[wvns] Ilan Pappe: History of Israel Reconsidered
History of Israel Reconsidered
Prof. Ilan Pappe
gyaku
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar07/gyaku18.htm
Professor Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and senior lecturer of
Political Science at Haifa University. He is the author of numerous
books, including A History of Modern Palestine, The Modern Middle
East, The Israel/Palestine Question and, most recently, The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine, published in 2006. On March 8, he spoke at a
small colloquium in Tokyo organized by the NIHU Program Islamic Area
Studies, University of Tokyo Unit, on the path of personal experiences
that brought him to write his new book. The following is a transcript
of his lecture, tentatively titled "The History of Israel
Reconsidered" by organizers of the event.
Ilan Pappe: Thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here. I
hope that you will ask me, afterwards, questions of a more general
nature because I'm not sure how much I can cover in 40, 45, 50
minutes. I will be a bit personal, to begin with, and then move to the
more general issues. I think it will help to understand what I am doing.
I was born in Israel and I had a very conventional, typical Israeli
education, and life, until I finished my B.A. studies at Hebrew
University, which was many years ago in the mid-1970s. Like all
Israeli Jews, I knew very little on the Palestinian side, and met very
few Palestinians. And although I was a very keen student of history,
already in high-school; I knew I would be a historian; I was very
loyal to the narrative that I was taught in school. I had very little
doubt that what my teachers taught me in school was the only truth
about the past.
My life was changed, in a way; definitely my professional life, but
after that also my private and public life when I decided to leave
Israel and do my doctoral dissertation outside the country. Because
when you go out, you see things that you would find very difficult to
see from within. And I chose as a subject for my doctoral thesis the
year of 1948, because even without knowing much the past, I understood
that this is a formative year. I knew enough to understand that this
is a departure point for history, because for one side, the Israelis,
1948 is a miracle, the best year in Jewish history. After two thousand
years of exile the Jews finally establish a state, and get
independence. And for the Palestinians it was exactly the opposite,
the worst year in their history, as they call it the Catastrophe, the
Nakba, almost the Holocaust, the worst kind of year that a nation can
wish to have. And that intrigued me, the fact that the same year, the
same events, are seen so differently, on both sides.
Being outside the country enabled me to have more respect and
understanding, I think, to the fact that maybe there is another way of
looking at history than what I lived -- not only my own world, my own
people's way, my own nation's way. But this was not enough, of course.
This was not enough to revisit history, this attitude, this fact that
one day you wake up and you say: wait a minute, there's someone else
here, maybe they see history differently; and if you are a genuine
intellectual, you should strive to have respect for someone else's
point-of-view, not only yours.
I was lucky that the year I decided to study the other side was the
year when, according to the Israeli law of classification of
documents; every 30 years the Israeli archives declassify secret
material, 30 years for political matters, and 50 years for military
matters. When I started in Oxford, in England, in the early 1980s,
quite a lot of new material about 1948 was opened. And I started
looking at the archives in Israel, in the United Kingdom, in France,
in the United States, and also the United Nations opened its archives
when I started working on this. They had interesting archives in
Geneva, and in New York.
And suddenly I began to see a picture of 1948 that I was not familiar
with. It takes historians quite a while to take material and turn it
into an article or a book, or a doctoral thesis, in this case. And
after two years, I, at least, found that I had a clear picture of what
happened in 1948, and that picture challenged, very dramatically, the
picture I grew up with. And I was not the only one who went through
this experience. Two or three, maybe four, historians -- partly
historians, partly journalists, in Israel -- saw the same material and
also arrived at similar conclusions: that the way we understood Israel
of 1948 was not right, and that the documents showed us a different
reality than what we knew. We were called the group of people who saw
things differently; we were called the New Historians. And whether
it's a good term or not we can discuss later, but it's a fact that
they called us the New Historians, this is not to be denied.
Now what did we challenge about 1948? I think that's very important to
understand, the old picture, and the new picture, and then we can move
on. The old picture was that, in 1948, after 30 years of British rule
in Palestine, the Jewish Nation of the Zionist Movement was ready to
accept an international offer of peace with the local people of
Palestine. And therefore when the United Nations offered to divide
Palestine into two states, the Zionist movement said yes, the Arab
world and the Palestinians said no; as a result the Arab world went to
war in order to destroy the state of Israel, called upon the
Palestinian people to leave, to make way for the invading Arab armies;
the Jewish leaders asked the Palestinians not to leave, but they left;
and as a result the Palestinian refugee problem was created. Israel
miraculously won the war, and became a fact. And ever since then, the
Arab world and the Palestinians have not ceased to want to destroy the
Jewish state.
