History Erased

History Erased
By Meron Rapoport
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/878851.html

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town.
About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto,
next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war,
Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a
population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid
the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-
century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein
Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his
death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of therift between Shi'ites
and Sunnis.

Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni,would visit the site. But
after July 1950, there was nothing left for themto visit: that's
when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein. This
was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War
ofIndependence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the
160mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel
under thearmistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing.
What is unusualabout the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the
demolition isdocumented, and direct responsibility was taken by none
other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named
Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up
deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least
two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod. A
member of the establishment is responsible for the documentation:
Shmuel Yeivin, then the director of the Department of Antiquities,
the forerunnerof the present-day Antiquities Authority. Yeivin, as
noted by Raz Kletter, an archaeologist who has studied the first two
decades of archaeology in Israel, was neither a political activist
nor a champion for Arab rights. AsKletter explains, he was simply a
scientist, a disciple of the Britishschool and a member of the
Mandate government's Department of Antiquitieswho believed that
ancient sites and holy places needed to be preserved,whether they
were sacred to Jews, Christians or Muslims. In line with his
convictions, he fired off letters of protest and was considered a
nudnik bythe IDF. "I received a report that not long ago, the army
blew up the big building inthe ruins of Ashkelon, which is known by
the name of Maqam al-Nabi Hussein and is a holy site for the Muslim
community," Yeivin wrote on July 24, 1950,to Lieutenant Colonel
Yaakov Patt, the head of the department for special missions in the
Defense Ministry, and sent a copy to chief of staff YigaelYadin and
other senior officers.

"That building was still standing during my last visit to the site,
on June 10 - in other words, the army authorities found no reason to
demolish it from the conquest until the middle of 1950. Ifind it
hard to imagine the site was blown up due to infiltrators, as
theyhave not stopped infiltrating the area during this entire
period."

The detonation, by the way, was extremely successful. Of the ancient
and holy site, not so much as a stone remained. Yeivin's complaint
was seemingly related to procedural matters, but only seemingly. The
army, he wrote, needed to understand that there were "sanctified
buildings," and if it wanted to touch them, "it is proper,honest and
courteous first to talk to the institutions that supervise
theseareas and buildings, and to consult with them in order to find
ways to avoiddestruction."

But that is not happening, Yeivin stated. "I was told that
simultaneously, the mosque in the abandoned village of Ashdod was
blown up," Yeivin added.

"This is not the first case. I already have had many occasions to
draw your attention to similar cases elsewhere, and the chief of
staff issued explicit directives with regard to the preservation of
such buildings and places, but apparently none of this avails
commanders of a certain type... I believe the commander responsible
for this explosion should be broughtto trial and punished, because
in this case there was no justification for aswift, war-contingent
operation." A perusal of the IDF Archives shows that Lieutenant
Colonel Patt forwarded Yeivin's complaint to Yadin. However, Yadin,
who would later become Israel's preeminent archaeologist and whose
father, Eliezer Sukenik, was anarchaeologist of repute in his own
right and Yeivin's colleague in the Mandate Department of
Antiquities, was not unduly upset.

Below Patt's letter addressing Yeivin's complaint are handwritten
remarks: "1. Confirm receiptof letter and inform that the matter is
being dealt with; 2. Add to Dayan's material for my meeting with B.-
G." - referring to then prime minister and defense minister David
Ben-Gurion.

It stands to reason that the handwriting is Yadin's, as it is
unlikely that anyone else could have met with Ben-Gurion
concerning "Dayan's material." And Yadin, as is clear from another
note written on the letter, did notattribute any great importance to
the complaint.

"Teven la'afarayim," it says, roughly the equivalent of "coals to
Newcastle" - in short, there isnothing new in Yeivin's complaint.
Nor was Dayan unduly upset. In a response he sent to the chief of
staff'sbureau, apparently on August 10 under the
heading "Destruction of a holyplace," Dayan wrote: "The detonation
was carried out by the Coastal Plain District, at my instruction."

The first words of the sentence have been struck out, but a letter
dated August 30 removes all doubt. Dayan replied to a letter
concerning "damage to antiquities in the Ashkelon area": "The
chiefof staff approached me and I gave him my explanations; the
action wascarried out at my instructions."

That reply was so embarrassing that Yaakov Prolov, the head of the
Operations Department in the General Staff, sent a letter to the
chief of staff's bureau asking for guidelines on how to reply to
Yeivin.

