The Palestinian Problem: A Historical Review

After 50 years of statehood, Israel now stands on a knife's edge. It is in the midst of an ideological battle that will shape its soul for the next fifty years and beyond. Israel can plunge toward religious fundamentalism, it can spiral downward toward tribal moralism, or it can confront its past and come to grips with the "Palestinian problem."

It has been half a century since the state of Israel was proclaimed, and it has also been a half a century of conflict between the Jews and the Arabs. The failures of the Oslo peace process onto which hopes were pinned, result not from the numerous violations of the agreement but from our fundamental lack of understanding of the basis for the conflict. If there ever is to be real peace between Israel and the Palestinians, we have to understand the conflict without the myth and propaganda. Only an Israel that can come to grips with its past can hope to achieve a lasting peace.

The creation of Israel created a moral paradox. We justly returned to a land that was ours and found another people, whom in our absence had developed strong ties and roots to the land. Many Jews closed their ears and pretended these people didn't exist, hoping that they would just go away. Even after the 1967 war, when we conquered the West Bank, Israel refused to recognize the Palestinians as a people. It was not until the Intifada, when the blood of hundreds of Palestinians flowed in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, that we recognized the problem. It was only when blood of innocent Jewish civilians filled the burnt out carcasses of busses in our cities that we realized that there was another people living in our land. It was only from bloodshed, that we realized that we were ruling over a million people who had their own national aspirations and wanted their own freedom and self determination. Now, as Israel becomes a mature state somewhat secure and economically sound, it is time to take an honest look at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the Palestinian question.

Theodore Herzl modeled Zionism after the European nationalism that was so rampant in his days. Nationalism, was to Herzl a European phenomenon. He could not even conceive of the notion that the Arabs had a national consciousness. He utterly failed to see that nationalism would eventually spread out all over the globe and infect the Arab world.

Interestingly, Herzl basically ignored the Arab question. In his opus "Altneuland," Arabs are featured only briefly, and only to parrot Herzl saying "the Jews have enriched us." In "The Jewish State," Herzl's utilitarian essay proposing a Zionist solution to the Jewish problem, he completely fails to mention that over 550,000 Arabs were living in Palestine at the time. The Arabs simply were not there. Thus "A land without people, for a people without a land" became the cry of the early Zionists. It was important for Herzl and the Zionist leadership to create this myth if they were to be able settle Palestine on moral grounds.

Truthfully, Herzl himself was aware of this fact but chose to ignore it. He completely disregarded the report of his student and colleague, Leo Motzken, whom he had sent to survey Palestine. In his report, Motzken includes this statement: "Completely accurate statistics about the number of inhabitants do not presently exist. One must admit that the density of the population does not give the visitor much cause for cheer. In whole stretches throughout the land one constantly comes across large Arab villages, and it is an established fact that the most fertile areas of our country are occupied by Arabs." (Protocols of the Second Zionist Congress, Pg. 103).

Ahad Ha'am, the celebrated writer and Zionist, echoed Motzken's concerns in his essay "The Truth from the Land of Israel." "We tend to believe that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, a non cultivated wilderness; and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow..." For the most part, though, the early Zionists chose to close their eyes to the large Arab population hoping they would just go away. Propagating the myth was easier than dealing with reality.

In "Altneuland," Herzl envisioned an Israel that by 1923 would be populated by a Jewish majority. Én the book he predicts that this majority would be a result of a mass influx of Jews from Europe and Russia. However, in his own personal diary, he suggests another method to achieve this majority in Palestine- the forced transfer of the indigenous population.

"When we occupy the land... we must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit away the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly." (Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Vol. 1)

Herzl's transfer ideas were prevalent among the later Zionist leadership as well. Except for men like Martin Buber and Ahad Ha'am, the idea of removing large portions of the population was looked upon favorably, while direct transfer was not the route most Zionist leaders planned. They believed in displacing the Arabs languidly, through purchase and appropriation of estates. Displacement and dispossession were necessary if a Jewish majority was to be created in Israel. All understood that it was best to create a Jewish State with as few potentially troublesome Arabs as possible.

In light of this fact, it is not surprising that Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency were elated by the Peel Commission's recommendation that 300,000 Arabs living in the "Jewish" areas of the partition plan be transferred either voluntarily or by force. Ben-Gurion, in his address to the 20th Zionist Congress on August 7th 1937, lauded the idea that "we must carefully examine whether the transfer is possible… In many parts of the country new Jewish settlement will not be possible unless there is transfer of Arab peasantry. The Peel commission dealt with this matter seriously, and it is important that the plan came from them and not from us." Subsequently Ben-Gurion justified the idea of transfer from a moral perspective, saying "You must remember that this method contains an important humane and Zionist idea; to shift parts of a people (Palestinians) to their own country and to settle empty lands."

The Arab world and Palestinian leadership rejected the Peel Commission's recommendations in toto, and shortly afterward the commission was disbanded. Without British support, Ben-Gurion realized that transfer was an unobtainable goal. When on May 15th 1948 the UN declared Israel a state, the Yishuv did not have a master plan for expulsion, but with the hammer blows of war the Palestinians were displaced. Understanding the Yishuv's attitude toward transfer helps us fathom their decision not to allow the refugees back to their homes after the war.

The Arabs for the most were not massacred in 1948, and they were not marched out of their homes as the Palestinians would have us believe. Additionally, the Arabs did not pick up and leave on orders from the Arab League, contrary to popular Jewish opinion. It is propaganda and myth which has originated from both sides that clouds the true history of 1948. The official Israeli version claims that the bulk of Palestine's Arabs fled their homes because of orders by Arab High Command, that they fled voluntarily, and that Israel is completely blameless for the exodus. Proponents of this version of history assert that there were blanket orders issued over Palestinian radio which demanded that the Arabs evacuate. In contrast, the standard Palestinian propaganda declares that the Yishuv had long planned the expulsion, which was systematically implemented upon the departure of the British forces in 1948.