This is more or less the version we grew up with. Another mythology
was that a major invasion took place in '48, a very strong Arab
contingent went into Palestine and a very small Jewish army fought
against it. It was a kind of David and Goliath mythology, the Jews
being the David, the Arab armies being the Goliath, and again it must
be a miracle if David wins against the Goliath.
So this is the picture. What we found challenged most of this
mythology. First of all, we found out that the Zionist leadership, the
Israeli leadership, regardless of the peace plans of the United
Nations, contemplated long before 1948 the dispossession of the
Palestinians, the expulsion of the Palestinians. So it was not that as
a result of the war that the Palestinians lost their homes. It was as
a result of a Jewish, Zionist, Israeli, call it what you want, plan
that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948 of its original
indigenous population.
I must say that not all those who are included in the group of new
historians agree with this description. Some would say only half of
the Palestinians were expelled, and half ran away. Some would say that
it was a result of the war. I have a clear picture in my mind. Of
course I don't oblige anyone to accept it, but I am quite confident,
as I wrote in my latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that
actually already in the 1930s the Israeli -- then it was not Israeli,
it was a pre-state leadership -- had contemplated and systematically
planned the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.
To summarize this point, the old historical Israeli position was:
Israel has no responsibility for the Palestinians becoming refugees,
the Palestinians are responsible for this because they did not accept
the peace plan, and they accepted the Arab call to leave the country.
That was the old position. My position, and with this a lot of the New
Historians agree, was that Israel is exclusively responsible for the
refugee problem, because it planned the expulsion of the Palestinians
from their homeland. Therefore it definitely bears the responsibility.
Another point that we discovered is that we checked the military
balance on the ground, and we found that this description of an Arab
Goliath and a Jewish David also does not stand with the facts. The
Arab world talked a lot, still does today, but doesn't do much when it
comes to the Palestine question. And therefore they sent a very
limited number of soldiers into Israel, and basically for most of the
time, the Jewish army had the upper hand in terms of the numbers of
soldiers, the level of equipment, and the training experience.
Finally, one of the common Israeli mythologies about 1948, and not
only about 1948, is that Israel all the time stretches its hand for
peace, always offers peace to the Arab world in general, and the
Palestinians in particular, and it is the Arab world and the
Palestinians who are inflexible and refuse any peace proposal. I think
we showed in our work that, at least in 1948, that there was a genuine
offer for peace from the world, or an idea of peace, after the war
ended, and actually the Palestinians and the Arab neighboring states
were willing at least to give a chance for peace, and it was the
Israeli government that rejected it. Later, one of the New Historians,
Avi Shlaim from Oxford, would write a book that is called the Iron
Wall. In this book, he shows that not only in 1948, but since 1948
until today, there were quite a lot of junctures in history where
there was a chance for peace, and it failed not because the Arab world
refused to exploit the chance, but rather because the Israelis
rejected the peace offer.
So revisiting history, for me, starts with 1948. And I will come back
again in the end of my talk to 1948 to talk more about my latest book.
But I want to explain that in the path from looking back at 1948 and
questioning the common historical version and narrative, a group of
Israeli scholars, academics, journalists, and so on, were not only
content with looking at 1948 but also looked at other periods. We had
a very strange time in Israeli academia, which is over now, in the
1990s. In the 1990s, Israeli academics went back to Israeli history,
as I said not only to 1948, and looked at very important chapters in
Israel's history, critically, and wrote an alternative history to the
one that they were taught in schools, or even in universities. I say
that it is a very interesting time because it ended in 2000 with the
second Palestinian uprising. You won't find many traces of this
critical energy today in Israel. Today in Israel, these academics
either neglect Israel, or left the views and came back to the national
narrative. Israel is a very consensual society nowadays. But in the
1990s it was a very interesting time, I'm very happy that I was part
of it. I don't regret it, I'm only sorry that it does not continue,
and time will tell whether it is the beginning of something new or
whether it was an extraordinary chapter and is not going to be repeated.
