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.

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.

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/text/FMR/26/09.doc.

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/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/KHII-6UB4Z6?OpenDocument


Last week 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/stories/2007/02/16/iraq/main2485467.shtml

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/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/iraq?page=briefing&id=45cc5a914


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.

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.

Normal Life, Destroyed Homes, and Israeli Apartheid

The other day, I got a tattoo. Actually, I should say that I got another tattoo, as it is not my first, or for that matter, my last. The day I got my tattoo, was more or less like any other; I got to work by my usual bike route (uphill, unfortunately), had my morning latte, and fortunately got off of work early. Of course, there were the occasional annoyances, stupid co-workers, anxiety about the tattoo (yes, this one hurt!), but for the most part, there was nothing terribly abnormal about my days events; so what the hell, let's call it a 'normal day.'



On February 14th, I received confirmation through a CPT report, that the homes of friends of mine in Palestine were destroyed. In one sense, this is also normal, as they were not the first, and won't be the last homes destroyed in Palestine by Israeli soldiers (or Palestinian homes destroyed in Israel for that matter). But truly, how can the demolition of your home by an illegal military occupation ever be considered normal? How can such brutality be carried out by human beings who are just following orders, without some semblance of reflection and disgust? And how do my friends, and countless other Palestinians, find the strength to survive such violence, and not only carry on, but rebuild and hope for the future?

In a moment, I'll be going through the pictures, both from my trip and the current destruction, but first a few more words. I wrote about the community that has suffered this outrage before, in a diary called Close Encounter of an Israeli Settler Kind . It is the village of Qawawis, and the residents have endured numerous acts of violence over the years, the main aim of which is to remove them (and other small villages in the area) from the land.


If one looks at the many maps available, they will show you the logic of the occupation in this area; the less populated (by Palestinians) South Hebron Hills have been targeted for annexation by the Israeli settlers for decades, as opposed to the more densely populated Palestinian areas of Yatta, Samu, and Hebron nearby (that said, Hebron is another story). The villages of Qawawis and many others like them are a problem, not due to 'terrorism' or 'security'as such, but due to their repeated refusal to leave, and their rootedness in the land.

Adi Ophir wrote in an article in the Book, Against the Wall that the occupation is defined not as much by overt acts of violence (although they do occur from time to time), which he calls kinetic violence, but by violence in small bursts, or even more, violence suspended, always there and threatened, always possible, but held back for the present. This is one of the reasons that conveying the terror and violence of the occupation can be deceptive to those that do not understand the way occupation dominates the daily life of Palestinians. But in the time I spent in Qawawis, I witnessed so many small and large examples of violence, it is hard to list them all. Just getting to the village requires a circuitous route replete with checkpoints, backroads and some on-foot traversing; then there was the morning we found 6 olive trees cut down by settlers, the surprise visits by the army, the countless visits to the village by armed and violent settlers. And then there is just the physical setting; Qawawis is ringed to the north, south and east by 3 settlements, and one major highway cuts it off from the village of Karmel. Two more roads branch off the main highway, completing the pincer which surrounds and attempts to choke off any ability to survive for the villages of the region. On top of that, in addition to the Apartheid Wall which passes close to the Green line, they are building an inner wall along the Highway, which will completely seal off the villages from Karmil and Yatta.



Now I don't just know this because I read Jeff Halper's Matrix of Control article, which describes this basic policy and strategy of control and suffocation that the IOF employs, and is certainly applicable to Qawawis and other parts of Palestine. I know it because I lived it when I stayed in Qawawis. When we would take the goats and sheep out to graze, we could go only so far as the lack of roads and settlements would allow us (to give you some idea, I traverse well more than twice that distance during my 20 minute bike ride to work). And when we would be near the roads, we would be in constant threat of soldiers and settlers, due to military orders which say that they need to stay 200 meters from the roads. Some days, the army jeeps would drive by and ignore us, and some days they would try and force us to leave. Some days, the settlers would ignore us (you can always tell who they are by the orange ribbons, a holdover from the disengagement), or some days they would honk their horns at us, or shout from their cars. And, some days, they would do more, as my previous post explains.

But on February 14th, the suspended violence gave way to a full-scale explosion, in the form of home demolitions, in 3 villages in the South Hebron Hills. First, here is a portion of the Haaretz article that discusses it;

Security forces demolish seven houses in Mt. Hebron villages
By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service

Security forces destroyed seven illegally constructed Palestinian houses and 13 other structures Wednesday on the southern slope of Mount Hebron in the West Bank.

