Not presuming to know everything worth knowing about Israel and Palestine, I thought I would attempt an occasional series to provide factual information about aspects of the conflict that might be of interest to people of good will. This diary discusses the 1947-49 war and the origins of the Palestinian Arab refugee problem.
If you want to learn more about my political views -- I'm a veteran supporter of Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) -- you may want to read one or more of my earlier diaries, including:
A recent diarist purported to quote Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, as having written in 1937: "We must expel Arabs and take their places." Actually, the diarist was quoting one Mona Baker,, who, in turn, was quoting the English translation of Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War. The by now well-known problem is that the English edition does not accurately reflect the Hebrew original, which reads (in English):
We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their place. All our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven throughout all our activity in the Land [of Israel]—that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.
In an exchange in Commentary magazine, Benny Morris acknowledged have relied on the English version of Teveth's book. Morris added that in the 1991 Hebrew edition of his book, he had followed the original Hebrew. Indeed, in the same letter, Ben Gurion also wrote: "all our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven throughout all our activity—that there is enough room for ourselves and the Arabs in Palestine."
The Zionist mainstream accepts partition and begins to internalize it.
Ben Gurion was writing during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. As Benny Morris has written, the Zionist mainstream changed its position from seeking to establish a Jewish state over all of Mandatory Palestine to accepting partition:
Until 1936–1937, certainly, the Zionist mainstream sought to establish a Jewish state over all of Palestine. But something began to change fundamentally during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, which was conducted against the background of resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe and the threat of genocide. In July 1937, the British royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended the partition of Palestine, with the Jews to establish their own state on some 20 percent of the land and the bulk of the remainder to fall under Arab sovereignty (ultimately to be conjoined to the Emirate of Transjordan, ruled by the Emir Abdullah). The commission also recommended the transfer—by agreement or "voluntarily," and if necessary by force—of all or most of the Arabs from the area destined for Jewish statehood.The Zionist right, the Revisionist movement, rejected the proposals. But mainstream Zionism, representing 80 to 90 percent of the movement, was thrown into ferocious debate; and, shepherded by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leadership ended up formally accepting the principle of partition, if not the actual award of 20 percent of the land. The movement resolved that the Peel proposals were a basis for further negotiation.
From 1937 to 1947, the Zionist mainstream "internalized the necessity of partition":
It is true that Ben-Gurion harbored a hope, in 1937, that such a partition would be but a "first step," to be followed by eventual Zionist expansion throughout Palestine. But the years that followed sobered Zionism and changed the movement’s thinking. . . . By November 1947, the Zionists’ reconciliation to a partial realization of their dreams was complete (except on the fringes of the movement), and Zionism’s mainstream, led by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, once and for all internalized the necessity of partition and accepted the U.N. partition resolution. The 1948 war was fought by Israel with a partitionist outlook, and it ended in partition (with the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule and the Gaza Strip controlled by Egypt), despite Israel’s military superiority at its conclusion.
It is also true, as Morris notes, that one can find occasional expressions by Zionist leaders, from Herzl, in 1881, to the mid-1940s supporting "'the "transfer" of Arabs, or of "the Arabs," out of the territory of the future Jewish state. But three salient facts must be recalled.
- "First, the Zionist leadership throughout never adopted the idea as part of the movement’s political platform; nor did it ever figure in the platforms of any of the major Zionist parties.
- "Second, the Zionist leaders generally said, and believed, that a Jewish majority would be achieved in Palestine, or in whatever part of it became a Jewish state, by means of massive Jewish immigration, and that this immigration would also materially benefit the Arab population (which it generally did during the Mandate).
- "Third, the awful idea of transfer was resurrected and pressed by Zionist leaders at particular historical junctures, at moments of acute crisis, in response to Arab waves of violence that seemed to vitiate the possibility of Arab-Jewish co-existence in a single state, and in response to waves of European anti-Semitic violence that, from the Zionist viewpoint, necessitated the achievement of a safe haven for Europe’s oppressed and threatened Jews. Such a haven required space in which to settle the Jewish masses and an environment free of murderous Arabs: this, indeed, was the logic behind the Peel Commission’s transfer recommendation."
Of course, the Palestinian Arab leadership position throughout the 1930s to the end of the British Mandate was expulsionist: at most those Jews resident prior to 1917 -- some 60,000 - 80,000 -- might be allowed to stay. This expulsionist policy, forcibly expressed through campaigns of violence, had its effect on Zionist thinking:
In other words, the surge in thinking about transfer in the late 1930s among mainstream Zionist leaders was in part a response to the expulsionist mentality of the Palestinians, which was reinforced by ongoing Arab violence and terrorism. The violence resulted in Britain’s severely curtailing immigration to Palestine, thus assuring that many Jews who otherwise might have been saved were left stranded in Europe (and consigned to death), while at the same time foreclosing the traditional Zionist option and aim of achieving a Jewish majority in Palestine through immigration.
The 1947 UN Partition Plan: The Zionist movement accepts it and begins planning for a large Arab minority's continued citizenship.
In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition the British Mandate for Palestine (already reduced by the exclusion of Transjordan, that is, today's Jordan), into three parts:
- a Jewish state;
- an Arab state; and
- Jerusalem, which would be under international control.