Objective history, i.e., history which is not self-serving, as so much of Israeli and Palestinian history is, has to be examined if a true understanding of '48 is to be realized.

A recent example of a myth debunked, or more precisely deflated, is that of the massacre at the village of Deir Yassin, which is now the Jerusalem suburb of Har Nof. For years, in an attempt to obtain sympathy, the Arabs have claimed that 250 unarmed Arabs, including women and children, were savagely murdered and raped by the Irgun and the Stern gang. After a careful review by historians, both in Israel and in Beir Zayit University, it was determined that about 120 people were killed, mostly in armed battle. While there were instances of rape and cold-blooded murder by the Irgun, by and large the entire incident was blown out of proportion. This revelation received much deserved press coverage in almost every Jewish publication, ranging from the Jerusalem Report to the Jewish Press.

Not surprisingly, or in fact quite naturally, when Israeli historians debunk Israeli myths they receive no press coverage and are completely ignored. It is much easier for us to go on living our myth instead of facing hurtful facts. Only when the "New Historians" challenged Palestinian myths did we listen. When they challenged our own, we closed our ears.

One of the greatest Israeli myths is that most Arabs left their homes on orders from the Arab High Command. To support this myth, the oft-quoted scandalous canard "their leaders told them to leave" was concocted. Assiduous research has shown this to be false. Like all successful myths it contained a kernel of truth, however small. In Haifa, which contained a sizable Arab population amongst a Jewish majority, Arab league representatives ordered the residents to leave after the Hagganah laid siege to the Arab quarter.

However, for the most part, Arab leaders in the rest of the country made relatively futile attempts to prevent the Palestinians from abandoning their homes. They did this as the refugee tide turned from a trickle to a flïod under the hammer blows of Tochnit Dalet, the Hagganah code name for the operation to secure the coastal strip and other strategic areas of Israel.

For the most part the Arab leaders failed to keep their people from fleeing. One by one, as villages fell to the vastly better organized Hagganah units, Arabs fled, fearing what the Zionists might do to them. In many cases it was fear of the well-known brutality of the Irgun and the Lehi which the precipitated the flight. Some villages were subject to forced evacuation by the Hagganah, especially if they were in strategic areas. But for the most part, there were no expulsions. The Arab exodus was caused by fear, both real and imagined, and not by orders from the Arab league. It was also brought about by the deliberate and systematic efforts of the Hagganah, whether direct expulsions, terrorism, whispering campaigns, or tricking the people into leaving by telling them they would be allowed to return in a few days or weeks.

A great deal of light has been shed on the causes of the Arab exodus ever since the opening of the Jewish Agency and Hagganah archives in the mid 1980's. One document in particular is an IDF intelligence report entitled "The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine in the Period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948." The document was produced by the IDF intelligence service during the first truce of the 1948 war. The report outlines the 11 major causes of the Arab exodus and lists them in order of importance.

Hagganah operations against Arab population centers was listed as being the primary reason, being responsible for approximately 55% of the exodus. Another 15% of the exodus is attributed to joint Irgun and Lehi operations, specifically in the central region of Gush Dan. All in all, the report concludes that the direct military operations carried out by the nascent state caused 70% of the exodus. According to the report only 5% of the flight resulted from Arab orders to evacuate and only 2% was a direct result of Israeli expulsion. Some Israelis source claim that there were significantly more expulsions then the report cited. According to Hagganah officer and military historian, Meir Pa'il, about a third of the Palestinian exodus was as a result of direct expulsions.

There is almost no credible evidence of a blanket order to Palestine's Arabs to flee. Had such an order been given, it would have found an echo in the thousands of documents produced by the Hagganah's Intelligence service, Jewish Agency Arab Department, Foreign Ministry Middle East Affairs department, memoranda and dispatches of various diplomatic posts in the area, and various radio monitoring services. In fact Israeli and Western archives refer to explicit "Arab orders" to stay put. While Arab leaders and radio stations were supposed to be broadcasting orders to the Arab population to leave, they were in fact calling on Arabs to stay put, and to those who fled, to return. Hagganah intelligence reports from May 5-6, 1948, repeatedly refer to a concerted campaign by Transjordan's king Abdullah, Damascus Radio, and Kaukji's Liberation Army calling on Palestinians to stand their ground and for those who left to return.

The myth of the radio broadcast was important to us because, if followed to its logical conclusion, it allowed all the blame to be placed on the refugees themselves. Since the 750,000 refugees simply left, we had no obligation to let them back. Furthermore, the nearly 1.4 million Palestinian and their descendants unto the third generation somehow deserve everything that has happened to them from 1948 and onward, all because of the sins of their leaders.

The myth eased our conscience; but the truth is that the decision not to let the refugees return home was a necessary evil. If a stable Jewish state was to be founded it could not be done with a large Arab minority in its midst. Once we understand that by not allowing the refugees to return we created the refugee problem, we can begin to understand the Palestinian attitude toward Zionism and the State of Israel.

If we continue to deny any legitimacy to Palestinian claims and continue to ignore historical facts, we can never hope to achieve any respite, let alone peace. It is important for us to reevaluate our image of Israel being just the innocent victim and the Palestinians the aggressors. We must reevaluate the myths we have created because, while they ease our conscience, they obfuscate our ability to analyze the situation from a political perspective. Both sides are the aggressors and both sides are the victims; that is the nature of the conflict. Resolution will only come when both sides realize that the "other" has rights.