The demolitions took place in the villages of Manzal, Umm al-Khir and Gawawis.

The Civil Administration said, "Twenty illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity."

And if you would like to see some of the reuters pictures of that day, go here

And here is the CPT report, which was emailed to me by Joe Carr & posted on the ISM site, and is fully approved for reposting;

CPT: Israeli military demolishes seven Palestinian homes in south Hebron district

Israeli soldiers demolished homes in three Palestinian villages near bypass road 317 on February 14, 2007. Starting in Imneizil at around 9am about forty Israeli soldiers with two bulldozers demolished one home, an animal pen and a stone bake-oven. At noon the soldiers moved to Qawawis where they demolished the homes of five families and one bake-oven, then on to Um Al-Kher where they demolished one home and damaged a wall of another home.

At Imneizil several young children were in their home eating when the Israeli military arrived; the soldiers gave the family time to get out, but did not give them time to remove their personal belongings. The animal pen was demolished with a few animals inside; two lambs were injured. The Palestinian family began immediately to build a makeshift pen for the animals as the majority of the sheep were just returning from grazing in the fields.

In the village of Qawawis one of the demolished homes was over sixty-five years old, and sheltered two families. Photos of the families amid the rubble are on the CPT photo gallery: www.cpt.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album93

The Israeli military, in concert with Israeli settlers, has been trying to force the Palestinian residents of the south Hebron hills to leave their homes for years. Due to harassment from the nearby Israeli outposts several of the young families of Qawawis moved to a nearby town; when the Israeli army then forcibly evacuated the remaining families, a court ordered that the families could return to their homes. According to a lawyer representing the families, the Israeli army now claims that this court ruling allows only the last inhabitants of Qawawis to return, not their children who earlier fled the assaults of the Israeli settlers.

“Our children need homes,” said one villager. “What do they want us to do?”

The Israeli army said, “Twenty illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity.” The Israeli military made no provisions for shelter for the families whose homes they demolished. The families asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide them with tents.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said, “A building permit is unavailable there [in the south Hebron hills].” The preceding day three Israeli peace activists and two internationals, including CPTer Sally Hunsberger, joined approximately fifty Palestinians in working on their land near Imneizil. The Palestinian men, women and children planted 600 olive trees in fields that they had afraid to walk on for the past four years due to threats of settler violence. During the action, soldiers and settlers watched from a distance, but did not interfere with the tree planting.

Now, I would like to walk through some of the pictures, which consist of the day's destruction, and my own pictures that precede it. It was especially painful to see these pictures, as these are people that fed and took care of me, in whose homes I slept and ate, and whose children I played with.



First, here is a picture of Qawawis from sometime bin 2004-2005, with the house of Hajj Khalil in the center. The land is farmed for olives, almonds and figs on the hills, and elsewhere for wheat and grazing for livestock.



Next to Hajj Khalil's house is the smaller structure that the internationals would sleep in. It is made of stone, mud & cement, with a tarp for a roof (after the rain, the water would collect in bunches and we would have to take sticks to push it out). The winter was cold there, but we would always gather in Hajj Khalil's house for sweet tea to warm us up.



And here are the remains of the home I stayed in, stones, tarp & all.



In the center of this picture is my dear friend, Hajj Ibrahim, and to his right, his wife Hajja Amne. Of the homes there, only Hajj Khalil's, seen behind them, still stands.



Now, this is a picture of my lame attempt to put together a family tree of the families of Qawawis, and I show it to you as my excuse for not remembering everyone's names in the photographs; the families are big, and it has been almost a year since I was there last, so my apologies!



Here I am in the home of Ibrahim, son of Hajj Mohammed who lives in the nearby village of Karmil. In the center is Ibrahim's son Mohammed, who lives and works in the nearby town of Yatta and teaches English. He was very welcoming, his English was excellent, and I enjoyed spending time with him there. One of the great things about staying in Qawawis was that it really forced me to learn some Arabic, as few spoke English, but when he was there, I luckily had some help!



The taller boy is Salah, and the younger one is either Eyal or Lohai, I honestly forget! I remember playing soccer with them & I twisted my ankle on the rocky terrain (that said, one of the kids was playing barefoot!)




Here is Ibrahim, sitting with his family in the ruins of his home, the one in which I took the previous pictures. To this day he bears an injury to his leg from a confrontation with soldiers years back (he was audacious enough to take his flock by the highway, can you believe that?).



