Peace in Palestine

I can only hope, that the little we do on dailykos to keep the Israeli Palestinian conflict in the public's eye will help bring this issue to a final resolution.

The rock is being pushed up hill an inch at a time. We can't stop now, the world is watching.

Somehow, we need to convince the powers that be, that there is more success and joy in building instead of destroying.

Time to decommission the war machine and fund organizations like an international Army Corp of Engineers. Build infrastructure, quit bombing it.

NEWS:

GAZA CITY (AP) -- Political rivals Hamas and Fatah reached a final agreement on forming a unity government Wednesday, wrapping up months of coalition negotiations aimed at ending bloody internal fighting and lifting international sanctions against the Palestinians.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas said he would present the new government to parliament this weekend for final approval.

snip

Both sides hope the alliance will bring the Palestinians out of international isolation after a yearlong boycott of the Hamas-led government. Israel and Western countries have reacted coolly to the deal, but say they are waiting for final details before deciding whether to lift the embargo.
http://www.cnn.com/...

New goverment:
http://english.aljazeera.net/...

The new government's platform includes only a vague pledge to "respect" past peace deals, falling short of explicit recognition of Israel.

It also affirms the Palestinians' right to resist and "defend themselves against any Israeli aggression."

While many in the West consider "resistance" to be a code-word for violent attacks, Palestinians have a wide variety of definitions that can encompass anything from armed attacks to street protests.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said his government will boycott the coalition government and encourage other countries to do the same because its program falls short of the international conditions for acceptance that include recognition of the Jewish state.

"Unfortunately the new Palestinian government seems to have said no to the three benchmarks of the international community," Regev said. "Accordingly, Israel will not deal with this new government and we hope the international community will stand firmly by its own principles and refuse to deal with a government that says no to peace and no to reconciliation."

http://cnews.canoe.ca/...

The only way to influence the new government is to ENGAGE it.

To be a fly on the wall:

Olmert to tackle withdrawal, Iran
in Washington meetings this week

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert faces his first major diplomatic meeting this week in Washington, where he hopes to win Bush’s backing for his West Bank withdrawal plan and close ranks on Iran’s nuclear program.
http://www.jta.org/...

Building a potent future:

Japan, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians have agreed on a plan to build an agro-industrial park in the occupied West Bank at a conference hosted by Tokyo.

A Japan-backed agreement for economic co-operation between Israel and the Palestinians could help to stem violence in the Middle East, a joint statement said.

But they also said that such economic co-operation, though important, was predicated on security and political progress.

Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, told the conference session on Thursday that a political solution was necessary for economic co-operation to flourish.

"Can regional co-operation be translated into a political solution? Can we achieve prosperity for Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians while the Israeli occupation continues?

"Any plans will be meaningless without progress in the peace process," he said.

Water issues

Erekat also urged Israel to take immediate steps to show its commitment to economic co-operation, such as giving Palestinians in the West Bank more control over water resources.
http://english.aljazeera.net/...

Glad to hear this:

The Bush administration´s opposition to aspects of Israel´s West Bank security barrier is spurring the U.S. to stay out of a case over the fence at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
http://www.jta.org/...

What Israel can do to quit inflaming Arabs:

Unesco urges halt to Jerusalem dig
Unesco says Israel has already excavated the site enough to complete their pathway project [AP]
A report by UN experts has called on Israel to halt excavations near Jerusalem's most sacred Islamic site and proceed only under international supervision.

Israel's archaeological excavation, taking place 50m from a compound revered by both Muslims and Jews, have led to protests across the world.

The Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), whose experts have visited the site, issued a report on Wednesday questioning a "lack of a clear work plan setting the limits of the activity, opening the possibility of extensive and unnecessary excavations".
http://english.aljazeera.net/...

Still in the news:

West Bank Sites on Private Land, Data Shows

JERUSALEM, March 13 — An up-to-date Israeli government register shows that 32.4 percent of the property held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is private, according to the advocacy group that sued the government to obtain the data.

The group, Peace Now, prepared an earlier report in November, also provided to The New York Times, based on a 2004 version of the Israeli government database that had been provided by an official who wanted the information published. Those figures showed that 38.8 percent of the land on which Israeli settlements were built was listed as private Palestinian land.

The data shows a pattern of illegal seizure of private land that the Israeli government has been reluctant to acknowledge or to prosecute, according to the Peace Now report. Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and takes land there only legally or, for security reasons, temporarily. That large sections of those settlements are now confirmed by official data to be privately held land is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace.
http://www.nytimes.com/...

