Tell me your story...
Breaking out of tribe-think and making sense of Israel and Palestine
"The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. [...] Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."
—Martin Luther King, Jr. from Strength to Love
Last year, I watched an interview with a Christian man from one of the ancient churches of the “old world”. He described his family's escape from an ethnic massacre in the 1940s. They survived and fled their home as their property was confiscated and many of their neighbors were shot and killed— a very common story from this period of history. Curiously, he described the way that Americans tend to respond when they hear his family’s story:
"Many times I find myself telling people the story of my family, and they don't believe me. I'm talking about American Christians mainly. If I bring a Jewish person they believe him, but they don't believe us [people like me]. If they hear it from a man that did that [a soldier that participated in the violence], that's okay, but if a Palestinian Christian tells that story, you have a question mark about that."
—Salim Munayer, Ph.D. from this interview (full documentary here)
Dr. Munayer is quite used to this reaction by now, but I wonder how he must have felt the first time? If this happened to you… If you were a Christian-type getting to know a fellow Christian from another part of the world and received a reaction like this, how would you feel? “I don't believe you because you're…” or, “I hear you, but… that can’t be true.”
Let’s not pretend. We all have prejudices— blind spots and untested beliefs of which we are only half aware. They are like blinders to a horse. Like a smartphone & earbuds to a brain-dead teenager. If left unchecked, unexamined, our assumptions gradually narrow our field of view, entrenching us in an imaginary world of our society’s creation and gradually eroding our ability to distinguish truth from fiction, good from evil. And seeing, we do not see; and hearing, we do not hear.
The erosion of perception, the failure of listening that unexamined prejudice produces defies what it means to be “human”— to have sincere relationships with those around us, to listen and learn, to pay attention and be present, to be part of something, and to not be… What do the kids call it… a “non-player character”.1
There is a universal need among humans— including those other humans that we see when we take our blinders off— a universal need to tell a story and be heard. To be understood and taken seriously. In most relationships until this need is met, the walls are up. After this need is met... well, miracles can happen. But you probably don’t believe in miracles, do you?
Are you listening?
I’m writing today because I suspect that you, dear reader, have not been listening. For many years you have been hearing and seeing the signs— things that don't add-up, things that don't make sense if you were to stop for a moment and think— but you have not been paying attention.2
Perhaps you, like most of us, subscribe to the pop-media narrative about the Middle East— that the Israel-Palestine conflict is primarily about national real estate, and the refugee problem is based on something vague that happened during Israel's “War of Independence” or maybe some other war... you're not quite sure. And there would, no doubt, be peace in the Middle East if not for Islamic extremists like Hamas. Now, I'm certainly no fan of Hamas, and neither are you, nor extremism of any kind. But as a student of history, I would like to provide an alternate perspective for you to consider...
Not a "balanced" perspective.3
Not an attempt to empathize with the other side, noble as that may be.
But a perspective that may expand your field of view and help you break out of "tribe-think".4
Come with me into the wilderness. I’m going to tempt you to take the blinders off. Let's see if we can bring the walls down.
The Boaz and Ruth story
Before we discuss history, it’s always helpful to know something about the storyteller.
I love to tell Bible stories to my kids— not the Sunday School stuff but the really interesting stories. All but one of my children have Old Testament names. The other one has a name from the New Testament. I have no regrets about that. Each name has a special meaning known only to our family. My third-grader, Ruth, recently told me that I am "obsessed with the Bible". I wasn't sure how to respond. She added, "It's okay. I think it's a good thing." She must have noticed that the other dads don't have whole books of the Bible memorized.
We got some push-back on the third kid's name, Ruth's older brother. I dismissed the mild objections from extended family. Then, on the Delta flight from Tel Aviv to New York I was making conversation with a Jewish lady who was returning home from a family visit. "Don't name him Boaz! The school kids will make fun of him. I grew up with a kid named Boaz and everyone called him Boozy."