The Zionist movement accepted the UN partition plan; the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states rejected it. Benny Morris notes that, "In private, Zionist officials began planning agricultural and regional development that took into account the large Arab minority and its continued citizenship in the new Jewish state. Indeed, down to the end of March 1948, after four months of the Palestinian Arab assault on the Yishuv, backed by the Arab League, Zionist policy was geared to the establishment of a Jewish state with a large Arab minority":
Haganah policy throughout these months was to remain on the defensive, to avoid hitting civilians, and generally to refrain from spreading the conflagration to parts of Palestine still untouched by warfare. Indeed, on March 24, 1948, Yisrael Galili, the head of the Haganah National Command, the political leadership of the organization, issued a secret blanket directive to all brigades and units to abide by long-standing official Zionist policy toward the Arab communities in the territory of the emergent Jewish state—to secure "the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without discrimination" and to strive for "co-existence with freedom and respect," as he put it. And this was not a document devised for Western or U.N. eyes, with a propagandistic purpose; it was a secret, blanket, internal operational directive, in Hebrew.
It was only at the start of April, with its back to the wall (much of the Yishuv, in particular Jewish Jerusalem, was being strangled by Arab ambushes along the Arab invasion six weeks hence, that the Haganah changed its strategy and went over to the offensive, and began uprooting Palestinian communities, unsystematically and without a general policy. Needless to say, the invasion by the combined armies of the Arab states on May 15 only hardened Yishuv hearts toward the Palestinians who had summoned the invaders, whose declared purpose— as Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League, put it—was to re-enact a Mongol-like massacre, or, as others said, to drive the Jews into the sea. And yet Israel never adopted a general policy of expulsion (or incarceration—as did the United States in its internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, without being under direct existential threat), which accounts for the fact that 160,000 Arabs remained in Israel and became citizens in 1949.They accounted for more than 15 percent of the country’s population.
The origins of the Palestinian Arab refugee problem.
The tragedy of the Palestinians Arabs stemmed from their own decision, encouraged and supported by the neighboring Arab states, to reject partition. Not just to reject it verbally, but to take up arms against the Jewish community. "It was the Palestinian Arab onslaught on the Jewish community in Palestine in November to December 1947," Benny Morris reminds us, "that provoked Jewish counterviolence, which then triggered the Arab exodus; and that it was the follow-up invasion of the country by the armies of the surrounding Arab states in May to June 1948 that turned what might have been an ephemeral phenomenon into a still larger tragedy, consolidating and finalizing, as it were, the refugee status of the fleeing communities."
The Zionist leadership had planned for something different. In addition to the March 1948 internal Galili memorandum cited above, Benny Morris notes that that records in the Israeli archives show that "the powerful settlement executives, when planning . . . from December 1947 to January 1948 the future rural development of the Jewish state, explicitly brushed aside all thought of transferring the Arab minority out of the Jewish state."
The Arab reaction was rather different. On November 30, 1947, the day after the UN voted for partition, the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee launched a civil war against the Jews. Morris writes:
On November 30, 1947, the day after the partition vote, Arab gunmen ambushed two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva, killing seven passengers and wounding others, and Arab snipers began firing from Jaffa into Tel Aviv’s streets, killing a passerby and wounding others. These attacks marked the start of the war. The Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian Arab community’s "government," called for a general strike, in the course of which an Arab mob poured out of Jerusalem’s Old City and looted and torched the New Commercial District.The civil war had begun.
Until April 1948, the Jews kept to the strategic defensive:
Things changed radically in early April 1948: the Haganah, with its back to the wall, especially in Jerusalem and along the roads, and facing imminent invasion by the Arab states’ armies, switched to the offensive, and within six weeks overran Arab areas, including Jaffa and (Arab) Haifa, and defeated the Palestinian militias, inducing chaos and mass flight.
What were the Jews of Palestine thinking as the Palestinian Arabs launched their attacks and the neighboring Arab states egged them on? Most Zionists, Morris writes, had two historical memories: the Hebron massacre of 1929 and then quite recent destruction of European Jewry:
Most were sure that, given half a chance,Arab mobs and gunmen would massacre them and their families, as they had done in Hebron in 1929, and re-enact a slaughter to rival the recently concluded catastrophe in Europe. Such things were hardly unimaginable. After all, none other than Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League, had warned in mid- May that the pan-Arab invasion would resemble the Mongolian rape of Baghdad in 1258, when 800,000 people were allegedly slaughtered.
Understandably, the leadership of the Jewish community worked to frustrate the Arabs' intentions:
In April and early May, this required—as Ben-Gurion and the Haganah brass saw it, and who really can fault them?—the destruction of Arab militia bases along the main roads between the Yishuv’s centers of population, and along its borders, which were about to be invaded by the Arab armies.This was a civil war between irregular militias, and the Arab villages were the Arab militias’ bases (as the Jewish settlements were the Jewish militia’s bases). This was the grim logic behind the Haganah’s conquest and demolition of the Arab villages in its operations in the spring of 1948: either overpower the Arab forces or go under.
By way of a brief conclusion
Several hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs became refugees. For most this meant moving a few, or several, miles to another part of Mandatory Palestine. For others it meant Lebanon or Syria, where many of them had family roots and connections. Some left entirely voluntarily. Some left out of a natural fear of being in a battle zone. And some were expelled.
Without in any way meaning to minimize their hurt, I think we need to be clear that the Palestinian Arabs were the victims primarily of their own decision, or at least their leaders' decision, to go to war against the Jews instead of accepting partition. Any other conclusion is unfaithful to the facts and robs the Palestinian Arabs of their historical agency.
None of this is to say that Israel bears no responsibility, as part of a comprehensive peace settlement, for contributing the a resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem, which, in Israel's sovereign discretion (as the Geneva Initiative puts it) even may include absorbing a small number of refugees within Israel. But the real task before us, I submit, is to
- defeat Israel's colonialist adventure in the West Bank (as it already has been defeated in the Gaza Strip); and to
- defeat the Palestinian folly of trying to destroy the Jewish state.
In other words, two states for two peoples.