In an initially pointless exercise that lasted nearly an hour, I flipped between two Palestinian television channels, Al Aqsa TV of Hamas in Gaza and Palestine TV of Fatah in the West Bank. While both purported to represent Palestine and the Palestinians, each seemed to represent some other place and some other people. It was all very disappointing.
Hamas’ world is fixated on their hate of Fatah and other factional personal business. Fatah TV is stuck between several worlds of archaic language of phony revolutions, factional rivalry, and unmatched self-adoration. The two narratives are growingly alien and will unlikely ever move beyond their immediate sense of self-gratification and utter absurdity.
It is no wonder why Palestinians are still struggling to tell the world such a simple, straightforward and truthful story. Perhaps it is now out of desperation that they expect Israel’s New Historians, internationals who make occasional visits to Palestine or an unexceptionally fair western journalist to tell it.
But what about the Palestinian themselves? This is rare because factionalism in Palestine and among Palestinians in the Diaspora is also destroying the very idea of having a common narrative through which they can tell one cohesive story, untainted by the tribal political mentality which is devouring Palestinian identity the same way Israeli bulldozers are devouring whatever remains of their land.
Even if such a narrative were to finally exist, it would likely be an uphill battle, for Israel’s official narrative, albeit a forgery, is rooted in history. On May 16, 2013, Shay Hazkani, described in a detailed Haaretz article the intricate and purposeful process through which Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rewrote history. “Catastrophic thinking: Did Ben-Gurion try to rewrite history?” was largely based on a single file (number GL-18/17028) in the State Archives that seemed to have escaped censorship. The rest of the files were whisked away after Israel’s New Historians – Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe and others – got their hands on numerous documents that violently negated Israel’s official story of its birth.
“Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment, were reclassified as ‘top secret’,” Hazkani wrote in the Israeli paper. But GL-18/17028 somehow survived the official onslaught on history.
The lone document spoke of the “evolution of the Israeli version of the Palestinian Nakba (The Catastrophe) of 1948.” That evolution took place under the auspices of Ben-Gurion himself between the years 1960-1964, where he assigned one scholar after another to basically fabricate history, which they surely did. Zionist leaders were at least astute enough to understand the power of collective memory, and its possible impact on international public opinion. So they tailored their own versions of history very early on as to counter future generation of Palestinians.
Salman Abu Sitta is one of Palestine’s foremost historians. The man has done more to preserve and document Palestinian historical records than any other historian alive. In an interview with Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper on August 5, 2012, Abu Sitta was, of course, fully aware of the Israeli attempts at restyling history. “The Israeli maps of the 1950s were nothing more than the British survey of Palestine maps overwritten in Hebrew,” he said. “From 1960 onwards, the survey of Israel department started to issue maps devoid of all these original Palestinian names, and replaced with Hebrew ones.”
The reference to 1960 retrospectively corroborates Hazkani’s story based on the enduring file GL-18/17028.
Six and a half decades later, that fight continues, between Israel’s attempts to erase the history of Palestine, while Palestinians, through independent efforts (no thanks to the warring factions) try to preserve their own. “The war runs along several fronts, not only militarily, but it is also a battle over the minds of people…We are not trying to obliterate any other history – we are trying to say that we will not allow you (Israel) to erase ours,” Abu Sitta explained.
Yet Israel’s effort at abolishing Palestinian history never ceased, starting with the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and expelling their populations in 1947-48, to rewriting maps, to changing names of towns and streets, to manufacturing alternate histories, to more recently, outlawing Palestinian memory. Yes, precisely that.
In March 2011, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) passed what is known as the “Nakba bill”. It financially penalizes any organization or institution that perceives and commemorates Israel’s founding as a day of mourning for Palestinians. The law, officially known as “Budget Principles Law (Amendment 39) – Reducing Budgetary Support for Activities Contrary to the Principles of the State,” was as a continuation of Ben-Gurion’s project of physically erasing Palestinians, severing their rapport with their own land, and presenting a construct of history to the rest of the world—a history that was deliberately misconstrued by few individuals following official instructions.