Olmert finally begins baby steps in the West Bank?

With West Bank withdrawal looming,
Israel prepares to move on outposts

In a first major test of Israel’s plans for a large-scale West Bank withdrawal, the government is gearing up for a showdown with extremists in four unauthorized outposts.
http://www.jta.org/...

American Jewish organizations influencing USA foreign policies, not all good:

Aside from that brief reference, however, the Times made no mention of the role that money, or lobbying in general, may have played in the lopsided vote. More specifically, the Times made no mention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It's a remarkable oversight. AIPAC is widely regarded as the most powerful foreign-policy lobby in Washington. Its 60,000 members shower millions of dollars on hundreds of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. It also maintains a network of wealthy and influential citizens around the country, whom it can regularly mobilize to support its main goal, which is making sure there is "no daylight" between the policies of Israel and of the United States.

So, when Congress votes so decisively in support of Israel, it's no accident. Yet, surveying US newspaper coverage of the Middle East in recent months, I found next to nothing about AIPAC and its influence. The one account of any substance appeared in the Washington Post, in late April. Reporting on AIPAC's annual conference, correspondent Mike Allen noted that the attendees included half the Senate, ninety members of the House and thirteen senior Administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who drew a standing ovation when he declared in Hebrew, "The people of Israel live." Showing its "clout," Allen wrote, AIPAC held "a lively roll call of the hundreds of dignitaries, with individual cheers for each." Even this article, however, failed to probe beneath the surface and examine the lobbying and fundraising techniques AIPAC uses to lock up support in Congress.

AIPAC is not the only pro-Israel organization to escape scrutiny. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, though little known to the general public, has tremendous influence in Washington, especially with the executive branch. Based in New York, the conference is supposed to give voice to the fifty-two Jewish organizations that sit on its board, but in reality it tends to reflect the views of its executive vice chairman, Malcolm Hoenlein. Hoenlein has long had close ties to Israel's Likud Party. In the 1990s he helped raise money for settlers' groups on the West Bank, and today he regularly refers to that region as "Judea and Samaria," a biblically inspired catch phrase used by conservatives to justify the presence of Jewish settlers there. A skilled and articulate operative, Hoenlein uses his access to the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council to push for a strong Israel. He's so effective at it that the Jewish newspaper the Forward, in its annual list of the fifty most important American Jews, has ranked Hoenlein first.
http://www.webcom.com/...

AIPAC message to American Jewry:

This year AIPAC Conference turned out to be a three day event attended by 6,000 activists and 200 politicians.

And the bottom line?

The conference observer suggested that there seemed to be a message throughout the event that the pro-Israel community "is not doing more on Iraq and isn't helping the administration more on Iraq."

In other words, that American Jewry needs to speak more loudly.

Support Bushco!

Even though throughout the conference, Iraq was the unspoken elephant in the room, Olmert spoke {to the distress of some of the Democrats} backing Bushco's actions in Iraq/Iran:

On Iran, Olmert warned against any effort - as has been proposed by some Democratic congressmen - to tie US President George W. Bush's hands. "I know that... all of you who are concerned about the security and the future of the State of Israel understand the importance of strong American leadership addressing the Iranian threat, and I am sure you will not hamper or restrain that strong leadership unnecessarily."
http://www.jpost.com/...

Hopefully, people are realizing the Olmert/Bush Regime is not good for either country.

Dailykos comments:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/16/184830/191

Palestinian Refugees - Stateless Forever?

This year the Palestinian Diaspora will be sixty years old. During the war that began in 1947 and concluded with the establishment of the State of Israel, a quarter of a million Palestinians were expelled from their homes at gunpoint and driven across the borders of the neighboring Arab states, where they became refugees - an event they now refer to as the Naqba: the Catastrophe. Despite UN Resolution 194,

that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible

the State of Israel has never allowed them to return. In 1967, hundreds of thousands more refugees fled the West Bank. Most of both groups remain, with their descendants, refugees to this day, four million persons without a state of their own.


