Posted on 04/12/2002 9:40:26 AM PDT by PleaseNoMore
SINCE THE birth of the Jewish state in 1948, there have been two Arab-Israeli conflicts. The first one was, and is, military in nature. Played out on the battlefield, it has had more than its share of heroes, villains, martyrs, and victims. The second, less bloody but no less incendiary, has been the battle over the historical culpability for the 1948 war and the accompanying dispersion of large numbers of Palestinian Arabs.
The Israeli "narrative" of this episode sees the Palestinian tragedy as primarily self-inflicted, a direct result of the vehement Palestinian/Arab rejection of the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947 calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and the violent attempt by the Arab nations of the region to abort the Jewish state at birth. By contrast, Palestinians view themselves as the hapless victims of a Zionist grand design to dispossess them from their patrimony.
For much of the last half-century, this second battle lay in the background as Israel struggled for survival and the Arab world continued to nourish and from time to time act upon its hope for the Jewish state's extinction by military means. But the focus of confrontation has now shifted. As the possibility looms of some political resolution to the century-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the latter have adamantly insisted on reintroducing into debate the events surrounding the 1948 war and the birth of Israel. In the words of the prominent Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi:
They [the Israelis] cannot wipe the slate clean and say: "Now we will deal with history in another way. The political process is a new process and must not be taken back".... What we need is, first of all, a genuine recognition, an admission of guilt and culpability by Israel; the real authentic narrative of the Palestinians has to come out, to be acknowledged, to be recognized.
Ashrawi is not invoking history for history's sake. Hers is a clear and far-reaching political agenda: first, to rewrite the history of the 1948 war in a manner that stains Israel politically and morally; then, to force Israel to measure up to its "original sin"--the allegedly forcible dispossession of native Palestinians--both by permitting the return of refugees to parts of the territory that is now Israel and by compensating them monetarily for their sufferings.
For the first time since 1948, this objective seems to be within reach. Fatigued by decades of fighting, and yearning for normalcy, most Israelis, while still nominally opposed to the return of Palestinian refugees, have effectively conceded defeat in the factual battle over their past. Not only have substantial elements of the Palestinian narrative--championed within Israel itself by a group of revisionist "new historians"--become the received wisdom in the country's academic and intellectual circles, but this same view of the past has also made inroads into public consciousness. A number of new high-school textbooks, introduced last year into the Israeli curriculum, repudiate many well-documented and long-established facts about the 1948 war in favor of standard Arab/Palestinian claims, including the charge that substantial numbers of Palestinians were expelled during the war and that Israel bears sole responsibility for their ongoing status as refugees.
"Only ten years ago, much of this was taboo," the Israeli author of one of the new ninth-grade textbooks boasted to the New York Times. "Now we can deal with this the way Americans deal with the Indians and black enslavement." That is precisely how the Palestinians plan to deal with it as well: i.e., through Israel's acknowledgment of guilt and the implementation of the Palestinian "right of return."
The city of Haifa, on Israel's northwest coast, has come to epitomize this demand for "rectification" (to use Ashrawi's term). It is not difficult to understand why. In 1948, Haifa's Arab population was second in size only to that of Jaffa. No less significantly, Haifa then constituted the main socioeconomic and administrative center in northern Palestine for both Arabs and Jews. It was one of the primary ports of the eastern Mediterranean, the hub of Palestine's railway system, the site of the country's oil refinery, and a formidable industrial center.
When hostilities between Arabs and Jews broke out in 1947, there were 62,500 Arabs in Haifa; by May 1948, all but a few were gone, accounting for fully a tenth of the total Palestinian dispersion. Little wonder, then, that Haifa has acquired a mythical place in Palestinian collective memory, on a par with Jaffa's and greater than Jerusalem's. As the prominent Palestinian author and political activist, Fawaz Turki, himself a native of Haifa, has put it,
You [Israelis] owe me. And you owe me big. You robbed me of my city and my property. You owe me reparations (which I know that you, or your children, will one day have to pay, and under duress if need be) for all the pain and unspeakable suffering you have put me, my family, and my fellow exiles through.
But what exactly happened in Haifa? Was there "an act of expulsion," as the Palestinians and Israeli "new historians" have argued? Or was the older Israeli contention correct--namely, that the Arabs who fled the city in 1947-48 did so of their own volition, and/or at the behest of their leaders? During the past decade, as it happens, Israeli and Western state archives have declassified millions of records, including invaluable contemporary Arab and Palestinian documents, relating to the 1948 war and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. These make it possible to establish the truth about what happened in Haifa--and by extension, elsewhere in Palestine.
