Historians agree: Israel committed ethnic cleansing in 1948

This diary started as a comment in a Daily Kos diary I wrote the other day on a joint interview by Amy Goodman of Norman Finkelstein and Shlomo Ben-Ami. In the discussion that followed, I argued -- following Finkelstein and Ben-Ami -- that Israel had pursued an intentional policy of ethnic cleansing in order to create a Jewish state. Kossack JNEREBEL considered that an "extraordinary claim," and requested "extraordinary evidence" to back it up.

What follows is the compilation of evidence, appropriately sourced, put together to satisfy the request for "extraordinary evidence."

In fact, historians of the 1948 generally agree on the basic point that Zionist armies took advantage of their military superiority over Palestinians and Arab armies in order to carry out a pre-existing objective of expelling non-Jewish peoples from the Jewish state-in-creation.

Here are some relevant cites from my previous diary regarding Israeli responsibility for the crime of ethnic cleansing. Here's a quote from Ben-Ami's book, cited by Amy Goodman in her first question in the interview:

The reality on the ground was that of an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation and at times atrocities and massacres it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred.

This one comes from Ben-Ami himself, also cited in the previous diary, in answer to one of Goodman's questions:

I am trying to be as fair as possible when I read the past, but it's a very interesting point, the one that you make here, about us trying to obliterate the memory of our war against the Palestinians, and the whole Israeli 1948 mythology is based on our war against the invading Arab armies, less so against the Palestinians, who were the weaker side in that confrontation, because it didn't serve the myth of the creation of the state and of the nation.

The following quote, from Finkelstein, didn't make it into that earlier diary, but you can find it at the original interview:

There is pretty much a consensus on what happened during what you can call the foundational period, from the first Zionist settlements at the end of the 19th century 'til 1948. There, there is pretty much of a consensus. And I think Mr. Ben-Ami, in his first 50 pages, accurately renders what that consensus is.

I would just add a couple of points he makes, but just to round out the picture. He starts out by saying that the central Zionist dilemma was they wanted to create a predominantly Jewish state in an area which was overwhelmingly not Jewish, and he cites the figure, I think 1906 there were 700,000 Arabs, 55,000 Jews, and even of those 55,000 Jews, only a handful were Zionists. So that's the dilemma. How do you create a Jewish state in area which is overwhelmingly not Jewish?

Now, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, at one point, he said there are only two ways you can resolve this dilemma. One, you can create what he called the South African way, that is, create a Jewish state and disenfranchise the indigenous population. That's one way. The second way is what he calls the way of transfer. That is, you kick the indigenous population out, basically what we did in North America.

Now, as Mr. Ben-Ami correctly points out, by the 1930s the Zionist movement had reached a consensus that the way to resolve the dilemma is the way of transfer. You throw the Palestinians out. You can't do that anytime, because there are moral problems and international problems. You have to wait for the right moment. And the right moment comes in 1948. Under the cover of war, you have the opportunity to expel the indigenous population.

I was kind of surprised that Mr. Ben-Ami goes beyond what many Israeli historians acknowledge. Someone like Benny Morris will say, "Yes, Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948." That's Benny Morris's expression. But he says it was an accident of war. There are wars, people get dispossessed. Mr. Ben-Ami, no, he will go further. He said you can see pretty clearly that they intended to expel the Palestinians. The opportunity came along, and they did so. Now, those are the facts.

Finkelstein notes here that not all historians agree with Ben-Ami and himself on the intentionality of Israel's ethnic cleansing, but he only cites Benny Morris as dissenting. Morris, of course, is on record that the ethnic cleansing was a good thing, and the only real problem with it is that Ben-Gurion did not go far enough -- that he left a substantial number of Palestinians inside the country:

[Q] I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too few Arabs?

[Benny Morris] If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.

Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, whose 1970s dissertation and subsequent book was the first scholarly treatment of Israeli ethnic cleansing, has written the following in a 2004 online essay:

The conclusion was that, as in many other cases, what seemed at first glance a pure and limited military doctrine, proved itself in the case of "Plan D" to comprise far-reaching measures that lead to a complete demographic, ethnic, social and political transformation of Palestine. Implementing the spirit of this doctrine, the Jewish military forces conquered about 20,000 square kilometers of territory (compared with the 14,000 square kilometers granted them by the UN Partition Resolution) and purified them almost completely from their Arab inhabitants. About 800,000 Arab inhabitants lived on the territories before they fell under Jewish control following the 1948 war. Fewer than 100,000 Arabs remained there under Jewish control after the cease fire. An additional 50,000 were included within the Israeli state’s territory following the Israeli-Jordan’s armistice agreements that transferred several villages to Israeli rule.

The military doctrine, the base of Plan D, clearly reflected the local Zionist ideological aspirations to acquire a maximal Jewish territorial continuum, cleansed from Arab presence, as a necessary condition for establishing an exclusive Jewish nation-state.

Interestingly, in his 2003 book (co-written with Joel Migdal), Kimmerling took a much more skeptical view of Plan D:

Was there, indeed, a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians? Walid Khalidi, among others, cites Zionist talk, even before the fighting, of population transfer, as well as other pieces of evidence that support the existence of such a plan....

The evidence is far more equivocal than Khalidi suggests. Plan Dalet itself was full of inner contradictions, referring to both expulsion of Arabs and their administration in secured areas. Israeli leaders were aware that mass expulsions, population exchanges, and huge movements of people had long been recognized practices during and after international wars... But such abstract musing was not responsible for the shattering of the Palestinian community (Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 163).

I cite that as an earlier example of Kimmerling's writing. Today, based on that online essay, he appears to accept the thesis that Plan D was in fact a master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians.

Finally, Ilan Pappe's 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine bears mention here. Pappe is perhaps the most radical of the New Historians -- the group of Israelis including Morris and Kimmerling who first began to revise the country's early history, and whose solid archival work has led to the emerging new consensus on the course of the Independence War. Pappe holds that Zionist actions during the war are directly comparable to Serbian cleansing campaigns in Bosnia-Herzogovina and Kosovo, and that the Israelis responsible for those actions should be judged on a standard similar to the one used for Milosevic and Mladic.

In sum, there are no extraordinary claims here. This is simply the consensus out there among Israeli and other Jewish academics who have studied this stuff.

Israeli Expulsion of Palestinians

Cross-posted from My Left Wing

A little over a year ago, on Feb. 14, 2006, Amy Goodman of Democracy, Now! conducted a joint interview with antiZionist gadfly Norman Finkelstein and the Israeli historian and diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami, author most recently of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Arab-Israeli Tragedy.  In the conversation, Finkelstein said the kind of things you'd expect from him.

The surprising part were the things said by Ben-Ami.  Here is Goodman's first question and Ben-Ami's response:

Well, I want to start going back to the establishment of the state of Israel, and I'd like to begin with Israel's former Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. Can you talk about how it began? I think you have a very interesting discussion in this book that is rarely seen in this country of how the state of Israel was established. Can you describe the circumstances?

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Well, for all practical purposes, a state existed before it was officially created in 1948. The uniqueness of the Zionist experience, as it were, was in that the Zionists were able, under the protection of the mandate, of the British mandate, to set up the essentials of a state - the institutions of a state, political parties, a health system, running democracy for Jews, obviously - before the state was created, so the transition to statehood was a declaration, basically, and it came about in the middle of two stages of war, a civil war between the Israelis and the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine and then an invasion by the Arab armies. The point that I made with regard to the war is that the country, to the mythology that existed and exists, continues to exist mainly among Israelis and Jews, is that Israel was not in a military disadvantage when the war took place. The Arab armies were disoriented and confused, and they did not put in the battlefield the necessary forces.

So, in 1948, what was born was a state, but also original superpower in many ways. We have prevailed over the invading Arab armies and the local population, which was practically evicted from Palestine, from the state of Israel, from what became the state of Israel, and this is how the refugee problem was born. Interestingly, the Arabs in 1948 lost a war that was, as far as they were concerned, lost already in 1936-1939, because they have fought against the British mandate and the Israeli or the Jewish Yishuv, the Jewish pre-state, and they were defeated then, so they came to the hour of trial in 1948 already as a defeated nation. That is, the War of 1948 was won already in 1936, and they had no chance to win the war in 1948. They were already a defeated nation when they faced the Israeli superpower that was emerging in that year.