The house is shared with his brother Abed, whose wife Mariamme is here in front of the tire.





some of their possessions that survived the destruction.





Here is a picture of Hajj Mahmoud from last year. He was a funny guy and fed me many times in his home. He also was a bit impatient with my steep Arabic learning curve; as soon as I would figure out a word or an expression of the most rudimentary sort, he would jump straight to full-speed Arabic! I had to learn how to say to him "slow down, I know very little Arabic;" needless to say, I forgot how to say even that.



Here is Hajj Mahmoud after the destruction of his home, with his wife Aisha and his son Ziad, who's wife was pregnant and has since given birth to their first child. Now they are all homeless, from the newborn to the grandfather.



Here I am in the home of Hajj Khalil with Mahmoud's son Ziad. Khalil and Ziad had just come back from Karmil after voting in the January 2006 election, fingers purple and all. Hajj Khalil was truly kind to me, and I look forward to seeing him and his family again; who knows, maybe I can help with the rebuilding of their homes, as rabbis for Human Rights and others have pledged to help them rebuild.





This is Hajj Khalil, just minutes before the settler came and attacked us, as described in my diary Close Encounter of an Israeli Settler Kind . The man is over 80 years old, and despite everything, both he and his family will refuse to leave their land.



Who is the Terrorist?

The compromised moral authority of Elie Wiesel

Note: This diary was cross-posted at DailyKos on February 12, 2007. As a result of the at times heated discussion there, I became aware of serious flaws in argument and presentation. The DailyKos version has been substantially revised, but this version remains unchanged so that readers may have access to an unedited version of my inexpert first effort to present this information. For my current thinking on this subject, you should check out my DailyKos diary.

There was a dailykos diary a few days ago about an unpleasant incident Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel suffered in a San Francisco hotel. Wiesel was reportedly accosted by a man who forced him out of an elevator and tried to usher him into a room of the hotel. Wiesel screamed for help, the man fled, and Wiesel was unharmed.

The assailant is a Holocaust denying blogger, who by his own subsequent blog admission had been stalking Wiesel for "weeks;" his intention had been to force from Wiesel a videotaped statement that the Holocaust was a myth.

The man is sick, unable to recognize or accept the historical reality of the world we live in. Denying the Holocaust, whatever the denier's intent, has the effect of authorizing the wanton slaughter of the Jewish people perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War.

It would be easy, and quite morally satisfying, to portray this incident as an encounter between the evil Holocaust denier and the pure Holocaust victim. In fact, the first diary on the event painted it in exactly those terms. Unfortunately, the truth is a lot more complicated, and the complication here has to do with Wiesel, not with the man who attacked him.

Wiesel, it turns out, is not so morally pure himself. For example, in 1948 -- after he had survived the Nazi concentration camps -- Wiesel had moved to Palestine and begun work as a journalist. According to Daniel McGowan, the director of Deir Yassin Remembered, Wiesel:

knows from personal experience that on April 9, 1948 Arab civilians, including women and children, were murdered in cold blood in the village of Deir Yassin on the west side of Jerusalem by Jewish terrorists known as the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Wiesel worked for the Irgun, not as a fighter, but as a journalist and knows the details of this infamous (but not the only nor the largest) massacre of Arabs by Jews. And while he piously demands public apologies for atrocities committed against Jews (for example in 1946 at Kielce, Poland), he has never been able to apologize for the atrocities committed by his own employer.

Wiesel's biographer Mark Chmiel wrote in a 2002 article in Tikkun:

While Wiesel did express his existential empathy with Palestinian suffering he refused to examine the historical and political causes of their suffering, except to blame the Arab nations or the Palestinians themselves. In bearing witness, he instead expressed paeans to Israel (as after the 1967 war), or, when things got out of hand, confessed anguish and sadness (as after the Lebanon invasion and the intifada). As he desired that Israel be a land of poets and dreamers, he did not really reckon with Israel as a powerful state, enthusiastically backed by the United States, with the same capacity for realpolitik characteristic of other governments in the international state system. In his various defenses of Israel, Wiesel alleged that any assertion that the victim had now become the victimizer was tantamount to anti-Semitism, a useful rhetorical strategy for neutralizing criticism. The historical record and ample documentation of Israel's policies of exclusion, dispossession, and violence -- from the U.N., international human rights groups, and Israeli human rights groups -- could then be quickly dismissed as another expression of the world's contempt for the Jews. Wiesel may have been personally incapable or unwilling to penetrate the systematic distortions in the Israeli narratives and to criticize Israeli practices towards the Palestinians. But in his silence he opened himself to the criticism that his moral maxims -- for which he has been accorded respect both by powerful and powerless alike -- were suspended when it came to his own favorite state of Israel.