"A mistakewas made here and it can be assumed it will not happen
again," someone instructed him in script that looks like that
attributed to Yadin in the previous letter.

Whitewashing, it turns out, is not a new invention.

Blots on the landscape

Not surprisingly, it did in fact happen again. At the end of
October, Yeivinsent another letter, this time directly to Yadin, to
complain about "the blowing-up of the ancient mosque at Yavneh," a
1,000-year-old structure whose minaret is still standing on a hill
south of Yavneh, close to the train station. Yeivin reminded Yadin
that he had been promised that thoseresponsible would be punished
this time. But it turned out there was anunexplained disparity
between the explicit orders prohibiting damage tomosques and the
actual policy in the field.

"I have just received an official reply from your bureau chief
[MichaelAvitzur], and after reading it I am totally at a loss,"
Yeivin wrote to Yadin.

"On the one hand, I have in front of me your explicit order,
whichspeaks unequivocally about preserving places of archaeological
or historical value ... On the other hand, I read in the letter of
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Avitzur that the mosque at Yavneh 'was
exploded on July 9, 1950, before the date on which the cessation of
blowing up mosques was announced.' How can these two things be
reconciled?"

Yeivin's quotation from Avitzur's letter makes it clear that blowing
up mosques was widespread enough that it required a special order to
stop it. Yeivin himself wrote later in the letter, "I am extremely
concerned following my talks with a number of people involved in the
policy on this question."

Yeivin did not specify whom he spoke to, but noted, "I do not
seemyself as being able to write explicitly about everything."

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of
Majdal atthe time, says "he does not want to return" to that period.
The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during
his term as chief ofstaff and remained close to him for years, says
he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and
therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in
Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heardDayan issue any
such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs
from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still
there," Bar-Onsays. "I know that in the South, in the villages of
Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were
leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar
with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable
to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's
book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in
Britain (EquinoxPublishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the
Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider
himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism
or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes
across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the
utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an
entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old
Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare
Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at
the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the
other.

Had it not been for afew fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save
these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the
face of the earth. As the documents quoted in the book show, only a
small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The
vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab
past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts
everyone wanted to forget.

"The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the
blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh
associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A.
Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in
an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book.

A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities.

"In the pastnine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However,
those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp
contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are
irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away."
The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the
foreign minister," Golda Meir.

Kletter reveals in his book that Yeivin and his staff occasionally
tried to stop the destruction - not always, not consistently, and
not for moral reasons or out of any special respect for the people
(the Arabs) who lived for centuries in these towns and quarters.
Their grounds were scientific,and Kletter believes this approach
stemmed from their background.

Before 1948 they worked for the Department of Antiquities of the
Mandate governmentunder British management, alongside Arab
employees. Kletter relates that inthe department they fought for
the "Judaization" of the names of ancient sites, but nevertheless
remained loyal to the department - so much so that after the United
Nations passed the partition plan, in November 1947, Yeivin proposed
that the department remain unified even after the country'sdivision
into a Jewish state and an Arab state.

Eliezer Sukenik went one step farther: "I do not believe the Jewish
state will preserve its antiquities," he said in a December 1947
discussion. "We must placescientific sovereignty above political
sovereignty. We are interested in the archaeology of the whole land,
and the only way [to ensure this] is a unified department."

Perjury at Megiddo

"Yeivin was not the greatest archaeologist in the world, but he had
personal integrity, which is the most important trait of the British
heritage," Kletter says. "But that heritage did not suit the
nationalism of the 1950s, because Ben-Gurion wanted to erase
everything that had been, to erase the Islamic past." Ben-Gurion saw
everything that existed here before the revival of the Jewish
community as wasteland.

"Foreign conquerors have turned our land into a desert," he said at
a meeting of the Society for Land of Israel Studies in1950. Thus the
failure of Yeivin and his colleagues was a foregone conclusion. In
the 1950s, when archaeology was a fad and archaeologists like Yadin
were cultural heroes, people of science were nudged out of
management positions. Yeivin was forced to resign and "technocrats"
like Teddy Kollekwere effectively put in charge of managing Israel's
major archaeological sites.

The Department of Antiquities was formally established in July 1948,
as aunit of the Public Works Department in the Ministry of Labor.
Even before this, the veterans of its Mandatory predecessor tried to
preserve antiquities, and in particular to prevent looting, but did
not always succeed.