In these lines, Ben-Ami basically agrees with the New Historian critique of the Zionist founding myth.  But he doesn't stop there.  In her next question, Goodman quotes from Ben-Ami's book on the expulsion of the Palestinians:

AMY GOODMAN: You have some very strong quotes in your book, of your own and quoting others, like Berl Katznelson, who is the main ideologue of the Labor movement, acknowledging that in the wake of the 1929 Arab riots, the Zionist enterprise as an enterprise of conquest. You also say, "The reality on the ground was that of an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation and at times atrocities and massacres it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred." Explain that further.

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Well, you see, there is a whole range of new historians that have gone into the sources of - the origins of the state of Israel, among them you mentioned Avi Shlaim, but there are many, many others that have exposed this evidence of what really went on on the ground. And I must from the very beginning say that the main difference between what they say and my vision of things is not the facts. The facts, they are absolutely correct in mentioning the facts and putting the record straight.

My view is that, but for Jesus Christ, everybody was born in sin, including nations. And the moral perspective of it is there, but at the same time it does not undermine, in my view, in my very modest view, the justification for the creation of a Jewish state, however tough the conditions and however immoral the consequences were for the Palestinians. You see, it is there that I tend to differ from the interpretation of the new historians. They have made an incredible contribution, a very, very important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the state of Israel, but at the same time, my view is that this is how - unfortunately, tragically, sadly - nations were born throughout history.

And our role, the role of this generation - this is why I came into politics and why I try to make my very modest contribution to the peace process - is that we need to bring an end to this injustice that has been done to the Palestinians. We need to draw a line between an Israeli state, a sovereign Palestinian state, and solve the best way we can the problem, by giving the necessary compensation to the refugees, by bringing back the refugees to the Palestinian state, no way to the state of Israel, not because it is immoral, but because it is not feasible, it is not possible. We need to act in a realistic way and see what are the conditions for a final peace deal. I believe that we came very, very close to that final peace deal. Unfortunately, we didn't make it. But we came very close in the year 2001.

Ben-Ami's argument here is pragmatic -- acknowledging a Right of Return for Palestinians would destroy the Jewish state.  Morally, however, he seems to agree that the Palestinians actually deserve the right to return to their homes.

In the next exchange with Goodman, he addresses Nakba-denial:

AMY GOODMAN: Before we get to that peace deal, another thing that you have said. "Israel, as a society, also suppressed the memory of its war against the local Palestinians, because it couldn't really come to terms with the fact that it expelled Arabs, committed atrocities against them, dispossessed them. This was like admitting that the noble Jewish dream of statehood was stained forever by a major injustice committed against the Palestinians and that the Jewish state was born in sin." I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that the author of these words is the former Foreign Minister of Israel.

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Yes, while, at the same time, a historian. I am trying to be as fair as possible when I read the past, but it's a very interesting point, the one that you make here, about us trying to obliterate the memory of our war against the Palestinians, and the whole Israeli 1948 mythology is based on our war against the invading Arab armies, less so against the Palestinians, who were the weaker side in that confrontation, because it didn't serve the myth of the creation of the state and of the nation. So we need to correct that. There is no way - there is no way we can fully compensate the refugees and the Palestinians, but we need to do our very, very best to find a way to minimize the harm that was done to this nation.

Goodman then turns to Finkelstein, who praises Ben-Ami's portrayal of the foundation of Israel:

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, I agree with the statement that there is very little dispute nowadays amongst serious historians and rational people about the facts. There is pretty much a consensus on what happened during what you can call the foundational period, from the first Zionist settlements at the end of the 19th century 'til 1948. There, there is pretty much of a consensus. And I think Mr. Ben-Ami, in his first 50 pages, accurately renders what that consensus is.

Finkelstein does differ with Ben-Ami on some points of interpretation after that, and then the entire conversation moves to the Camp David process.

The point of this diary is that the Nakba happened, and that, as Finkelstein says, serious historians rational people have very little dispute left about the facts.