AS THE British Mandate in Palestine neared its end in 1947-48, the city of Haifa became engulfed in intermittent violence that pitted Arab fighters, recruited locally as well as from neighboring Arab countries, against the Jewish underground organization known as the Hagana. The hostilities would reach their peak on April 21-22, 1948, when the British suddenly decided to evacuate most of the town and each of the two parties moved in quickly to try to fill the vacuum and assert control. But the first thing the documents show is that Arab flight from Haifa began well before the outbreak of these hostilities, and even before the UN's November 29, 1947 partition resolution.
On October 23, over a month earlier, a British intelligence brief was already noting that "leading Arab personalities are acting on the assumption that disturbances are near at hand, and have already evacuated their families to neighboring Arab countries." By November 21, as the General Assembly was getting ready to vote, not just "leading Arab personalities" but "many Arabs of Haifa" were reported to be removing their families. And as the violent Arab reaction to the UN resolution built up, eradicating any hope of its peaceful enforcement, this stream of refugees turned into a flood.
Thus it was that, by mid-December 1947, some 15,000-20,000 people, almost a third of the city's Arab population, had fled, creating severe adversity for those remaining. Economic and commercial activity ground to a halt as the wealthier classes converted their assets to gold or U.S. dollars and transferred them abroad. Merchants and industrialists moved their businesses to Egypt, Syria, or Lebanon, causing both unemployment and shortages in basic necessities. Entire areas were emptied of their residents.
These difficulties were exacerbated by deep cleavages within the Arab community itself. The town's Christian Arabs, erecting clear boundaries between themselves and Muslims, refused to feed the Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi recruits arriving to wrest the city from the Jews, asserted their determination not to attack Jewish forces unless attacked first, and established a special guard to protect themselves from Muslim violence. Added to this was a growing lawlessness, including pandemic looting of deserted properties.
At the time, the official leadership of Haifa Arabs was a fifteen-member body called the National Committee. Although the Committee strove to curb the mass flight, urging Haifa's Arabs to stay put and castigating those who fled--occasionally, these warnings were backed by the torching of escapees' belongings--its remonstrations proved of no avail.
To be sure, the Committee itself hardly constituted a model of commitment or self-sacrifice. For one thing, scarcely a meeting was attended by all members. For another, affluent though they were, Committee members, while taking care to reimburse themselves for the smallest expense, rarely contributed financially to the national struggle. Transcripts of the Committee's meetings do not exactly convey a grasp of the severity of the situation: they tend to be taken up instead with trivialities, from the placement of an office partition to the payment to a certain individual of 1.29 [pounds sterling] in travel expenses.
Even when the Committee did try to deal with the cycle of violence in which the town was embroiled, its efforts were repeatedly undermined by the sheer number of armed groups operating in defiance of its authority, by infighting between its own pragmatists and militants, and by the total lack of coordination, if not outright hostility, between the Committee and its parent body, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC). The latter, the effective government of all the Arabs in Palestine, was headed by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, now resident in Cairo. Giving his own fighters free rein in Haifa, the Mufti turned a deaf ear to the Committee's requests and recommendations. Not even the dispatch of an emergency delegation to Cairo in late January, warning that, if terrorist activity did not cease, the result would be the eventual disappearance of the entire Haifa community, had any effect.
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I recall there were more than two. Need help here.
1948: War of Independence
1956: Egypt's Nasser starts a war but the Israelis kick his a--. Israeli army threatens Cairo and occupies the Sinai, but British and French threats get them to retreat.
1967: Arabs on all sides threaten war but the Israelis strike first and destroy the Arab Air Forces. Then, they whomp a-- in tank battles. Arabs flee in terror and run home; this time the Israelis give nothing back as they occupy the Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan.
1973: Arabs threaten war again, but this time the Israelis don't strike pre-emptively. Arabs invade on Yom Kippur, the Israelis are truly in trouble but brilliant military leadership (especially from one General named Ariel Sharon) routs the Arabs and throws them back. Sharon even crosses the Suez Canal to prove to the SOBs that they shouldn't mess around with him. Arabs cry, whine, and sob, but the only grown-up among them is Anwar Sadat, who makes peace instead during 1977-78. Sadat is rewarded for his statesmanship by being assassinated during a military parade during 1981.
1982: terrorist incursions from Lebanon (Palestinian uprisings had been thrwarted in Jordan and Egypt) prompt Israel to invade Lebanon. Israeli Army chases the SOBs out of all of south Lebanon.
1983-2001: Arabs realize that they can't win on the battlefield and are afraid to confront Israel militarily.
2002: Arabs conduct their war through proxy using young men and women as suicide bombers.
Hope this overview helps. I guess you can tell which side I'm on.
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