The Palestinians as a people have a home nowhere on Earth. Of all the Arab states where they took refuge during the Naqba, none wanted them to remain. Only Jordan has offered a substantial number of them citizenship. Some have been able to emmigrate to the United States and other western nations, where citizenship is open to them. The remainder are officially homeless, often confined for generations to refugee camps under restrictive and discriminatory rules, without the same rights as citizens. In some places, they may not own property or work in certain jobs. Without rights, their presence in other nations is always precarious. As many as 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait as punishment for the PLO's support of Saddam Hussein's invasion of 1991.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq was for some time one of the more welcoming of the Arab states to Palestinian exiles. Being seen to support the Palestinians was one of Saddam's ways of expressing his antagonism to Israel. Palestinians were given incentives to immigrate to Iraq - although not citizenship or the right to own land - and special privileges not available to ordinary Iraqis.

These privileges, however, caused resentment of the Palestinians, particularly on the part of the Shi'ites, and almost immediately after the war, the Iraqi population began to turn on the foreigners living among them. Hundreds of Palestinians have been murdered in Baghdad, and the violence has only increased since, as Shi'ite militias conduct campaigns of ethnic cleansing.

Many of the approximately 34,000 Palestinians in Iraq have been living in the country since 1948 and have known no other home. Stereotyped as supporters of Saddam Hussein, and prime candidates for the insurgency, many today face harassment, threats of deportation, media scapegoating, arbitrary detention, torture and murder.

Palestinian refugees came to Iraq in several waves. The first group, some 5,000 persons from Haifa and Jaffa, came in 1948. Others arrived after the 1967 War and a third group arrived in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War when many Palestinian refugees were forced to leave Kuwait.

...

Palestinian refugees were provided protection by successive Iraqi governments and enjoyed a relatively high standard of treatment, mainly guided by the Casablanca Protocol ratified by the League of Arab States in 1965.1 Palestinians were issued special travel documents, had the right to work and were given full access to health, education and other government services. In addition, they were provided with government-owned housing or fixed, subsidised rent in privately-owned houses and apartments. In effect, Palestinians enjoyed many of the same rights and relative prosperity as Iraq citizens. However, in the aftermath of wars, Palestinians, like the Iraqis among whom they live, have witnessed dramatic declines in their standards of living.

The fall of the former regime in April 2003 left Palestinians particularly vulnerable, given their uncertain legal status and the loss of benefits previously provided to them. They have been harassed by segments of the Iraqi population and armed militias who resent their perceived close affiliation with the Ba’athist regime. The ongoing insurgency, which has taken the lives of thousands of Iraqis, is blamed on foreign agents, Palestinians and other refugees of Arab origin, who are accused of acts of terrorism.

When the former regime fell, hundreds of Palestinian families were evicted from their homes by landlords resentful that they had been forced to house subsidised Palestinian tenants. There was an intense climate of hostility to Palestinians and many received verbal or physical threats. In May 2005, Palestinians were widely blamed in the media for a bombing incident in the al-Jadida area of Baghdad after a televised ‘confession’ by four Palestinians. They bore visible signs of beating and according to their lawyer had undergone torture while in detention.

http://www.fmreview.org/...

In mid-March, a militant group calling itself the "Judgment Day Brigades" distributed leaflets in Palestinian neighborhoods, accusing the Palestinians of collaborating with the insurgents, and stating, "We warn that we will eliminate you all if you do not leave this area for good within ten days." The killings and death threats put the Palestinian community in a "state of shock," according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and led Palestinian National Authority President Mahmud Abbas and the High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres to each call upon Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to intervene to stop the killings of Palestinians. Fear continues to grip Palestinian communities in Baghdad, and thousands more Palestinians in Iraq are eager to leave the country. And the killings continue: UNHCR reported at least six more killings of Iraqi Palestinians in Baghdad and renewed death threats against Iraqi Palestinians in the last two weeks of May.

http://www.reliefweb.int/...

In February three Palestinian men were abducted in Baghdad.

The three were identified as lawyer Ibrahim Saleh Abu Abdoun, Ayman Baha’ Ed Deen Al Marzouqi, and Waleed Khalid Sadeq.

...

Armed groups in Iraq have carried out several abductions of Palestinian refugees, and are responsible for several bombings that targeted Palestinian areas; dozens were killed and injured in these attacks.

...

Several Palestinian refugees were abducted in January by gunmen who attacked areas inhabited by Palestinian refugees, especially Al Ameen neighborhood, Al Sina’a and Al Nidal in Baghdad.

In response to this violence, thousands of Palestinians are attempting to flee the country, along with many times the number of Iraqis. There is, however, one difference. While Iraqi citizens will be able eventually, in theory, to return one day to Iraq, the Palestinian refugees are stateless. There is no country that will take them in for fear they may never leave, having nowhere else to go. Jordan and Syria, in particular, while they have allowed in large numbers of Iraqis, have closed their borders to Palestinian Iraqi refugees.

