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“WAS Israel born in sin?” Dan Perry of the Associated Press asked Ilan Pappe, a scholar at Haifa University in Israel, in December 1997. The answer was a resounding ‘yes’ with this stunning elaboration. “The Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab. We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet come across as moral at the same time.”
Pappe was by far the most outspoken and erudite of a group of dissenting historians who came to the fore in Israel in the 1980s.
Some fell out of the group after adopting a halfway position. Benny Morris’ book The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem refuted Israel’s false claim that in 1948, 750,000 Arabs left voluntarily in response to a call by the Arab states. They were forcibly expelled. Israel can hardly deny their right to return to their lands. But Morris became a rightist.
Dominique Vidal’s and Sébastien Boussois’s survey of the revisionist dissenters characterised Benny Morris as ‘schizophrenic’. Some dissenters only object to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians’ lands; others question the very legitimacy of Israel’s establishment as a state on Arab lands.
Israeli leaders know that they themselves are the transgressors.
One must also distinguish between those who speak the truth in private and those who speak up in public. Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion told the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: “Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural. We have taken their country.”
Israel’s leading daily Haaretz reported in 2000 a statement at a cabinet meeting by then acting foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami during a discussion on charges against the Palestinians. “Accusations made by a well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence.”
In oppressing the Palestinian, Israeli leaders know fully well that they themselves are the transgressors not their victims. Is this truth not evident also to Israel’s backers in the United States and Europe?
Israel’s former foreign minister Abba Eban, criticised the US policy of being more royalist than the king. Israel’s media friends in the US are more ferocious in defending Israeli positions than are most Israelis. That is true of the US Congress no less.
It is not sympathy for victims of the Holocaust that animates such a policy. It is realpolitik. Israel is an outpost of Western, especially American power, in a sensitive region where its presence has been increasingly under attack. That explains the relevance of historical truths. Their impact is gradual; but as has been well put there is no army in the world which can stop the march of an idea whose time has come.
Dissent is all the more telling when it is delivered by a person of impeccable credentials. Simha Flapan was a Zionist right up to his death. He was the first to make use of official documents to expose Israeli myths which have been deployed for years to dupe Israelis and their friends in the West. His book The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities is a classic.
The myths are — the ‘sincerity’ of Zionist acceptance of the UN resolution on the partition of Palestine in November 1947, as against its rejection by the Arabs; their flight from their country; the Arab states’ ‘invasion’ of Palestine; Israel’s inferiority in arms and its quest for peace.
Tom Segev, a journalist and historian, is a columnist in Haaretz. His book One Palestine Complete documents Israel’s premeditated colonisation of Palestine aided by the British government. It preceded the Holocaust by two decades. “There is no basis for the frequent assertion that the state was established as a result of the Holocaust.”
Ilan Pappe frankly asserted that “had Israel not existed, then 750,000 Palestinians would not have become refugees … the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948 — when they were ethnically cleansed by the Jewish state — would not have occurred. …Two and a half million Palestinians would have been saved from one of the cruellest and most callous military occupations in the second half of the 20th century”.
He revealed in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, ‘Plan D’ for the expulsion and massacre of Arabs. It was formulated in March 1948. Israel was established soon after.
Pappe remarks “the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine’s native people in 1948 is still alive, and continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes discernible, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today”.
Compelled to leave Israel, Ilan Pappe is now professor of history at the University of Exeter. The truths he told have a profound moral purpose.
The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.
Published in Dawn, September 20th , 2014