Wiesel often says that he will not criticize Israel "outside of Israel." Yet, as Chmiel points out, in his memoirs Wiesel cited Albert Camus to the effect that "not to take a stand is to take a stand." In other words, he is aware that his silence on Israel has a broader effect, an effect of endorsing Israel's actions towards the Palestinians.

Christopher Hitchens, writing in The Nation in 2001, has called Wiesel a liar and a denier of the Nakba:

In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948, "incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home."

This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom no longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it time and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as well as 1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every Arab newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such "incitement," in direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light. The late historian and diplomat Erskine Childers issued an open challenge on the point as far back as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will be. And of course the lie is a Big Lie, because Expulsion-Denial lies at the root of the entire problem and helps poison the situation to this day. (When Israel's negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return, at least they don't claim to be arguing about ghosts, or Dead Souls.)

The historical evidence available today is overwhelmingly conclusive: Israeli historians working independently of each other have confirmed time and again that Zionist* armies in 1948 systematically expelled hundreds of thousands of noncombatant Palestinian villagers from their homes. The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling and the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe have both argued that the cleansing was coordinated at the highest levels of Zionist leadership, in accordance with a worked plan of creating an ethnically pure Israel; Pappe in fact paints a portrait of a handpicked group of advisors meeting on a weekly basis with Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion to plot strategy and direct the cleansing operations on the ground. Benny Morris, whose Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem is probably the best-known work documenting the ethnic cleansing campaign, does not agree with Kimmerling and Pappe that the campaign was coordinated. Nevertheless, his book documents in chilling detail a brutal and horrific campaign punctuated by extrajudicial assassinations, massacres, rape, and other atrocities. In interviews granted in 2004, Morris indicated that he now believes Ben-Gurion himself was implicated in the cleansing campaign -- while he still insists there was no direct coordination from above, he spoke of an "idea in the air" in which the "entire officer corps understands what is required of them."

Morris believes 700,000 Palestinian noncombatants were expelled in this campaign, while Pappe sets the figure somewhat higher at 850,000. Everyone agrees that the approximately 4 million Palestinians living in refugee camps throughout the Middle East today are descended from these individuals initially expelled by the Zionist armies. The historical evidence is clear that Israel expropriated the real and liquid property of the refugees, which was then used to finance some of the initial expenses of organizing the Zionist state.

The point here is not to exculpate the Palestinians from any responsibility for bringing about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestinians clearly were hostile to the idea of an Israeli state from the beginning, and some Palestinians carried out attacks, and conducted atrocities, against Zionist settlers from the earliest stages of the conflict.

The intent of this diary, rather, is to insist that the MidEast conflict is a moral minefield. Neither side wears white hats, and the degree of historical culpability on the Israeli side is at least as great -- and perhaps even greater -- than that on the Palestinian side. As for those Palestinian noncombatants expelled from their homes, denied access to their livelihoods, and robbed of their property, it is hard to see them as anything other than innocent victims. Yet Israel to this day refuses to acknowledge any responsibility for the crimes committed by its armies in 1948, and still officially denies that any ethnic cleansing took place.

Wiesel is a solid brick in that Israeli wall of official denial. From him we get a restating of the Zionist foundation myth, that the State of Israel redeems the world of the Holocaust, and that therefore no public criticism of Israel is necessary. Even in his much publicized dialogues with Palestinians, Wiesel winds up -- in the words of his biographer Chmiel -- "blaming the Palestinians and averting his eyes from the political causes of their grievances."

Wiesel, in other words, "feels the pain" of Palestinian victims but refuses to acknowledge either his own or Israel's responsibility in causing their suffering. In a very real sense, his silence serves as a denial that the ethnic cleansing campaign even occurred -- even though he was employed by one of the principal organizations conducting cleansing operations.

He is a Holocaust exceptionalist -- he appears to believe that Jewish suffering trumps all other suffering. It is a very comfortable position for one, like Wiesel, in a position of power. One can hardly be surprised, however, that the powerless who suffer are enfuriated by such an attitude.

*The word Zionist is used here in place of Israeli, as the cleansing campaigns began, in some accounts, before the State of Israel came into existence. In any event, the creators of the State of Israel self-identified as the leaders of a Zionist movement, and believers in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state still call themselves Zionist (e.g. here) today.