I enjoyed that conversation. It was one of the first conversations I'd had with a real New Yorker. We talked about my visit to Israel, and I told her more than she wanted to hear about the kibbutz where I stayed and my man-crush on the gray-haired Israeli-Jewish-Christian-carpenter-musician war veteran that showed us around the country. When she started doing the head nod + "uh huh" thing, I asked about her family. She had spent part of her childhood in Israel and part in New York. Her mother, a Holocaust survivor, had moved to Israel after World War II, then to New York, and years later back to Israel.
"It was hard for her the first time she lived in Israel. She says she didn’t “fit in”. I think she was just so traumatized from the war. People didn’t talk about the Holocaust back then. We didn't talk about it in school either. It was a kind of stigma in Israel.”
Hold on! Did I hear that right?
Few things can reveal your total ignorance of a part of history better than a conversation with someone who has lived through it. I had just spent two weeks travelling around Israel thinking only about ancient stories and tourist sites. I didn't even know what year modern Israel was founded. My understanding of the country was built on vague assumptions and mental images from movies and news reports. I had not been paying attention. I asked my new friend some questions, and she told stories, which led to more questions, and so on. She very patiently told me the story of modern Israel from her perspective. It opened my eyes and piqued my curiosity. Hopefully, I can do the same for you.
I forgot to tell you… We named him Boaz anyway. He likes it.
The Holocaust story
Stories from history have no beginning. The chain of cause-and-effect from every major event stretches back for ages. To learn the history of a place or people, you must pick a chapter and dive into the middle of things. As a storyteller, where you choose to begin an historical tale communicates something important about your perspective. In the West, the story of modern Israel usually begins with the Holocaust. So, let's start in that chapter of Israel’s history... with the many Jews who, like Dr. Munayer’s family in the story above, survived the earth-shattering ethnic violence of the mid-20th century.
In the immediate aftermath of World War 2, despite the shock of learning about the Nazi genocides5, many in the "Western World" still had a real prejudice against Jews, especially in some places. It was a racism inherited from their parents and grandparents and tribes. The Allied Powers seemed to expect that the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust along with the war’s other refugees would want to return to their pre-war homes. However, many of them did not, especially the Jewish survivors who feared persecution in their homelands in eastern Europe. Those fears were often proved right, especially in Poland and Russia, where thousands of returning Jews were murdered or abused in the months after the war, not by Nazis but most often by their neighbors.6
After some repatriations and after refugee quotas had been filled in the Allied nations, more than one million refugees remained homeless in the many Displaced Persons Camps in central Europe. Approximately, 25% of these refugees were Jewish survivors of the war, like the mother of my friend on the airplane. It took several years to settle these refugees into countries willing and able to accept them. Some of the Jewish refugees settled in Palestine just prior to Israel’s founding in 1948 and many more made a home there afterward.7
Despite the difficulties experienced by Jewish survivors after the war and the virulent racism that continued in some places, the Western world fully acknowledged the tragedy experienced by the Jewish people and anyone with a conscience felt a sincere shock and regret. True, it would be many years before the story was openly told in places like Poland and eastern Germany, but in all other parts of the West the atrocity was not hidden in secrecy, downplayed, or swept under the rug. Reparations were paid, museums were built, and history books were written.
Can you imagine how it would have exacerbated the trauma of Holocaust survivors if the Western world had refused to acknowledge the tragedy? Or refused to regret it?
—Don't ask. Don't tell.
Well, that's a glossed-over ending to the story. In reality many Jewish survivors were not so welcomed by the Western World as you might expect, not even in Israel where our friend’s mother had difficulty fitting in.8 Did you know that Israeli Jews in the 1940s and 1950s often shamed and scorned Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel after the war?