In consequence, an increasing number of Palestinian refugees from Iraq are trapped on these border in no-man's-land, existing in tents, in limbo. They can neither return to Iraq nor leave it.

"All our lives we've been refugees. My family fled, we fled. My family stayed in tents, they saw similar war, now we're sitting in tents, seeing war and not knowing what the future will bring."
Miriam, Iraqi refugee of Palestinian descent

http://www.cbsnews.com/...

Meanwhile in a related development, the number of Palestinian refugees stranded at Al Waleed on the Iraq-Syria border has now [February 2007] reached more than 750 after the arrival over the last two days of 73 refugees fleeing the violence, harassment and killings in Baghdad. More are reported to be following. The total of Palestinians at this border area has now reached 753, with 354 stuck in no-man's land and 399 remaining on the Iraqi side. An abandoned school close to the border site has been opened to accommodate the new arrivals but is already full and any new arrivals will have to live in tents.

http://www.unhcr.org/...

If it is a human right for any people to have a state, a home to which they can return in times of distress, the Palestinian people have long been deprived of such a right. For 60 years, they have been homeless. The State of Israel persists in its refusal to allow them to return to the land of their birth and ancestry, within its borders. For most of this period, Israel also worked to prevent the establishment of a state for the Palestinians, but in the last decade, this has finally changed. Israel now officially supports the idea of a Palestine state, and in doing so, insists that the human rights of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes must be fulfilled by their returning to Palestine, not Israel.

And surely this is only right and just, when all the world refuses to accept them, that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return, of all places in the world, to Palestine. However, Israel, which controls all the borders of the Palestinian territory, refuses to allow this. Despite its declaration that Palestine is the only acceptable homeland for the Palestinian refugees, it will not let them in.

Now, with the urgency of the situation of the refugees fleeing Iraq, would be the perfect time for the world to urge Israel to reverse this policy. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has urged the Israelis to allow those refugees from Iraq who were born in Gaza to return there. Israel has refused.

Israelis claim that their state was established so that Jewish people anywhere in the world would have a homeland, a place to which they could turn for refuge and escape from danger. They have claimed that this is a human right which justified the establishment of this state, even when it created as a consequence another stateless people. Surely the Israelis, of all the people in the world, ought to recognize that what is a human right for one people must be a right for all.

For 60 years, the Palestinian exiles have remained stateless in a world where people lacking a state have nowhere to turn for safety and refuge from danger. Now, the crisis in Iraq dictates that it is time to put an end to this failure of the international community to fulfill their human rights. Let the Palestinians fleeing Iraq take refuge - in Palestine.

Refuting Israel's New Historians

In a series of diaries recently (on DailyKos here, here, and here), I've been citing Israel's New Historians -- a generation of scholars that first came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s -- to argue that Israeli military forces committed ethnic cleansing during the country's 1948 Independence war. The New Historian interpretation, though solidly grounded in archival research and generally accepted by historians, directly challenges Zionist accounts of national history, and it is still controversial in Israel and especially among Zionists.

In this diary, I'm going to use two contrasting accounts of the Zionist siege of Haifa in April 1948 to illustrate how the New Historians have changed our understanding of the 1948 war. I will also show what must be done to refute the New Historian interpretation -- though I am skeptical that such a refutation is actually possible.

One criticism I've heard of the New Historians is that they "are fringe views that have never stood up to peer review." This argument, which would be valid if true, in fact ignores the actual publication history of historians like Benny Morris (Cambridge University Press), Avi Shlaim (Oxford University Press), Tom Segev (Hill and Wang), or Baruch Kimmerling (University of California Press, Harvard University Press). Clearly, these New Historians have published with some of the most prestigious academic publishers in the English language -- an indication that someone, at least, with credentials takes their work seriously.

Another criticism often leveled at some of the New Historians is that they have manipulated data. The most sensational case involves an alleged massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura on May 22, 1948. Teddy Katz, a graduate student at the University of Haifa, used oral history techniques, interviewing Palestinian refugees from Tantura and Israeli veterans who participated in the occupation, to reconstruct a story of a brutal massacre perpetrated by the Israelis. This research then became the foundation of his Masters thesis, subsequently publicized in the Israeli press. Upon seeing their stories in the newspapers, the veterans sued Katz for libel and -- because of discrepancies between his taped interviews and the citations included in his thesis -- Katz was stripped of his degree. Eventually, he was granted what the university has called a "non-research" degree, and Katz continues to hold that a massacre took place at Tantura in May 1948.