Now what did these scholars do? They went from the beginning of the
Zionist experience to the present time and looked at all kinds of
stations. They began with the early Zionist years. The Zionist
movement appeared in Europe in the late 19th century. The first Jewish
settler in Palestine arrived in 1882. Now the common view in Israel is
that these people came to more or less an empty land, and were only
part of a national project, that they created a national homeland for
the Jews, and for some unexplained reasons, the Arabs didn't like it,
and kept attacking the small Jewish community, and this seems to be
the fate of Israel, to live in an area of people who cannot accept
them. They don't accept them because the attackers of Israel are
either Muslims, or Arabs, which should explain a certain political
culture that cannot live at peace with neighbors, or whatever the
explanations Israelis give for why Arabs and Palestinians keep
attacking the Jewish state.
Now the new scholarship decided to look at the movement of Jews from
Europe to the Arab world as a colonialist movement. It was not the
only place in the world where Europeans, for whatever reasons -- even
for good reasons -- moved out from Europe and settled in a
non-European world. And they said that Zionism in this respect was not
different. The fact that the Jews of course were persecuted in Europe
explains why they were looking for a safe haven, this is known and
accepted. But the fact that they decided that the only safe haven is a
place where already someone else lived turned them into a colonialist
project as well. So they introduced the colonialist perspective to the
study of early Zionism.
They also looked differently at a very touchy subject, and this is the
relationship between the Holocaust and the state of Israel. Very brave
scholars showed what we know now is a fact how the Jewish leadership
in Palestine was not doing all it could to save Jews in the Holocaust
because it was more interested in the fate of the Jews in Palestine
itself. And how the Holocaust memory was manipulated in Israel to
justify certain attitudes and policies toward the Palestinians. They
also note the treatment of Jews who came from Arab countries in the
1950s, they found this Israeli urge to be a part of Europe very
damaging in the way they treated Jewish communities who came from Arab
countries. And of course it would have helped Israel to integrate in
the Middle-East, because they were Arabs as well, but they de-Arabized
them, they told them: "You are not Arabs, you are something else." And
they accepted it because it was the only ticket to be integrated into
Israeli society.
All this revisiting, if you want, of Israeli history goes from 1882 to
at least the 1950s. Around 100 to 120 scholars were involved in this
in the 1990s. The Israeli public, at first, of course, did not accept
these new findings, and was very angry with these scholars, but I
think it was the beginning of a good chance of starting to influence
Israeli public opinion to the point of even changing some of the
textbooks in the educational system.
Then came the second Intifada, and a lot of people felt that Israel is
again at war, and when you are at war, you cannot criticize your own
side. This is where we are now, and so many of these critical scholars
lowered down their criticism, and in fact people like myself -- I can
only testify from my own experience -- in one night, changed from
heroes to enemies. It is not an easy experience. In the 1990s, my
university was very proud that I was a part of it. So the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs sent a lot of people to show how pluralistic is this
university, they have this guy who is a New Historian, and he can show
you how critical he is and that Israel is an open society, the only
democracy in the Middle East.
After 2000, I became the enemy of the university. Not only did the
foreign office stop sending people to see me, the university was
looking for ways of sending me abroad, not bringing people to visit
me, and almost succeeded in 2002. There was about to be a big trial --
the trial didn't take place, thank God -- where I was to be accused of
all kinds of things that you would think that a democracy doesn't
have, accusing lecturers of treason and being not loyal to their
country, and so on. I was saying the same things in the 1990s as I was
in 2002; I didn't change my views, what changed was the political
atmosphere in Israel.
I want to go, now, in the last part of my talk, to my new book. After
working on this new scholarship I wrote quite a lot of articles and
edited a lot of books that summarized this new scholarship that I was
talking about, trying to assess its impact. I was also very impressed;
in one of my books I wrote extensively about this -- how it influenced
Palestinian scholarship to be more open and critical. It really
created something which I call the "Bridging Narrative," a concept
that I developed, and I am still developing. It is a historical
concept that in fact to create peace you need a bridging narrative.
You need both national sides, each has their own historical narrative,
but if they want to contribute to peace they have to build a bridge
narrative. I founded, together with a Palestinian friend, a group in
Ramallah, called the Bridging Narrative Historians. We started to work
in 1997, still work now, and it's a very good project of building a
joint narrative. We looked jointly at history because we believe the
future is there if you agree on the past.
After doing that, I felt still very haunted by '48, I felt that the
story was not complete. I wrote two books on 1948, and I felt it was
not enough. And then came the new archives. In 1998, the Israelis
opened the military archives. As I said, they opened political
archives after 30 years, but military archives after 1990. And then I
felt I had even a more complete picture, not only of '48, but
unfortunately, of how '48 lives inside Israel today. And the new
documents, I think, show very clearly, although I knew it before, but
the new documents show even more clearly, if you needed more evidence,
that the Zionist movement, from the very beginning, it realized that
in the land of Palestine someone else lives. That the only solution
would be to get rid of these people.