Most of the Jews in Israel after WW2 were Zionist Ashkenazim (Europeans not native to the Middle-East) who moved to British Palestine in the decades prior to WW2 to give expression to their nationalistic dreams or to escape persecution in Russia and eastern Europe.9 Many of them brought revolutionary and militant political philosophies with them from their homelands, and by the 1940s the Jewish militias were full of sun-tanned, muscular “sabras” (foreign Jews born in the holy land) who had been well-trained by the British and seasoned in warfare for more than a decade. To these pre-state Zionist Jews, the Holocaust survivors seemed like the antithesis of what a proud Jew should be. "They went like sheep to the slaughter. They did not stand up and fight like us!" According to stories and interviews, Holocaust survivors often experienced discrimination and derision in Israel’s early years, so they mostly remained silent. Many had arrived as orphans, so they married quickly, integrated into society, and never spoke of the horrors they survived, not even to their families.10
Additionally, Holocaust survivors were not an influential part of Israeli leadership in the early days of the state.11 The 1948 war was led by pre-state Political Zionists who developed their plans over the previous thirty years and whose state-building zeal made them callous about the long anticipated "transfer" of the native Muslim and Christian population during the birth of the Jewish state.12 During Israel's founding, survivors of the Holocaust along with survivors of the Russian pogroms were often those with the greatest moral dilemmas during the expulsion campaigns that began in 1947, several months prior to the First Arab-Israeli War, the “War of Independence".13 One Palmach (Jewish militia) commander wrote about the expulsion and looting of Tiberias in 1948:
“It was the way things had always been done to us [...] And here – here, we were doing these awful things to others. We loaded everything onto the van – with a terrible trembling of the hands. And that wasn't because of the weight. Even now my hands are shaking, just from writing about it."14
That's not to say that the Holocaust did not have an effect on the state's founding. It certainly did — psychologically, demographically, and most importantly in encouraging unquestioning international support from Western powers. However, Zionist plans to establish a large Jewish state were in motion long before the Holocaust. The reason the state of Israel did not form prior to WW2 was because of the continued British presence in Palestine. After Palestinian Arabs (Muslims, Christians, and some Druze) were crushed in the 1930s revolt against Britain — approximately 15% of the male population killed, wounded, or imprisoned and most Arab political leaders exiled — all that stood between the European Zionists and their goal was the British colonial mandate.15 So, Jewish militia commanders like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir (future Israeli Prime Ministers) turned their attention on the British with a series of assassinations and bombings of British targets, political and civilian, to encourage the British to exit Palestine sooner rather than later. The plan worked.16
—No more shame
Holocaust survivors were eventually accepted and embraced in Israel. Although the change was gradual, many accounts point to the dramatic Adolf Eichmann (Holocaust mastermind) trial 18 years after WW2 as the turning point in Israeli society. By that time, the pre-state Ashkenazim better understood the nature of the Holocaust and more fully accepted the Jewish survivors, and they began to tell their stories aloud.17
Also, by this time the memory of “the Nakba”— the violent expulsion of Arabs during the 1948 War when Dr. Munayer’s family and more than 700,000 others were forced from their homes and prevented return— had long been erased from Israeli consciousness, history books, school curricula, maps, landmarks, and public discourse.18 Without knowledge or memory of the Nakba, the recently immigrated Holocaust survivors had no moral or philosophical dilemmas preventing them from fully embracing the Jewish state. This "historical editing" was effective also on the many pre-state Jewish civilians of Palestine who fell victim to the redacted national newspeak and proudly embraced their new nation-state.19 In other words, propagandizing the historical narrative20 (very common after any nation formation) eliminated the ethical dilemmas and cognitive dissonance that the Nakba would have created among the much persecuted and morally sensitive Jewish people.21
In any case, Holocaust survivors were finally accepted and embraced as they should have been all along, and the Holocaust was adopted as an integral part of Israel’s national identity.22 On the other hand, most Jewish war veterans who had participated in the civilian expulsions and massacres of Arabs the 1940s retreated into silence. Their government refused to tell the story, and so did they.23
The Nakba story
Unfortunately, a similar healing process never happened for the Palestinian victims of the 1948 War. Israel never acknowledged it or confessed the reasons behind it to its supporters in the West.24 There were no reparations, no museums, and history books were censored on the subject. The few Westerners who knew about the event showed little regret, were ignored when they voiced objections, or even endorsed it. Palestinian refugees were told by U.N. humanitarian workers that the "great powers" would soon intervene and enforce justice, but justice never came.25 26 27 28 29
Thanks to a combination of censorship and propaganda and willful blindness, the international public generally overlooked this part of history, and most Americans remain ignorant still today. The various opinions outside the Arab world are: 30
The Nakba never happened.