Katz's interpretation has been defended by Ilan Pappe, a senior historian at Haifa University and a particularly radical voice within the New Historians movement. Pappe's position in the Katz affair, and his subsequent call for an economic boycott of Israel in order to pressure the university to restore Katz's degree (among other complaints), has led many people to challenge all of his research. If Katz was wrong on Tantura, and Pappe agrees with Katz, then Pappe must be wrong about other things as well.

I honestly don't enough about the specific details of what happened at Tantura to offer an opinion as to whether there was a massacre or not. In Pappe's 2006 The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine he treats the massacre as fact, devoting an entire subsection of a chapter (pp. 133-137) to it. Although Pappe mentions the lawsuit against Katz (p. 136), he gives no indication in the book of the sanctions against the historian or of the serious academic challenges to the validity of his work. (Pappe does have a 2001 article in the Journal of Palestine Studies on the Katz affair, but I haven't found a full-text version online.)

I'm spending some time on this, because it is Pappe's account of the siege of Haifa I'd like to quote at length. First though, via kossack Pumpkinlove, we have a pre-New Historians account of the siege. As noted in her comment, Pumpkinlove took her cite off Times Select and because I do not a Times Select account I'll just cite her cite of it:

I've looked for proof.. primary source proof and I think I have found evidence that Israel's intentions were NOT to ethnically cleanse Israel of Arabs in 1948.

This source requires that you be a member of Times Select.

The NY Times reports on April 22nd that the Haganah had defeated the Arab forces in Haifa and offered the following terms of surrender. Please note that of the 140,000 residents in Haifa in 1948, 80,000 were Jews.

(1) The laying down of all arms and the surrender of them to the Jews.

(2) The deportation of all foreign Arab fighters from Haifa.

(3) A 24-hour curfew during, which the Jews would carry out the disarming.

(4) All Germans and Nazis in the Arab ranks to be handed over.

(5) Freedom of movement for all and the end to sniping and of roadblocks.

(6) Safety of all individuals to be guaranteed by the Haganah.

Most relevant to this discussion...

Tens of thousands of Arab men, women and children fled toward the eastern outskirts of the city in cars, trucks, carts and afoot in a desperate attempt to reach Arab territory until the Jews captured Rushmiya Bridge... the complete evacuation of Arabs from Haifa began tonight with the assistance of British Army transports.

Notice that neither the Haganah nor any Jewish group demanded the evacuation of non-combatants from Haifa. Nor was this a massacre with hundreds or thousands of Arab deaths to terrify the rest into fleeing.

Although the Arabs referred to the fight as a massacre, the British estimated that between 50 and 100 Arabs had been killed in house to house battling

So, the key points from the New York Times story (which I assume was published at the time of the events) are that:

* the Haganah offered generous surrender terms to the Palestinians
* Palestinians chose to flee, which they accomplished with assistance from the British Army
* Very few Arabs died in the events, and those who did were killed in combat

Let's move now to Pappe's very different account of the same events:

The removal of the British barrier meant Operation Scissors could be replaced by Operation 'Cleansing the Leaven' (bi'ur hametz). The Hebrew term stands for total cleansing and refers to the Jewish religious practice of eliminating all traces of bread or flour from people's homes on the eve of the Passover, since as these are forbidden during the days of the feast. Brutally appropriate, the cleansing of Haifa, in which the Palestinians were the bread and the flour, began on Passover's eve, 21 April.... The Carmeli Brigade made sure they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc. [Note 18: Walid Khalidi, "Selected Documents on the 1948 War," Journal of Palestine Studies, 107, Vol. 27/3 (Spring, 1998), pp. 60-105, uses the British as well as the Arab committee's correspondence.]

In ... parts of the town, loudspeakers delivered a ... message from the town's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levi, a decent person by all accounts, who beseeched the people to stay and promised no harm would befall them. But it was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmeli Brigade, not Levi, who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: 'Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.' (He later became the Israeli army Chief of Staff.) [Note 19: Hagana Archives, 69/72, 22 April 1948.]

When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometres where thousands of Haifa's defenceless Palestinians were still residing, the shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse. In panic, they headed towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or a boat to take them away from the city. As soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their homes.