Alas, a largely invented history that is so focused and well-funded seems to trump genuine history that is mostly distorted by the incompetence of its owners. True, there are other Abu Sitta type historians, who see Palestinians through the transparency of the collective, not the distorted prisms of individuals or factions. Their voices however are muffled and trounced by overwhelming odds—the Hamas vs. Fatah vs. the rest, the division of the national identity based on geography, politics, and funds, among other factors.
The current generation of Palestinians is yet to have a fully comprehensive, well-funded, long-term national Palestinian project that spans limited group interests and geography; one that is manned by qualified, well-trained Palestinian historians, spokespersons and scholars, so that a broad and unswerving Palestinian narrative can be presented throughout the world. All such efforts remain the responsibility of single individuals and small organizations with limited means, thus with narrowed outreach. But without such a unifying platform, it will be immensely difficult for the Palestinian narrative to reach the critical mass needed to overpower the fictitious Israeli version of Palestinian history which continues to define mainstream thinking in many parts of the world, especially in the West.
The work of Israel’s New Historians has been immensely valuable, although one cannot compare the compassion of such historians as Pappe with the harshness of Morris. The hundreds of other accounts offered by outsiders are also important, for they help in creating frames of references to which their specific audiences around the world can relate. But without a unified Palestinian narrative, massive in its magnitude, striking in its consistency, and all-inclusive in its presentation, the Israeli story, as fallacious as it is, will continue to define the mainstream understanding of history for years to come.
“Most of Palestine’s 700,000 ‘refugees’ fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders).”
— Benny Morris
“There was no Zionist ‘plan’ or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of ‘ethnic cleansing.’
— Benny Morris
Research reported by the Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, stated “the majority of the Arab refugees in 1948 were not expelled, but that 68% left without seeing an Israeli soldier.”
“The Arab exodus from the villages was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews”
– Yunes Ahmed Assad, refugee from the town of Deir Yassin, in Al Urdun, April 9, 1953
The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.
– Falastin (Jordanian newspaper), February 19, 1949
“It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem.”
– Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, April 3, 1949
“Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees… while it is we who made them to leave… We brought disaster upon Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave… We have rendered them dispossessed… We have accustomed them to begging… We have participated in lowering their moral and social level… Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon… men, women and children – all this in service of political purposes…”
– Khaled al Azm, Syria’s Prime Minister after the 1948 war
“The refugees were confident that their absence would not last long and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the ‘Zionist gangs’ very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.”
– Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, in the Beirut newspaper Sada al Janub, August 16, 1948
“The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce they rather preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town. This is in fact what they did.”
Amal Husseini, Acting Chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, speaking to the United Nations Security Council. Quoted in the UNSC Official Records (N. 62), April 23,1948,p.14
“As early as the first months of 1948 the Arab League issued orders exhorting the [Arab Palestinian] people to seek a temporary refuge in neighboring countries, later to return to their abodes in the wake of the victorious Arab armies and obtain their share of abandoned Jewish property.” – bulletin of The Research Group for European Migration Problems, 1957
“This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic Arab press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country.”
– Edward Atiyah (then Secretary of the Arab League Office in London) in The Arabs (London, 1955), p. 183
“The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city…By withdrawing Arab workers, their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.”.
– Time Magazine, May 3, 1948, p. 25
“The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab States in opposing Partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem,
– Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, in the Beirut newspaper, Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948
“The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.”
– from the Jordan daily Ad Difaa, September 6, 1954
“The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.”
– General Glubb Pasha, in the London Daily Mail on August 12, 1948
“[The Arabs of Haifa] fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel.”
– Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, according to Rev. Karl Baehr, Executive Secretary of the American Christian Palestine Committee, New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1949
“Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe. [However] …A large road convoy, escorted by [British] military . . . left Haifa for Beirut yesterday. . . . Evacuation by sea goes on steadily. …[Two days later, the Jews were] still making every effort to persuade the Arab populace to remain and to settle back into their normal lives in the towns… [as for the Arabs,] another convoy left Tireh for Transjordan, and the evacuation by sea continues. The quays and harbor are still crowded with refugees and their household effects, all omitting no opportunity to get a place an one of the boats leaving Haifa.””
