The presentation began with the Palestinian Nakba of 1947-1949 and how it affected Lydd/Lod specifically. The speaker showed how 95% of the city’s Palestinian residents were expelled, while those who managed to return were housed in new neighborhoods with Hebrew names. She showed how the city went from being an important regional and commercial center, a beautiful city with a 6,000 year old history, into a neglected backwater in Israel’s “periphery,” a city “being erased before one’s eyes. She showed how 95% of the city was physically erased after the war, demonstrating that the Nakba is not just about the expulsion of people but the erasure of their homes and the physical landscape in which they lived. The plight of Dahamash, she argued, is simply a continuation of the policies of completely Judaizing Israel’s “mixed cities.” She cited recent quotations from top Israeli officials openly stressing the need to force Palestinians to emigrate out of the country. She suggested that the Judaization of street names and names of neighborhoods is part and parcel of this process, and she quoted senior officials who are “seriously considering” changing Ramle’s name to a Jewish name.

In years following the 1948 war, the responsibility for Judaizing Lydd/Lod was transferred from the military (who destroyed thousands of houses in the city in 1954) to the district planning commissions and the Lydd/Lod municipality. Since construction permits are nearly impossible for Palestinians to receive (even if their land is privately owned) it is estimated that the majority of Palestinian houses in the “mixed” cities are illegally built. She stressed that residents are forced into this situation by the municipality, who give them no choice but to build illegally or leave their city. Thus, entire neighborhoods in Lydd/Lod have been built without permits. Their inhabitants are heavily fined, they don’t receive even the most basic services from the municipality. This situation creates an economic incentive for the municipality to force Palestinians to build illegally since they receive tax and fine revenue but are not required to provide basic services. There are 500 active demolition orders in the city, and residents live in constant fear of demolition. The speaker noted that although the municipality frequently suggests that there is no money to provide services such as garbage collection and school buses, it costs far more to demolish one house than to provide services to an entire neighborhood like Dahamash. This shows quite clearly what the municipality’s priorities are.

The speaker discussed the relationship between Jews and Palestinians in the city over time. Following the 1948 war, Palestinian and Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) Jewish residents lived as neighbors in the Old City area in peace, but in ensuing years the Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods were forcefully separated and separate neighborhoods were established for each. She stressed that impoverished Jewish residents suffer from the same policies of intentional neglect and gentrification that Palestinians suffer from, with any who succeed in attaining any economic security opting to leave the city instead of trying the dying city. All the residents desire, she stressed, is to live in dignity as equal residents in the city of Lydd/Lod, side by side with Jews.

Unfortunately, the municipality and the state of Israel’s policy of ghettoizing the Palestinian population and Judaizing Lydd/Lod and other “mixed” cities creates tremendous tension between the Jewish and Palestinian residents. To give us a sense of the state-sponsored ethnic conflict in the city, she discussed the fact that during election periods, mayoral candidates use pictures of demolished houses to demonstrate to their right-wing Jewish constituents that they will control the Palestinian population with a heavy hand. She quoted the current mayor of Lydd/Lod in an interview with the local newspaper, responding to a question about Palestinian community organizations’ request that streets in which Palestinians live be given Arab names. He demonstrated a deep race-based hostility to Palestinians that she said was the norm rather than the exception in mayors of “mixed” cities. For example, he said that “the first Arab to talk about national issues, I will shoot him, because whenever I shot Arabs in the past, I was the one left alive. They should go to hell.” The speaker showed us horrifying pictures of Israeli youths recruited by the municipality as volunteers to assist in the process of “preparing” a Palestinian home for demolition. She said that it was “much worse than the demolition itself” to see young Jews educated to demolish Palestinian houses. She mentioned the post-disengagement phenomenon of the religious Zionist movement seeing the “mixed” cities as a target for settlement and Judaization, sending Jewish “pioneers” to try to Judaize Palestinian neighborhoods. She differentiates between Jews who want to live in Lydd/Lod as a city, and Jews who want to Judaize Lydd/Lod, to dominate its Palestinian residents, and eventually to replace them with the aid of the municipality.

At this point, she discussed the specific case of Dahamash. This is a village located between Ramle and Lydd/Lod and is home to 500 Palestinians. Exceptionally, they are the recognized owners of the land, which is has not been the case in post-Nakba Lydd/Lod. They had to go to court to receive even the most basic services, such as garbage collection.. Unfortunately, their land has been zoned as “agricultural land” and all structures on it have been declared “illegal.” Thirteen demolition orders on houses in the neighborhood are imminent, while nearby, a construction project initiated by the aforementioned mayor of Lydd/Lod is taking place despite the fact that that land as also previously zoned as agricultural land. The race-based discrimination is apparent. For Palestinian residents who’ve lived on their land for decades and even longer, it is impossible to rezonetheir privately owned land for construction. For housing projects and construction for Jews, however, it is possible and frequently done. She stressed that the recent demolition orders are part of a plan approved in 2000, and that a plan called “Lod 2020” approved by the municipality threatens to bring the Judaization of Lydd/Lod and the condition of its Palestinian residents to new levels of hardship. These are not isolated cases, but well-thought-out plans approved before-hand which the residents of Dahamash see as the continuation of the Nakba of 1948.

On recommendation from members of the district planning council, the residents spent thousands of dollars developing an entire city plan for their neighborhood, in a bid to legalize the existing buildings. A few days ago, the well-thought out, professional, and expensive plan was rejected outright. In this, the residents of Dahamash join the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, who have submitted hundreds of plans, financed entirely from their own pockets, to the planning committees, all of whom have been rejected. Now the demolition orders have again become imminent, and are scheduled to be approved on July 14^th. On July 13^th, the Sheikh Jarrah solidarity activists will join with the residents of Dahamash and activists across the country to protest the impending race-based house demolitions.

During the teach-in, it was clear to those assembled that this event was not a simple educational opportunity, but also a political statement. Shortly after the presentation began, a police officer cruised by and pulled aside a Palestinian activist. Later, a dozen or so settlers stood beside the stolen Al Ghawi house and watched the presentation. Some clapped when the speaker showed pictures of destroyed Palestinian houses. They were obviously angry at our presence in what they consider to be their neighborhood Discussing the Nakba with the newly-made refugees of Sheikh Jarrah, amidst the glowering stares of orthodox settler youths, brought home to me how immediate and urgent the struggle against Judaization is, and how the struggle is entirely about the simple right of people to be present, when powerful institutions and racist movements just want them to disappear.

As I was riding my bike back across the unmarked border, the Green Line, to Jewish Jerusalem, I had to go through Me’a She’arim. One of the settlers from the neighborhood was there, and he recognized me. He started shouting “Traitor! Traitor! He helps Arabs! Traitor!” I saw the other ultra-orthodox people starting to look up, and I felt fear. I pedaled faster, appreciating a new knowledge of what a society headed for fascism feels like. I remembered that same settler confronting one of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah: “You are an Arab. You. Are an Arab. You are an Arab.” He responded: “Yes! I am a Palestinian, Muslim Arab” and the settler responded: “People should be ashamed when you call them Arabs.”

The shame of his shamelessness, and of the shamelessness of the state and non-state proponents of Judaiziation, turns my stomach anew every time.

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.