Archives Reveal Ruthless Settlers, Say New Historians
THE INDEPENDENT, 04/1998
By Adam LeBor
As Israel approaches its 50th birthday a fresh generation of Israeli-born scholars is
using official government archives and declassified documents to deconstruct the myths
surrounding the state's founding.
Sometimes reviled as "traitors" and "self-haters" - Jews who are
themselves anti-Semitic - the "new historians" as they are dubbed, are
illustrating how the Palestinians who fled in 1948 were the victims of organised and
systematic ethnic-cleansing, much as happened in the former Yugoslavia.
Israelis have for decades been taught in school that Palestine was largely uninhabited
until the arrival of the first Zionist settlers from central Europe at the turn of the
century. This theory was encapsulated in the motto "a land without a people for a
people without a land".
Israeli students also learn that the few (according to the mainstream Zionist
perspective) Arabs who lived in Palestine upped and ran away after being told to flee by
neighbouring Arab governments as they attacked the new-born state, while the Israelis made
valiant efforts to try and persuade them Palestinians to stay.
Documents and letters preserved by the key players tell a different story.
"Previously, Israel had no historiography, only ideology, myth and
indoctrination," said Tom Segev, author of 1949 and the First Israelis, one of the
first works of new history to challenge accepted wisdom.
"Israel has a relatively liberal policy on access to archives and so it is
possible to check their contents against the myths and ideology. When you read these
papers you think 'wow, that's not the way we learned this at school'. Some of the facts
that emerged from Israeli archives are very shocking," said Segev.
Such as this extract from the diaries of Yosef Nahmani, a director of the Jewish
National Fund office in eastern Galilee for 30 years. Nahmani's diaries were originally
published in an abridged version, but Israeli new historian Benny Morris published this
extract from the unedited manuscript in the Journal of Palestine Studies, describing
events in the Arab village of Safsaf, during the 1948 war of independence: "The
inhabitants had raised a white flag, the [Israeli] soldiers collected and separated the
men and women, tied the hands of 50-60 fellahin [peasants] and shot and killed them and
buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women.
"In Saliha, where a white flag had been raised.they had killed about 60-70 men and
women. Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty . is there no more human way of
expelling the inhabitants than by such methods?"
That these are Israeli sources, and so cannot be dismissed as foreign propaganda
increases their shock value, said Tom Segev. "We were told that we did everything to
try to prevent the Arabs escaping. Today you can go to the Israeli army archive and find
generals' reports on how they expelled the Arabs."
Other documents unearthed by the new historians reveal the extent of institutionalised
racism against Jewish immigrants from Arab countries among the European elite, who largely
came from Poland, central Europe and Russia.
Officials at one Jewish Agency meeting in 1949 discussed how a forthcoming influx of
Polish and Russian Jews could not be housed in the same tents as the Jews from Arab
countries, because they had higher standards of living, agency officials claimed.
Instead, the European Jews would be housed in hotels. The remainder of the meeting was
devoted to ensuring that the decision would not be discovered by the press.
- Adam LeBor is the presenter of The Promised Land, a four-part series on the 50th
anniversary of Israeli independence, broadcast on Radio 5 Live, which started last Sunday,
12 April.