I'm not saying that they knew exactly how to do it, I'm not sure that
they always knew how to do it, but they definitely were convinced that
the main objective of the Zionist project, which was to find a safe
place for the Jews on the one hand, and to redefine Judaism as a
national movement, not just as a religion, can not be implemented as
long as the land of Palestine was not Jewish. Now some of them thought
that a small number of Palestinians can stay, but definitely they
cannot be a majority, they cannot even be a very considerable
minority. I think this is why '48 provides such a good opportunity for
the Zionist leadership to try to change the demographic reality on the
ground. And as I tried to show in my book, ever since 1937, under the
leadership of the founding father of Zionism, David Ben-Gurion, the
plan for ethnic cleansing of Palestine was carefully prepared.
This has a lot of moral implications, not just political ones. Because
if I am right -- and I may be wrong, but if I am right -- in applying
the term ethnic cleansing to what Israel did in 1948, I am accusing
the state of Israel of a crime. In fact, in the international legal
parlance, ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. And if you
look at the website of the American State Department, you will see
that the American State Department Legal Section says that any group
in history, or in the future, that lives in a mixed ethnic group, and
plans to get rid of one of the ethnic groups, is committing a crime
against humanity. And it doesn't matter -- very interesting -- it
doesn't matter whether it does it by peaceful means, or military
means. The very idea that you can get rid of people just because they
are ethnically different from you, today, definitely, in international
law, is considered to be a crime.
It's also interesting that the State Department says that the only
solution for victims of an ethnic cleansing crime, who are usually
refugees because you expel them, is the return of everyone their
homes. Of course, in the State Department list of cases of ethnic
crime, Israel does not appear. Everyone else appears, from Biblical
times until today, but the one case that does not appear as an ethnic
cleansing case is the case of Palestine because this would have
committed the State Department to believe in the Palestinian right of
return, which they don't want.
There is another implication. I am not a judge, and I don't want to
bring people to justice, although in this book, for the first time in
my life, I decided not to write a book that says "Israel ethnically
cleansed Palestine." I name names, I give names of people. I give the
names of the people that decided that 1.3 million Palestinians do not
have the right to continue to live where they lived for more than one
thousand years. I decided to give the names. I also found the place
where the decision was taken.
I think far more important for me is not what happened in 1948. Far
more important for me is the fact that the world knew what happened
and decided not to do anything, and sent a very wrong message to the
state of Israel, that it's okay to get rid of the Palestinians. And I
think this is why the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today as
we speak. Because the message from the international community was
that if you want to create a Jewish state by expelling so many
Palestinians and destroying so many Palestinian villages and towns,
that's okay. This is a right. It's a different lecture, why -- and I'm
not going to give it -- why did the world allow Israel in 1948 to do
something it would not have allowed anyone else to do. But, as I say,
it's a different lecture, I don't want to go into it.
The fact is that the world knew, and absolved Israel. As a result, the
Israeli state, the new state of Israel that was founded in 1948,
accepted as an ideological infrastructure the idea that to think about
an ethnic purity of a state is a just objective. I will explain this.
The educational system in Israel, the media in Israel, the political
system in Israel, sends us Jews in Israel a very clear message from
our very early days until we die. The message is very clear, and you
can see that message in the platforms of all the political parties in
Israel. Everybody agrees with it, whether they are on the left, or on
the right. The message is the following. And to my mind -- I will say
the message in a minute -- but I will say that, to my mind, this is a
very dangerous message, a very racist message, against which I fight
(unsuccessfully).
The message is that personal life -- not collective life, not even
political life -- personal life of the Jew in Israel would have been
much better had there not been Arabs around. Now that doesn't mean
that everybody believes that because of that you go out and start
shooting Arabs or even expelling them. You will see the paradox.
Today, I gave an interview to a journalist here in Japan, and he told
me of someone -- I won't mention the name -- but a very well-known
Israeli politician of the left, who said to him: "My dream is to wake
up one morning and to see that there are no Arabs in Israel." And he
is one of the leading liberal Zionists, he is on the left, very much
in the peace camp. This is the result of 1948, the idea that this is
legitimate, to educate people that the solution for their problems is
the disappearing of someone just because he is an Arab, or a Muslim,
and of course the disappearing of someone who is an indigenous
population, who is the native of that land, not an immigrant. I mean,
you can understand, maybe not accept, but you can understand how a
society treats immigrants. Sometimes they find that these immigrants
come to take my job, you know these politics of racism that are the
result of immigration. But we are not even talking about immigrants,
we are talking about a country that someone else immigrated into, and
turned the local people into immigrants, and said that they have no
rights there.
