in Cambridge with a thesis on modern European history. His interest in the history of the conflict was aroused by his journalistic work, which he started at the Jerusalem Post in the late 1970s, and in particular through his coverage of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In 1988, as a reserve soldier, he refused to be posted in occupied Nablus. For his refusal, he spent three weeks in jail.

  That same year, Morris published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, in which he confirmed Flapan’s refutations of the fourth foundational myth: that the Palestinians left their homes because they were ordered to do so by their leaders in and outside the country. Like Flapan – and before Flapan, the Irish journalist Erskine Childers – he found no evidence for such a statement. As for Fla
pan’s claim that the refugee problem was caused by multiple instances of expulsion and dispossession, Morris was able to verify this by mining the Israeli archives of both the IDF and the paramilitary organisations.

  Israel followed British law and so declassified political documents after thirty years and security documents after fifty years. Thus, by 1978, both the British and the Israeli documents on 1948 were open to the public. Morris worked mainly in the archives of the Hagana and the IDF, looking at reports from the battlefield and discussions among the politicians of the day. He concluded that the archival material did not indicate a systematic plan to expel Palestinians but that the residents’ inevitable fear and the consequences of the fighting were the major causes that led people to leave their homes. But in a very detailed manner, he did adduce quite a few cases in which local commanders in fact decided to expel the population. In addition, he pointed out that there was a deliberate policy not to allow them to return. When this book was published in Hebrew in 1991, it was for many Israeli readers their first encounter with the possibility that their army had expelled people by force. The fact that Palestinians were not allowed to return seemed to all of Morris’s reviewers and readers the only possible policy that a Jewish democracy could have adopted.

  Avi Shlaim made similar use of the declassified material, in his case to reaffirm Flapan’s refutation of the third foundational myth: that the Arab world was united in its determination to destroy the future Jewish state. Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945 and emigrated to Israel in 1951.25 As a sixteen-year-old, he was sent to England to complete his high school studies. He went back to Israel, served in the army, and then returned to England, completing his BA in history at Cambridge and then a PhD at the University of Reading in the early 1970s, where he was a lecturer until moving to St Antony’s College at Oxford in the 1980s. As with Morris, Shlaim’s doctoral dissertation dealt with European history, and it was the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that orientated him towards the history of the Arab–Israel conflict in general and that of the 1948 war in particular.

  Shlaim focused on the secret negotiations between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Transjordan until 1949) and the Zionist leadership. His book Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine followed these negotiations from the moment they began in the 1930s until their culmination in a tacit understanding that allocated to Jordan parts of Palestine that the UN defined as the future Arab state in its partition resolution of November 1947.26 This pre-1948 war agreement neutralised the Jordanian army and confined its activity to the Jerusalem area. In many ways, Shlaim showed that this tacit understanding explained the Jewish success on the battlefield. The Jordanians had the only modern army in the Arab world; it had battle experience and included a strong contingent of British officers. The Arab Legion was thus the ablest Arab army, and so its neutralisation and limitation to one front, the Jerusalem front, removed a serious threat to the existence of the young state. The claim of a prior agreement also forms an important chapter in the Palestinian narrative.

  In my own career as a historian, the 1982 war loomed large. It was an assault that ended in the loss of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese, and culminated in the brutal Israeli occupation of Beirut. The massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila by Christian Phalangists, with the full knowledge of the occupying Israeli army, caused hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews to demonstrate, for the first time in the state’s history, against an ongoing army operation.

  I was born in Israel in 1954 and graduated from the Hebrew University in 1979. During the research phase of my doctorate studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford, the 1982 war broke out. I had been working on British policy during the 1948 war. In the resulting book, Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951, I relied mainly on British documents released in the 1980s.27 In so doing, I completed the picture of collusion drawn by Avi Shlaim by highlighting Britain’s part in it.

  In classical Zionist historiography, Britain was mainly pro-Hashemite and played a highly negative role. But it turned out that even the ‘villain’ Ernest Bevin opposed the idea of an independent Palestinian state and supported, as did the rest of his staff, the partitioning of post-Mandatory Palestine between the Jews and the Hashemites, which he viewed as the best means of safeguarding British interests in the area. Shlaim and I thus corrected the demonised image of Britain in Israeli collective memory; we showed Britain’s behaviour to have been neutral in the conflict and even, on various occasions, pro-Israeli.28

  But in Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict I accuse British forces of indifference towards the dispossession of the Palestinians. The British troops watched the expulsion of the Palestinians and at times, such as in Haifa and Jaffa, played a dubious role by exerting pressure of their own on the resident population to leave or be exposed to the Zionist occupation, undefended by the British. As a result, they facilitated the transfer of the Palestinians from both these cities.