– Haifa District HQ of the British Police, April 26, 1948, quoted in Battleground by Samuel Katz
“the military and civil authorities and the Jewish representative expressed their profound regret at this grave decision [to evacuate]. The [Jewish] Mayor of Haifa made a passionate appeal to the delegation to reconsider its decision”
– The Arab National Committee of Haifa, told to the Arab League, quoted in The Refugee in the World, by Joseph B. Schechtman, 1963
“The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.”
– Kenneth Bilby, in New Star in the Near East (New York, 1950), pp. 30-31
“We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.”
– Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, quoted in Sir Am Nakbah (“The Secret Behind the Disaster”) by Nimr el Hawari, Nazareth, 1952
“The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade… He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean. . . Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.”
– Habib Issa, Secretary General of the Arab League (Azzam Pasha’s successor), in the newspaper Al Hoda, June 8, 1951
“Some of the Arab leaders and their ministers in Arab capitals . . . declared that they welcomed the immigration of Palestinian Arabs into the Arab countries until they saved Palestine. Many of the Palestinian Arabs were misled by their declarations…. It was natural for those Palestinian Arabs who felt impelled to leave their country to take refuge in Arab lands . . . and to stay in such adjacent places in order to maintain contact with their country so that to return to it would be easy when, according to the promises of many of those responsible in the Arab countries (promises which were given wastefully), the time was ripe. Many were of the opinion that such an opportunity would come in the hours between sunset and sunrise.”
– Arab Higher Committee, in a memorandum to the Arab League, Cairo, 1952, quoted in The Refugee in the World, by Joseph B. Schechtman, 1963
“…our city flourished and developed for the good of both Jewish and Arab residents … Do not destroy your homes with your own hands; do not bring tragedy upon yourselves by unnecessary evacuation and self-imposed burdens. By moving out you will be overtaken by poverty and humiliation. But in this city, yours and ours, Haifa, the gates are open for work, for life, and for peace, for you and your families.”
The Haifa Workers’ Council bulletin, 28 April 1948
“…the Jewish hagana asked (using loudspeakers) Arabs to remain at their homes but the most of the Arab population followed their leaders who asked them to leave the country.”
The TIMES of London, reporting events of 22.4.48
“The existence of these refugees is a direct result of the Arab States’ opposition to the partition plan and the reconstitution of the State of Israel. The Arab states adopted this policy unanimously and the responsibility of its results, therefore is theirs.”
…The flight of Arabs from the territory allotted by the UN for the Jewish state began immediately after the General Assembly decision at the end of November 1947. This wave of emigration, which lasted several weeks, comprised some thirty thousand people, chiefly well-to-do-families.”
– Emil Ghory, secretary of the Arab High Council, Lebanese daily Al-Telegraph, 6 Sept 1948
“One morning in April 1948, Dr. Jamal woke us to say that the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), led by the Husseinis, had warned Arab residents of Talbieh to leave immediately. The understanding was that the residents would be able to return as conquerors as soon as the Arab forces had thrown the Jews out. Dr. Jamal made the point repeatedly that he was leaving because of the AHC’s threats, not because of the Jews, and that he and his frail wife had no alternative but to go.”
“The Arab streets are curiously deserted and, ardently following the poor example of the more moneyed class there has been an exodus from Jerusalem too, though not to the same extent as in Jaffa and Haifa.”
– London Times, May 5, 1948
“Even amidst the violent attacks launched against us for months past, we call upon the sons of the Arab people dwelling in Israel to keep the peace and to play their part in building the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent.
“We extend the hand of peace and good-neighborliness to all the States around us and to their people, and we call upon them to cooperate in mutual helpfulness with the independent Jewish nation in its Land. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.”
– David Ben-Gurion, in Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, read on May 14, 1948, moments before the 6 surrounding Arab armies, trained and armed by the British, invaded the day-old Jewish micro-state, with the stated goal of extermination.