The museum in Caesarea was emptied out by thieves, and the same fate
befell the findings and documents at Tel Megiddo, which were
concentrated in the offices of the University of Chicago
archaeologicalexpedition, which had been digging there since the
1920s. Rare collections, such as the one at Notre Dame Monastery in
Jerusalem, disappeared almostcompletely, and private collections and
antique shops in Jaffa and Jerusalemwere also targeted by thieves.

"All the objects have disappeared from the government museum [more
than 100 fragments of inscriptions and parts of pillars]," reported
Emanuel Ben-Dor, who would later become Yeivin's deputy director,
after visiting Caesarea. "The collection in the office of the Greek
patriarch was destroyed."

The Megiddo incident was particularly embarrassing, as the dig was
carried out by American archaeologists and the U.S. consulate wanted
to know who was responsible for the devastation. An investigation
was launched under Yeivin's supervision, and the local commanders
said that Arab units had wrecked the site. Yeivin discovered that
this was untrue, and that Israeli soldiers had looted the site and
then burned the archaeological expedition's offices.

In a confidential report, Yeivin quoted from an internal letter of
the local unit: "In consultation with the battalion commander and
with the brigade's operations officer, we agreed that in the event
of an investigation by the U.S. consul general ... we will
(shamefully) lie and say the place was found in this condition when
it was captured and that the crime was committed by the Arabs before
they fled."

But the theft of antiquities was only a small part of the problem.
The major problem was the destruction. In August 1948, the army
started to demolish ancient Tiberias, apparently in the wake of a
local decision. The attemptsto salvage some of the town's
archaeological gems were to no avail. In September the site was
visited by Jacob Pinkerfeld, from the Department of Antiquities'
monument conservation unit.

"In ancient Tiberias the army began to blow up a hefty strip of
buildings inthe Old City," Pinkerfeld wrote in his report. "In talks
with all theresponsible parties at the site, we emphasized the
special importance of the ancient stone with the relief of the lions
on it, which was built into one of the walls. We were promised that
this antiquity dating back 3,000 years would be specially guarded,
but in my last visit I found precisely thisstone blown to bits."

So sweeping was the destruction of Tiberias that evenBen-Gurion was
taken aback when he visited the city in early 1949. The list for
destruction sometimes assumed ludicrous proportions. During a visit
to Haifa in August 1948, Yeivin discovered the army was laying
wasteto large sections of the Arab city around Hamra Square (now
Paris Square)under the direction of the city engineer. In his
restrained language, Yeivin expressed his astonishment at the
destruction: "With our own eyes we saw the ruins of half of a
building that had served as a synagogue on the Street of the
Jews ... According to Jews who live there and wandered about among
theruins, another two or three synagogues were also destroyed
there ... It would appear that with attentiveness, the damage
inflicted to these holy buildings could have been avoided."

Depressing impression

The leveling of the villages began as soon as the fighting ended.
During his visit to the North, Yeivin saw the army blowing up
villages near Tiberias and Mount Tabor. He asked that before
villages were demolished, consultations be held with representatives
of the Department of Antiquities, because "in many villages, ancient
building stones are embedded in the houses." At Zir'in (now Kibbutz
Yizrael) a Crusader tower was blown up, and the fortress at Umm
Khaled, near Netanya, was reduced to rubble.

But there were successes, too. An order was issued to raze the
fortress at Shfaram, but Antiquities Department staff arrived at the
last minute and blocked the demolition. And at Al-Muzeirra, a
village south of Rosh Ha'ayin, a miracle occurred: the army used a
handsome building of pillars in the middle of the abandoned village
for target practice, apparently without knowing it was "the only
mausoleum that survived in our country from the Roman period,"
according to Yeivin.

When, nonetheless, the decision came to blow up the mausoleum in
July 1949, an antiquities inspector arrived at the site and
prevented the blast. The site is now known as "Hirbat Manor" (the
Manor Ruin) and is recommended in all sightseeing guides for the
area. Kletter relates that in February 1950, at the initiative of
Yeivin andothers, who grasped that without government intervention,
the country's urban past would simply disappear, Ben-Gurion agreed
to establish agovernment committee "for sacred and historic sites
and monuments."