When Golda Meir, one of the senior Zionist leaders, visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. Meir had come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia, and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier. [Note 20: Central Zionist Archives, 45/2 Protocol.] But this apparently left no lasting mark on her or her associates' determination to continue with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In the early hours of dawn on 22 April, the people began streaming to the harbour. As the streets in that part of the city were already overcrowded with people seeking escape, the Arab community's self-appointed leadership tried to instil some order into the chaotic scene. Loudspeakers could be heard, urging people to gather in the old marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter there until an orderly evacuation by sea could be organised. 'The Jews have occupied Stanton road and are on their way,' the loudspeakers blared.

The Carmeli Brigade's war book, chronicling its actions in the war, shows little compunction about what followed thereafter. The brigade's officers, aware that people had been advised to gather near the port's gate, ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port -- where Rothschild Hospital stands today -- and to bombard the gathering crowds below. The plan was to make sure people would have no second thoughts, and to guarantee that the flight would be in one direction only. Once the Palestinians were gathered in the marketplace -- an architectural gem that dated back to the Ottoman period, covered with white arched canopies, but destroyed beyond recognition after the creation of the State of Israel -- they were an easy target for the Jewish marksmen. [Note 21: Zadok Eshel (ed.), The Carmeli Brigade in the War of Independence, p. 147.]

Haifa's market was less than one hundred yards from what was then the main gate to the port. When the shelling began, this was the natural destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians. The crowd now broke into the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate. Scores of people stormed the boats that were moored there, and began to flee the city. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors, published recently. Here is one of them:

Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers. [Note 22: Walid Khalidi, "Selected Documents on the 1948 War."]

The scenes were so horrendous that when reports reached London, they spurred the British government into action as some officials, probably for the first time, began to realise the enormity of the disaster their inaction was creating in Palestine (Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: One World Publications, 2006), pp. 94-6).

It's worth pointing out that the New York Times account and Pappe's are not mutually exclusive -- that is, both can be true at the same time. In fact, one could read Pappe simply as adding detail not included in the Times. Horrifying, damning, condemnatory detail, yet detail just the same.

But is Pappe telling the truth?

That question is in fact easy enough to answer. Pappe makes a set of specific, verifiable claims:

* the Zionist push into Haifa was codenamed "bi'ur hametz," or "cleansing the leaven"
* Zionist troops were ordered to kill Arabs indiscriminately
* Arab families left their homes in a panic, as evidenced by the prepared, uneaten food and children's toys left behind
* the Carmeli Brigade, following orders, shelled massed Palestinians at the gates to the Port of Haifa

Each one of these claims is sourced to specific documents. Some of those documents are located in specific places in named archives (the Hagana Archives, the Central Zionist Archives), where they can be consulted by any researcher with access to those archives. Other documents have been published (the history of the Carmeli Brigade, Khalidi's publication of Palestinian oral histories), and can be consulted by any researcher with inter-library loan.

If the documents cited by Pappe actually support the claims he makes of them, then we would have to say that his claim of ethnic cleansing in the specific case of Haifa on April 22, 1948 is a strong one. If they do not support the claims, then he is guilty of academic fraud.

Going back for a moment to the alleged massacre at Tantura, Katz's thesis was withdrawn and his degree revoked because his review committee was able to confirm that Katz claimed his interviewees made statements they did not in fact make. What is not clear from the reading I've done on the case -- and I've done a bit -- is whether his misquotations materially affected the evidence for a massacre. Pappe obviously believes they didn't, and two of the three members of the special committee appointed to review the thesis also agreed he deserved the degree. The final two members, however, gave him such a low grade on the thesis that his overall average dropped into the "fail" range, so he lost the degree.

It is not impossible that Pappe has fabricated evidence -- US historian Michael Bellesiles did exactly that in his infamous Arming America -- but Bellesiles was discovered fairly easily, and subsequently lost his tenured position at Emory University. Any enterprising Zionist historian who wants to make a name for themselves only has to go to the archives and prove Pappe -- or Kimmerling, or Shlaim, or Morris -- has been fabricating their data, and they will instantly become an international celebrity in the world of Israeli studies specifically and history generally.

Pappe's book was released last fall, and has not had time to be exposed to serious scrutiny by historians. Morris book, however, on the Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem -- the text that first put Israeli ethnic cleansing out in front of the public -- was released in 1989. That's nearly twenty years ago, more than enough time for every single source to be checked and double-checked.

Far from finding fabrications, the book has held up so well that Morris released a second, revised and expanded, edition in 2004.

Ad hominems don't refute historians. Historical research does.

So far, the historical research confirms the basic findings of the New Historians.