Recently I’ve been reading the second edition of the book (”The Birth of the Refugee Problem Revisited”), as well as a book by a young Palestinian scholar, Rosemarie Esber (”Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians”), and excerpts from Hillel Cohen’s “Army of Shadows”, and Flapan’s brilliant “The Birth of Israel – Myths and Realities”. I used to think I was especially ignorant because the Israeli education system is still covering up a lot of what happened, but a lot of Palestinians have told me they know little more than their family’s history (if their relatives were even willing to talk about their experiences), and outside Israel/Palestine few are taught this history properly. It’s frustrating, because the information is out there – it just needs to get circulated.

I measure everything against what I was taught in school. I never learned about 1948 in a history lesson (these only extended as far as the Holocaust. We learned a lot about the pre-state Zionist movement, but almost nothing about proper Israeli history). What I received was more mythical versions – the children’s books I read in third grade (there was a series on Zionist martyrs with colored covers – my favorite guy was from the Haganah, while my friend’s was from the IZL (Irgun), and we used to fight about who was braver). There were the pieces in the reader for first or second graders (I remember very vividly one about a lone kibbutznik standing up to Arab tanks), and the tedious but affecting ceremonies every year for Remembrance Day, which were designed to make us identify with the fallen soldiers (I immediately think of the poet Alterman’s line “we are the silver platter, upon which you were given the Jewish state”). The essence, of course, was that in 1948 the Arabs attacked Israel. It’s amazing how quickly every political discussion of the present, or of the future (one state? two states?) with anyone who has had this kind of education reverts back to this very basic point. This where the books I mentioned come in handy.

It turns out there was no unified collective of Arabs in 1948. The strongest Arab army, that of Jordan, did formally enter the war, but this was primarily in order to capture the areas allocated to the Palestinian state – not the Jewish ones. King Abdallah’s forces never advanced westwards towards Tel Aviv. Quite the opposite – they evacuated whole cities like Lydda and Ramle, and enabled the Zionists to take them over and expel their inhabitants. There was fighting around Jerusalem, but overall, their reaction was more complacent than aggressive.

The Egyptian Minister of Defense declared “we shall never even contemplate entering the war officially. We are not mad” (Flapan, 1987:119). This was on May 12th, three days before the war broke out! The rhetoric of the Arab countries was belligerent, but the regimes made very few preparations for war and entered it reluctantly. A big reason for the decision to intervene was the pressure from their public to protect the Palestinian population: throughout April there had been massacres and atrocities, like the well-documented and well-publicized death of over a hundred villagers of Deir Yassin, and a huge stream of refugees from cities like Haifa. There were no guarantees for the safety of the huge Arab minority that would have become citizens of the Jewish state under the partition plan. Another factor was the internal rivalry, especially between the Hashemite Jordan and Iraq and the rest, leading to the attempt to carve up the future Palestinian territory. No one particularly liked the Palestinian leader, Haj Amin AlHusseini: the secretary of the Arab league referred to him as “the Menachem Begin of the Arabs” (Flapan, 1987:130).

Personally, I don’t have too much sympathy for him either: he did collaborate with Hitler, and was responsible for the 1929 massacre of Palestinian Jews in Hebron. However, the nationalist position of opposition to partition made sense: the Palestinian majority wanted to remain a majority in one state, instead of handing over a large portion of their population to become an eternal minority in a Jewish state. Jews at the time were only a third of the overall population of Palestine. This is apart from the terms of partition, which were clearly unfair (most of the country and its most fertile and developed areas were given to the minority).

But the Palestinian position was much more complex than that: because of the mufti’s previous violent record of executing his rivals, many opposed him and refused to join his forces. A whole series of Palestinian communities signed non-aggression pacts with their Jewish neighbors. Most were expelled anyway: for example, the inhabitants of Deir Yasin actually made an agreement with Giv’at Shaul, and refused to let Syrian and Iraqi volunteers to enter. Muhammed Nimer al-Hawwari, head of the Najjadah organization in Jaffa, went so far as to organize contingents to man Tel Aviv’s southern border so as to prevent attacks (Cohen, 2008:233). Many of these communities realized they would be unable to protect themselves in case of a war, and grudgingly accepted the partition plan.

Of course, there were also serious clashes and much intercommunal violence. The point is that the phrase “the Arabs attacked Israel” is false because there was hardly a coordinated Arab collective that attacked together, and also there was no pre-given Jewish Israel: almost half of the inhabitants of the Jewish state weren’t Jewish, so that the initial stages of the conflict were more of a mutual civil war. When the Arab states stepped in, they were entering a conflict with a state that had already expelled several hundred thousand of its potential citizens.

The trick with Morris is to skip his conclusions, which are bizarrely apologetic and tend to contradict his own findings, and just to concentrate on the evidence itself. Today I was reading about a crucial moment: on April 2, a brigade is ordered not to destroy a village if there is no resistance, but April 8-10 the order is reversed – there is a decision “to destroy villages in strategic areas or along crucial routes regardless of whether or not they were resisting” (Morris, 2004:236). Like so many crucial decisions in Israel, this begins as an initiative of medium-level army officials and ends up as an overall policy of clearing away Palestinians from most areas, although the government never makes an official decision to expel them, and several ministers and officials complain they are being left in the dark. (Morris explicitly calls this a policy numerous times, e.g. pages 167, 245, 505, but then in the conclusion he suddenly claims that there was no systematic policy).

Esber gives the other side of the story, basing her narrative on interviews with refugees. But as she points out, there is really a wide correlation between Morris’ army commands and her materials: there aren’t really two narratives – the main outline of what happened is common to both books. Army units are given commands to expel “the Arabs from Sumsum and Burayr and burn their granaries and fields” (Morris, 2004:258), or “to attack with the aim of conquest, the killing of adult males, destruction and torching” (2004:253), and the troops go systematically from village to village and do just that – as the survivors testify in heartbreaking detail. Esber estimates over 80% of the population was expelled, and 20,000 died in the process (through initial killings – almost every village was mortared before conquest – but also as a result of the life-threatening conditions that were imposed upon the refugees). At the end of the war the government decided to investigate the many reports of atrocities committed by the soldiers, but the conclusions remain censored.

This is the background for everything we are witnessing today. Pick up a copy of one of these books – they are very hard to read, but also very rewarding.