It happened but was small and isolated, not something to be taken seriously.
Palestinians left voluntarily or at the order of Arab leaders (what Israeli school books teach).31
It was necessary and justified and was probably the fault of the victims (what many Israeli professors teach at university).
And to pour salt on the Nakba wound, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine never fully ended in 1949. There were mass expulsions in the 1950s, expulsions of Bedouins in the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of new refugees after the 1967 war, and gradually more in the decades that followed as Israel ruled over the "occupied territories".32 Even in 2023 prior to October 7, Palestinian landowners were run off their lands by settlers, homes were demolished in the West Bank by the Israeli military, and Arab families were forced from their long-time homes in East Jerusalem by the Israeli government.33
Are you listening?
Let's try a listening exercise together… a sincere discovery conversation about modern Israel and Palestine— you, me and a couple of Arab and Jewish friends. Let’s see if we can bring the walls down.
How will they know that we’ve taken the blinders off? How will they know we’re listening? To begin with… to avoid coming across like deranged conspiracy theorists or embarrassingly ignorant Americans, let’s do a little homework ahead of time. Then, we’ll know what questions to ask…
Take the challenge
Take a few minutes each day for the next two weeks and, with a curious mind, give yourself the gift of a brief education about one of the longest standing and furthest reaching conflicts in the world today (see link below: “Berean challenge”).
And if you’re an American Christian, shake off the stereotypes and show the world that you’re not as naive and gullible as you are believed to be. Be like those ancient Bereans who refused to accept the message of St. Paul on his word alone and earned greater respect.
“Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.” —Acts 17.11, NASB
Don't take my word for it. Come see for yourself…
Footnotes, quotes, and fun facts
If the introduction to this article challenges you, then read this article. David Brooks, “The Essential Skills for Being Human”. It has nothing to do with Israel-Palestine, but it’s good!
To help you see through American news reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict, see the documentary, The Occupation of the American Mind. Very interesting, well made, and there are shortened versions (20 min. or 45 min.) in addition to the full-length version (80 min.).
If you’re a nerd, or an academic-type, see…
"Erasing the Nakba... Atrocity Denial in the U.S. Media" report by Greg Shupak. The report discusses the following common tropes that are used to misrepresent the Nakba in Western media: The Coincidence Trope, Cava Lingua, Agentlessness, The Israel-Centric View, Euphemisms and Undercounts, Denigration, Atrocity Denial, and Victim Blaming.
Edward Said, et al. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.
"balanced perspective". See "A dangerous balancing act" by David Robert Grimes regarding the fallacy of false balance in journalism.
"If one position is supported by an abundance of evidence whilst another is entirely bereft of it, it is profoundly misguided to afford equal air‐time and coverage to both positions."
"tribe think". See "Tribal Thinking: Tribe before truth" by David Gurteen. 'Intelligent' people are often more prone than others to tribal thinking:
"Surprisingly, the more numerate the individuals, the more likely they were to answer wrong if the correct answer did not align with their political beliefs. In other words, people with better numerical reasoning abilities were more prone to letting their political beliefs influence them."
“genocide”. The legal term and legal concept that we call “genocide” was created in the early 1940s by a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. He was a brilliant man, fluent in a dozen languages, a great thinker. He became interested in creating laws against mass atrocities after reading about the Armenian Genocide, when more than one million Armenians Christians were sent on death marches into the Syrian desert in 1915-16, dispersed into concentration camps, and later massacred The few surviving women and children were forced to give up their cultural heritage and assimilate into Turkish households, and the Armenian culture was systematically erased, effectively ending two-thousand years of Armenian civilization in Anatolia (Asia Minor, modern day Turkey).