If someone who is from the Israeli peace camp, and very much on the
left, has a dream that all the Arabs would disappear from the land of
Israel, you can understand what happens if you are not from the left.
You don't dream, you start working on this. And you don't have to be
on the extreme right for that, you can be in the mainstream. We have
to remember that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was
committed by the Labor Party, not by the Likud, by the mainstream
ideology.
In other words, what we have here is a society that was convinced that
its need to have ethnic exclusivity, or at least total majority, in
whatever part of Palestine it would consider to be the future Jewish
state, that this value, this objective is above everything else in
Israel. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than
human rights. It's more important than civil rights. Because, for most
Jews in Israel, if you don't have a demographic majority, you are
going to lose, it's a suicide. And if this is the position, then no
wonder people would say that if the Palestinians in Israel would be
more than 20%, we will have suicide. You will hear people that will
tell you that they are intellectuals, liberals, democrats, humanists,
say this.
And if Israel wants to annex -- and it wants to annex -- half of the
West Bank, as you know, and half of the West Bank has a lot of
Palestinians in it, there is not one person in Israel that thinks that
it's wrong to move by force the people that live in one half of the
West Bank to the second half of the West Bank. Because otherwise the
demographic balance in Israel will change. And it's no wonder that
Israelis feel no problem with what they did to the Gaza Strip. Take
one million and a half people and lock them in an impossible prison
with two gates and one key, that the Israelis have, and think that
people can live like this without reaction. In order to delegitimize
the right of someone to be in their own homeland, you have to
dehumanize them. If they're human beings you won't think about them
like this.
I think that as long as this is the ideology of the state of Israel,
and it is the ideology of the state of Israel, a lot of the good
things in Israel -- and there are many many good things in Israel,
it's an impressive project that the Zionist movement did, the way it
saved Jews, the way it created a modern society almost out of nothing
-- all these amazing achievements will be lost. First of all the
Palestinians would lose, that's true. This is true. First of all the
Palestinians are going to lose because the Israelis are not going to
change -- it doesn't look like they're going to change their policy,
and it doesn't look like anyone in the world is going to force them to
change their policy. But in the long run, Israel is not alone, and it
is a small country in the Arab world and in the Muslim world, and
America will not always be there to save it.
In the end of the day, if the Israelis, like South Africa -- you
cannot be in a neighborhood and be alien to the neighbors -- and say
"I don't like you," or "I don't want to be here," eventually they
would react. It could take one hundred years, two hundred years, I
don't know. But the Israelis are miscalculating, I think, history.
Only historians understand that sixty years is nothing in history.
Look at the Soviet Union. The fact that you are successful for sixty
years with the wrong policy does not mean that the next sixty years
are going to be the same. They're making a terrible mistake, as the
Jewish communities around the world are making a terrible mistake in
supporting this policy.
The new book is trying to convince that the most important story about
the ethnic cleansing is not only what happened in 1948 but the way
that the world reacted to what happened in 1948, sending the wrong
message to Israel, that this is fine, you can be part, not only of the
world, but you can be part of the Western world. You can be a part of
what is called "the group of civilized nations." So don't be
surprised, if you go to the occupied territories and you see
first-hand how people are being treated there, that the vast majority
of the Israelis, firstly don't know what goes on there, secondly when
they know what goes on there, don't seem to bother much. Because the
same message they got from the world in 1948 is the message they get
from the world in 2007. You can take a whole city -- imagine Tokyo --
surround it by an electric gate, and one person would have the key for
the only gate to the city. Any other place in the world, if you would
hear of a city that is at the mercy of a warden, like a prison, you
would be shocked. You would not allow it to continue for one day
without protests. In Israel, the world accepts it. And this is despite
the fact that there are more international journalists per square mile
in Israel and Palestine than there are anywhere else in the world.
That's a fact. And despite this international media presence, the
Israelis have not changed one aspect of their policy of occupation in
Palestine.
As I say, unfortunately I don't have time for this, but I think it's a
very interesting question: why does the world allow Israel to do what
it does? But it's really a different question; so I think I will stop
here, and open up for questions and remarks. Thank you.
gyaku is a media project based in Japan.
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