“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, THEY ABANDONED THEM, FORCED THEM TO EMIGRATE AND TO LEAVE THEIR HOMELAND, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe, as if we were condemmed to change places with them; they moved out of their ghettos and we occupied similar ones. The Arab States succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the States of the world did so, and this is regrettable”.
– by Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the article titled: “What We Have Learned and What We Should Do”, published in Falastin el Thawra, the official journal of the PLO, of Beirut, in March 1976
“The first group of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere. . . . At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle.”
– Ash Shalab (Jaffa newspaper), January 30, 1948
“The Arab streets are curiously deserted and, ardently following the poor example of the more moneyed class there has been an exodus from Jerusalem too, though not to the same extent as in Jaffa and Haifa.”
– London Times, May 5, 1948
“Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the -Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit.. . . It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”
– The London weekly Economist, October 2, 1948
“In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.” — Benny Morris
“In Operation Hiram there was an unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion. That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take tothe roads.” — Benny Morris
“Yes.” — Benny Morris, in answer to the question, “What you are telling me here, as though bythe way, is that in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?”
“Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt inmy mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani.” — Benny Morris
“From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created.”– Benny Morris, in answer to the question, “Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?”
“Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.” — Benny Morris
“Ben-Gurion was right. If he had notdone what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would nothave arisen here.” — Benny Morris
“I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands…. There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing…. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population.” — Benny Morris
“There were 200 villages [in southern Palestine] … and these are gone. We had to destroy them, otherwise we would have had Arabs here … as we have in Galilee. We would have had another million Palestinians.” — Yitzhak Pundak, commander of the Givati Brigade’s 53rd Battalion
“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.” — Plan ‘Dalet’, approved by the Zionist leadership under Ben-Gurion on March 10, 1948
You aren’t doing the math. Benny Morris did:
“Most of Palestine’s 700,000 ‘refugees’ fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders).”
But don’t argue with me. Argue with the Arabs quoted above and other eyewitnesses.
Yes, Benny Morris did the math, sure enough, when he criticized Ben Gurion for not doing a thorough enough job of ethnically cleansing Palestine.
Fred Skolnik is a paid member of Hasbara, an Israeli Foreign Ministry propaganda tool.
Members are paid to flood the media with pro Israei arguments and misinformation. There is active Israeli solicitation to become “Media volunteers” who are provided with media links which the Ministry would like addressed by pro-Israel comments.
Richard Silverstein wrote, in theguardian on the 9th January 2009, an interesting article regarding the concerted efforts to promote pro-Israeli propaganda, it`s well worth a read.
It seems that Fred has been given the task of “dealing with The Foreign Policy Journal”, I suppose that`s a bit of a feather in your cap Jeremy!
It`s interesting that Fred can claim that there were no Palestinians in Palestine, while also saying they left voluntarily (Let them go back then Fred!).
It`s a bit long winded, but my comments are relative to Ramzy Baroud`s article and demonstrates the difference between an efficient Israeli method of propagating lies and a dis-unified Palestinian approach that hopes the truth will be come apparent.
I may be wrong, but I have the distinct impression, that despite Israeli efforts, the truth about the Palestinian/Israeli situation is slowly becoming better known.
Despite Fred and his Hasbara connections.
That`s,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/09/israel-foreign-ministry-media
I hope I have it right!
“It`s interesting that Fred can claim that there were no Palestinians in Palestine, while also saying they left voluntarily (Let them go back then Fred!).”
Well said, Mike.
I`m just getting a tad miffed at zealous zionists who are driven to obfuscate when regurgitating their shrouds of misleading disingenuous and horribly biased statements, with the sole purpose to complicate a really simple situation.
Israel stole and continues to steal Palestinian land. Palestinians suffered and continue to suffer, by force.
It`s not as if Fred even has the courage of his own convictions, he simply regurgitates Israel`s prepared propaganda statements.
George Orwell`s 1984, focused on “The Ministry of Truth”, were he to write that novel now he would rename it The Israeli Foreign Ministry.