The Idea of Israel (16 page)

In the footsteps of Shapira and Kimmerling came Gershon Shafir. He, too, was a precursor of the later and more comprehensive attempt to challenge Zionism in Israel. Shafir began his career at the University of Tel Aviv before emigrating to the United States; his work there, in many ways, was a continuation of that done by the Haifa critical group of the 1970s, complementing Kimmerling’s voyages into the questions of colonialism and Zionism. Shafir was more blunt than his predecessors. He reconstructed Zionism as an orthodox colonialist movement in a colonialist era despite its atypical characteristics, such as the absence of a proper mother country, the marginal role played by capitalist profit-and-loss considerations in the Zionist project, and the evident nationalist discourse and motivation. These exceptional historical circumstances led the leading Zionist scholars to reject strongly, indeed to condemn, any reference to Zionism as a colonialist movement.

Shafir’s explanation of Zionism’s distinctive features stands in stark contradiction to that of Zionist historians such as Anita Shapira, a leading figure in the historiographical establishment. She has insisted on the uniqueness of the Zionist case study, which therefore excludes it from being treated as a colonialist project like any other – an exclusion authorised by the movement’s highly exceptional moral standards.
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Zionist historiography likes to characterise the project in Palestine as colonisation without colonialism, and has even invented
a Hebraicised term with a Latin connotation when responding to the charge that Zionism was a colonialist movement: Zionism was a
Colonisatoring
movement, meaning that it colonised but was not a colonialist movement. Think of it as decaf or diet colonialism.
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Shafir did not ignore the uniqueness of Israel but preferred to stress particular geographical and economic conditions as the unique features of the Zionist movement. For him, Zionism was an intriguing example of colonialism, since the movement succeeded in establishing a state notwithstanding its lack of vast military or financial means. Thus, for Shafir, the jewels in the Zionist crown – the kibbutz and the
moshav –
were types of settlers’ colonies that could be found in the plantations of whites in South America, the Caribbean, Australia and elsewhere.
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In addition, Shafir debunked another self-proclaimed Zionist achievement: that of building an independent national market under the British Mandate. In the Zionist parlance it was called
Kibbush Ha’avoda
(conquest of labour), and it epitomised the Zionist dream of creating a ‘new Jew’ by delivering the Eastern European Jews from their dismal location at the margins of the Continent’s labour market prior to the rise of Zionism. The early ideologues of the movement condemned the pre-Zionist occupational map of European Jews as based entirely on what they called in Yiddish
luftgescheften
(hot air business) – non-productive and parasitic jobs forced upon the Jewish communities at times of persecution and anti-Semitism.

For the purpose of
Kibbush Ha’avoda
, there was a need to move out those in Palestine who were employed as more productive labourers, i.e., the Palestinians. In Shafir’s dictionary these strategies were typical colonialist means of excluding the native from the labour and land markets and replacing him with the settler. Two other Israeli historians of labour, Deborah S. Bernstein and David De Vries, would soon closely examine this policy in similar terms and expand our knowledge of the period.
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Although Shafir certainly broke new ground, it must be said that for many scholars outside Israel, his analysis of Zionist policy in its early stages was accepted as the most natural way to describe what happened there. Ernest Gellner, who was a friend of the state and the
movement, while discussing examples to show how national movements nationalise past events so as to fit them to a new narrative, chose the kibbutz as one such example. Like Shafir, he asserted that this form of collective settlement was the cheapest and most effective way of colonising Palestine at the time, and that only in hindsight did historians attribute a socialist or communist agenda as being the principal motivation behind the kibbutz and the
moshav
.

This pathway recurs often in history and has even a theoretical reification: symbolic realism. A certain action is taken by people – in the case at hand, leaving a country for another, alien country – for a variety of discrete and individual reasons. Then they choose the most functional way of surviving during the early stages of their settlement in an alien landscape. When the project becomes successful, these individual stories and practical solutions are narrated in such a way as to fit the objectives of the newborn state. In our case, the narrative becomes that the Jews did not come to Palestine because of their personal troubles nor did they live in kibbutzim because it was cheaper. No, they did both things because they were Zionists in the first instance and socialists in the second. And the articulators of this new narrative were those who became leaders of the group, either by choice or by force.

Shafir viewed the tale of a socialist dream as a retrospective justification for the brutal takeover of Palestine. A few years later, in 1999, Zeev Sternhell would articulate the same idea in an elegant book titled
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State
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Each of these three pioneering sociologists – Shapira, Kimmerling and Shafir – had a profound influence on the next wave of historical revisionism in Israel. Whereas Shapira and Kimmerling normalised the historiographical picture and opened the way to self-criticism, Shafir was the first scholar to investigate the principal chapters in the Palestinian narrative that related to the genesis of the Zionist project in Palestine.

Nevertheless, an identification with the Palestinian vantage point should not be mistaken for a wholesale adoption of Palestinian collective memory and history. At the time books by these sociologists
were published, Palestinian historiography was less nuanced in its treatment of Zionism. It would become more so, as a result of dialectical and mutual influences, only after the emergence of more comprehensive post- and even anti-Zionist scholarship in Israel. In fact, only when some hope for introspective Zionist criticism arose did Palestinian historiography respond in kind. In many ways, the appearance of the Israeli ‘new history’ of the 1948 war held the potential for such an introspective view and a favourable Palestinian response.