Sound familiar? The Armenian Genocide was undoubtedly causally connected to the Holocaust, and both genocides were carried out for the same reasons—eliminating a perceived threat to a nation building project. Hitler in 1939: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Raphael Lemkin did not believe that the Holocaust genocide resulted from a specific evil directed toward the Jewish people but that the suffering of European Jews was part of a larger pattern of human violence and injustice that stretched back through time and throughout the world— “a line of blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the Bialystok pogrom.” At the time of his death he was working on an ambitious and comprehensive “History of Genocide” with dozens of proposed chapters.
The United States and other nations were slow to embrace 1948 Genocide Convention, and Lemkin died believing that his life’s work had been a failure— “The fact is that the rain of my work fell on a fallow plain, only this rain was a mixture of the blood and tears of eight million innocent people throughout the world. Included also were the tears of my parents and my friends.”
“Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland After Liberation” (Yad Vashem)
“The Last Million: Eastern European Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany” (The National WWII Museum, New Orleans)
“Displaced Persons Camps: Difficulties of Repatriation” (Wikipedia)
“The Aftermath of the Holocaust - Animated Map” (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
Holocaust survivors' reception in Israel
Idit Gil. "Between Reception and Self-Perception: Testimonies of Holocaust Survivors in Israel", Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 12, 18 Dec 2013.
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman. Chapter 11 "Crosswinds". For example:
"...in the 1950s, the Holocaust was a family secret—a shame. In those days, we barely learned about the Holocaust in school [...] All of us, parents and kids, tried to cover up what had happened." —Ruth Firer
Hanna Yablonka. Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War.
“Zionist”. Jewish nationalist.
Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews
Brief explanation on justvision.org
Tal Kra-Oz. "Israeli TV Series Examines The Lives of Mizrahim", Tablet, 17 Sept 2023.
Jen Marlowe. "Israel’s Mizrahi Activists Are Fighting the Racist Nation-State Law", The Nation, 27 May 2020.
"never spoke"
David Hoffman. "The Secret Suffering of Israel's Holocaust Survivors", The Washington Post, 23 April 1993.
Tom Segev. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust.
"leadership in the early days of the state" and "over the previous thirty years". See any historical overview of modern Israel-Palestine for more on this topic. I recommend The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi.
"state building zeal... callous". David Ben-Gurion is a good example of the state-building zeal which was callous toward the fate of Arab natives and even toward Jews in the diaspora. For example, callousness toward European Jewry:
"Were I to know that all German Jewish children could be rescued by transferring them to England and only half by transfer to Palestine, I would opt for the latter, because our concern is not only the personal interest of these children, but the historic interest of the Jewish people." 1938 quote
And callousness toward Arabs:
"I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it." June 1938 to the Jewish Agency Executive.
"long anticipated transfer"
See this list of quotes from early Israeli leaders. For example,
“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.” —Ariel Sharon as Israeli Foreign Minister, 1998
"The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Thinking and Practice" by Nur Masalha
"several months prior"
Expulsions before vs. during the 1948 war (infographic)
Ilan Pappe. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Ofer Aderet. "Jewish Soldiers and Civilians Looted Arab Neighbors' Property en Masse in '48. The Authorities Turned a Blind Eye", Ha'aretz, 3 Oct 2020. More quotes:
“There is nothing [left] to take from [the] Arabs. Simply a pogrom… And the commanders all have excuses” —Moshe Ben-Peretz, general prosecutor
“…it was shocking to see the eagerness of civilians to take advantage of the vacuum and raid the homes of people whom a cruel fate had turned into refugees.” —Zadok Eshel, Carmeli Brigade
“Shame and disgrace overwhelm me; there’s a desire to spit on the city and leave it. This will take its revenge on us and in the education of the youth and the children. People have lost all sense of shame, acts like these undermine the society’s moral foundations.” —Yosef Nachmani
“Bring judges and police officers to Jewish Jerusalem, for we have become as all the nations.” —reporter for Maariv, July 1948
"1930s revolt". See "1936-1939 Arab revolt" (Wikipedia).