  I have also shown that the British intelligence documents reaffirm Flapan’s refutation of the story that the war of 1948 was fought between an Arab Goliath and a Zionist David. The British chiefs of staff wrote a highly detailed assessment of the balance of power on the eve of the war, which was to be sent to the cabinet in London. It was based mainly on reports submitted by the various British advisers to the heads of the Arab armies at the time. Each in turn, the Arab armies were assessed as being unable to endure for more than a brief period on the battlefield.29

  For a book I wrote shortly afterwards, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, I also excavated available Arab documentation of the war.30 I looked at the reports of the military commanders to their political masters, in which they drew a dismal picture of their armies’ level of preparation, commitment, and ability to perform on the battlefield. As I have shown, this led the Arab League, and most of the Arab leaders to request the international community to prolong the Mandate over Palestine and to seek a new peace plan. But the massacre at Deir Yassin, in which 250 innocent civilians were slaughtered on the north-western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains, together with the forced depopulation of most of the Palestinian towns, pushed public opinion towards a demand for action in Palestine. In any case, the international community disregarded these desperate calls and insisted that only the UN partition plan was the way forward. And yet, as I showed, one day before the actual war broke out, most Arab leaders were still trying to avoid a military operation that they knew only too well would end in a fiasco. The final decision to enter Palestine was taken on May 14, 1948.

  In addition, I confronted one of the main arguments raised against Flapan: that his depiction of the balance of power as favouring the Zionist side could not be right because of the high number of Jewish casualties in the war (one per cent of the community). In fact, considerable numbers of casualties were caused by local and civil clashes during the period preceding the war itself; regular Arab troops were not involved in these confrontations, and therefore the losses could not have been attributed to their firepower or superiority. I also stressed that Ben-Gurion’s policy of trying to defend isolated settlements led to some unnecessary and desperate battles that did not necessarily reflect the overall balance of power. Finally, I argued that the great number of casualties in the battle for Jerusalem and its vicinity could have been avoided, since the parties involved (the Jordanians and the Israelis) had already reached non-aggression arrangements regarding other fronts in Palestine.31

  The balance of power was further enhanced in Israel’s favour due to a successful diplomatic campaign. The achievements on that front were attributable to a rare cooperation between the two warring superpowers in 1947, with each for its own reasons supporting the Zionist cause against the Palestinians.

  The Truman administration was probably the first ever to succumb to the power of a Jewish lobby (although in those days there was no AIPAC or a structured effort). In February 1948 t
he administration was still giving serious consideration to replacing the partition plan with a new scheme that would extend the Mandate over Palestine for an additional five years and would seek a new solution. But this approach was abandoned after prominent Jewish leaders visited the president in the White House to exert pressure on him. Although his secretary of state, George Marshall, was not enthusiastic about the creation of a Jewish state, his military strategists hoped it would become an asset in the ensuing Cold War. I have also shown that Truman was moved by his visit to the Holocaust sites and that he accepted the Zionist contention that the best response to the atrocity was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

  As for the Soviet Union, it hoped that the Jewish state would be on its side in the Cold War because of the prominent role played by socialist parties in the Jewish community – Israel’s second-largest party, Mapam, respected Stalin and his policies, and Stalin’s death became an official day of mourning for the Kibbutz Movement. The Communist Party was also very loyal to Moscow, and some of its members helped the Hagana purchase weapons in the Eastern bloc (Britain and France had imposed an embargo on arms sales to both sides).

  This dual backing also ensured victory in the United Nations. ‘The world’ was not ‘against us’, as the Israeli myth declared. In fact, the world opposed the basic Palestinian demand to recognise their demographic majority as a basis for the creation of an independent state in Palestine. Generally speaking, the Zionists succeeded in persuading large segments of world opinion to accept the idea of Israel as the best response to the horrors of the Holocaust. Against such a claim, even able Palestinian diplomats – and there were not many in those days – could hardly win the diplomatic game, as was faithfully reflected in the UN Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP.32