FIVE

Recognising the Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 War Revisited

S
oon after his victory in the 1960 election, President John F. Kennedy became deeply involved in US global policies. Among other issues that attracted his attention were the Middle East and in particular the question of Palestine. He decided to continue the policies of his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was convinced that only the repatriation of a significant number of Palestinian refugees to their homes in what became Israel would help resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict, which was disrupting US efforts to create a solid base against the Soviet Union in that region. That is why Kennedy ordered his ambassador at the UN to support the efforts by Arab countries in the General Assembly to force Israel to repatriate a large number of refugees from the UN camps in which they had lived ever since being ethnically cleansed in 1948.
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The astonished Israeli government, which had already successfully fended off an attempt by Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to impose such a policy on Israel, had to come up with new ways of responding to the new pressure. (One of the major decisions taken by the government at that time was to create a pro-Israel lobby to ensure that future American administrations would not stray down that same path.) The Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, convened an emergency meeting in his office to discuss
the matter. ‘We need to tell the facts. [These people] fled voluntarily … As far as I know, only the Arabs of Lydda and Ramla were forced to leave’, he said.
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As I and others have shown, his diary from 1948 showed that he was aware, if not responsible, for the forced expulsion of Palestinians from almost every corner of the land. What he meant by ‘we need to tell the facts’ was that he wanted to tell the facts in a way that would ease American and international pressure on Israel.
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Ben-Gurion explained that he was going to provide Israeli academia with the necessary archival material to show the world that the Arabs voluntarily left their homes in 1948. He chose the Shiloah Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (in 1965 this institute moved to Tel Aviv University). Reuven Shiloah was the first head of the Mossad until 1952 and then remained a senior adviser to the government on Mideast affairs. The Israel Oriental Society decided to commemorate his activity by naming after him the first ever university centre for research on the Middle East. The centre (which in 1983 became the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and still operates there today) has close ties with the Israeli security apparatus and in many ways was part of their research infrastructure. At the same time, it was recognised across the world as an important academic entity.
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The task at hand was entrusted to the institute’s deputy director, Rony Gabbay, an Arabic-speaking Iraqi Jew who emigrated to Israel in 1950 and later wrote a PhD on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. In his 1959 thesis, Gabbay contended that the Palestinians became refugees mainly due to a policy of destruction and dispossession that was executed by local Israeli commanders in many places during the war, although at the time he found no evidence for a systematic policy of expulsion.
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This was hardly the conclusion Ben-Gurion wished the Shiloah Institute to draw, with or without the examination of documents and archives.

Now the plot thickens. Under Gabbay’s name, the Shiloah Institute provided a report, which provided Ben-Gurion’s desired narrative. The main reason for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, it said, was that Palestinian leaders as well as leaders in
neighbouring Arab countries encouraged them to leave. Even better, as Gabbay wrote in a letter in 1961, ‘The last chapter of the report shows that the local Jewish leadership tried to stop the exodus of the Palestinians but to no avail’.
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Gabbay moved to Perth, Australia, decades ago because he found the Israeli academia to be racist towards Iraqi Jews like himself. He says he does not recall writing these conclusions. Recently he told a PhD student from New York named Shay Hazkani that he drew no conclusions; he only collected and summarised the documents, which showed that there was no encouragement from any Arab or Palestinian leaders and that there were plenty of cases of expulsion. Hazkani published a long piece in
Haaretz
on the subject in May 2013.

Ben-Gurion took a personal interest in the affair; he read Gabbay’s report and was disappointed, so he asked one of his advisers on Arab affairs, Uri Lubrani, to write a new report. Lubrani in turn gave the mission to Moshe Ma’oz, who would later become one of Israel’s leading Orientalists and was about to go to Oxford to complete a PhD. Ma’oz explained in a letter to another member of the institute that ‘we aim to show that the exodus was caused by the encouragement by the local Arab leaders and Arab governments and was facilitated by the British government’.
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Indeed, this conclusion – reached before the documents were even inspected – was the very same one reached afterwards.

Ma’oz told Shay Hazkani that today, in retrospect, he regrets playing such a role in the fabrication of history (indeed he later became a champion of Palestinian rights). In the meantime, this report’s conclusions were the main Israeli argument used to fend off further American and international pressure. As it happens, the pressure ended when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. The new administration, under Lyndon B. Johnson, ceased any attempt to force Israel to repatriate the refugees, and any continued UN insistence on it was regarded by both Washington and Jerusalem as insignificant and irrelevant.
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Those involved in this episode recall that the documents were shredded and their reports shelved. Hazkani discovered some of it
in Israeli archives decades later, but at the time, in the early 1960s and until the late 1980s, the professional as well as the popular historiography subscribed to the narrative presented above, in the third chapter.

By now, readers of this book should be familiar with the term ‘new historians’ of Israel. We are a group of professional Israeli historians, myself included, who have challenged the official version of the 1948 war and about whom more will be said later. In many ways, the ‘new history’ was nearly born in 1961, fathered by none other than David Ben-Gurion! Shelving the Gabbay report precluded that outcome.

A more familiar chapter in the local challenge to the official Israeli version of events surrounding the 1948 war began with the journalist Simha Flapan. He was an unlikely candidate to challenge the official version of the war. If anything, in the public mind after 1967 he was remembered as someone who brilliantly demolished Jean-Paul Sartre’s call, upon his visit to Israel, for the unconditional return of the refugees Israel had expelled in 1948. Flapan refuted the allegation and rejected out of hand the philosopher’s demand. Years later, however, he would embrace both the allegation and Sartre’s solution.
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