The committee was staffed by senior government and military
personnel. The report, which was submitted in October 1951, stated
that certain sites had to be preserved as "whole units" - "Acre, a
few quarters in Safed, smallsections of Jaffa and Tiberias, small
sections of Ramle and Lod, a few sections of Tarshiha."

The rest of the towns, and hundreds of villages, were already lost.
However, the state institutions failed to honor even these
conclusions.

According to Kletter, Yeivin was one of the first to fight the
August 1950 decision to demolish all of Jaffa. Afterward, artists
who had moved into the abandoned city joined the struggle, as did
Development Authority personnel,and thus a few sections were spared
total annihilation. Yeivin was less successful in Lod. In June 1954,
he wrote a protest letter to the educationminister, in the wake of a
decision on "the destruction of the ancient quarter in the city of
Lod."

Israeli law, pursuant to British law, stipulated that only what was
built before 1700 was considered an "antiquity," but Yeivin wrote
that the other sites should also be preserved- both for tourism and
because they are "cultural and educational assets and living
historical testimonies that every enlightened state is obliged to
preserve."

Kletter's book leaves the impression that the destruction was not
accidental and that its perpetrators were aware of its significance.
The ideological foundation of the devastation is set forth in the
August 1957 Foreign Ministry letter sent at the behest of Golda
Meir.

After the author of the document, A. Dotan, requested the Ministry
of Labor to "clear the ruins," he specified "four types" of "ruins"
and the grounds for their destruction:

"First, it is necessary to get rid of the ruins in the heart of
Jewish communities, in important centers or on central
transportation arteries; rapid treatment must be given to the ruins
of villages whose residents are in the country, such as Birwe, north
of Shfaram, and the ruins of Zippori; in areas where there is no
development, such as along the rail line from Jerusalem to Bar
Giora, one receives a depressing impression of a once-living
civilized land; attention must also be directed to ruins in
distinctly tourist areas, such as the ruins of the Circassian
village in Caesarea, which is intact but empty ... Accordingly, the
Ministry of Labor should assume the mission of clearing the
ruins ... It should be taken into account that the participation of
nongovernmental elements requires caution, as politically it is
desirable for the operation to be executed without anyone grasping
its political meaning."

Kletter says he was surprised to discover the scale of the
destruction, but that to some extent he understands those who were
behind the operation. The decision not to allow the Palestinian
refugees to return was unavoidable, he believes, if the idea was to
establish a Jewish state here. Those were the rules of the game in
that period, he says, and if the Jewish community had lost in 1948,
the Arab victors would likely have treated the Jews in the same way.
And because it was impossible to preserve hundreds of abandoned
Palestinian towns and villages, there was no choice but to demolish
most of them, Kletter maintains.

He also has nothing against the archaeologists who in the early
years of the state were concerned almost exclusively with Jewish
sites, or in the bestcase with Christian or Roman sites, and ignored
Muslim sites almost completely. It is natural for researchers to be
interested first and foremost in their own culture, Kletter says;
and besides, relative to the political pressure exerted on them by
people like Ben-Gurion, who declaredly wanted to erase the Arab past
of this country, they behaved honorably.

"Early Israeli archaeology has something to be ashamed of and much
to be proud of," Kletter writes. Still, Kletter says, his book
is "about loss, about what could have been but was not. The loss of
archaeology that began with a scientific tradition and did not
continue, the loss of vast historical information, the loss of the
village landscape. I don't think this village landscape belongs to
us - it belongs to the people who lived here - but still, there is
longing for thatlost landscape. We cannot bring it back, but at
least we should be aware of the truth and not lie to ourselves."

Kletter says this country's great good fortune lies in the fact that
it contains so many monuments that it was impossible to destroy all
of them. But even those that were destroyed somehow continue to live
a different life. Mash'had Nabi Hussein, the holy site in Ashkelon,
was leveled in 1950, but the Muslim believers did not forgo it. A
few years ago, the Shi'ite Ismaili sect, which is based in central
India, established a kind of small marble platform at the site, on
the grounds of Barzilai Hospital, and since then thousands of
believers have come there every year. In Yavneh, only the minaret
remains of the razed ancient mosque, standing alongside heaps of
rubble and one fig tree, but in a visit to the site a week ago I saw
a group of elderly Ethiopians there on the hill, praying ardently
under the fig tree. It was as if the place had remained holy even if
its inhabitants had changed.

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