"15% of male population". From The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi and other sources, also.
"turned their attention against the British"
"Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine" (Wikipedia)
"King David hotel bombing" (Wikipedia)
British wanted poster showing two future Israeli prime ministers (Wikipedia)
"The Sergeants affair" (Wikipedia)
Assassination of Count Bernadotte, U.N. mediator (video)
Adolf Eichman trial as "turning point"
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman. Chapter 11 "Crosswinds".
Irit Keynan. "The Memory of the Holocaust and Israel's Attitude Toward War Trauma, 1948-1973: The Collective vs. the Individual", Israel Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, Summer 2018.
"erased"
"Nakba denail" (Wikipedia)
Ilan Pappe. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Especially ch. 10 "The Memoricide of the Nakba".
Israeli citizens who immigrated after the war and those born in Israel were ignorant of the extent Arab civilization in Palestine prior to 1948. For example, Moshe Dayan, war hero and former Minister of Defense, recognized this ignorance when responding student questions at Technion Univ. on 19 March 1969:
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because [the] geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat in the place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua in the place of Tell Shaman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab Population." (Ha'aretz on 4 April 1969). Source: Edward Said. The Question of Palestine and "Moshe Dayan" (Wikipedia).
Fun fact: More than 70% of the villages from which Palestinians were expelled have yet to be built over. As it turns out, there is enough room for everyone (infographic).
"schoolbooks"
Nurit Peled-Elhanan. Palestine in Israeli Schoolbooks.
"Textbooks in Israel" (Wikipedia)
"historical editing"
Avi Shlaim. "The Debate about 1948", Int'l Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 27 no. 3, Aug 1995.
Ilan Pappe. Out of the Frame: The Quest for Academic Freedom in Israel.
"propagandizing the narrative"
"Inside Israel" with Ilan Pappe, Noam Chomsky, and Frank Barat. This brief interview is a short, insightful, inside look at Israeli society taken from On Palestine. A teaser quote:
“…one of the major challenges is to find space for Israelis and Western people to be able to understand how it all began. […] It is this infrastructure they [‘the ‘early Zionists’] have built about the other side that feeds all the Israelis’ perception and visions. […] How to explain to people that they are actually a product of this [‘infrastructure’]. It is one of the biggest tasks for anyone who engages in alternative education or is trying to convey a different message to the Israeli Jews’ society.” —Ilan Pappe
One example of popular Israel-narrative propaganda is the novel Exodus by Leon Uris. See this article for Marjorie Ingall's commentary on the impact of Exodus on her life as an Israeli Jewish citizen. David Ben-Gurion, the foremost Israeli leader of the 20th century, said about the Exodus novel: "As a literary work, it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel."
"ethical dilemmas and cognitive dissonance". Leon Hadar. "American Jewish Fantasies of Israel: Coping With Cognitive Dissonance", Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Aug/Sept 1991.
"Social scientists describe as "cognitive dissonance" the condition that results from discrepancies between the image and the reality of an admired political figure. When that beloved figure is accused of immoral personal behavior or political corruption, the immediate tendency of his admirers is not to withdraw their support, but to fall back on what communication scholars refer to as "image-maintaining mechanisms." The admirer questions the reliability of the news medium or the journalists who reported that story. He casts doubt on the credibility of the report's source, or may even avoid reading or listening to any information suggesting that the idol is less than perfect."
[...] "How have most supporters of Israel in the United States avoided dealing with their own political inconsistencies? The answer lies in their personal image-maintenance methods designed to avoid the cognitive dissonance between their perceptions of Israel and its reality. That, and an American media that for many years sympathized with the Israeli point of view, has helped them to preserve the Israeli fantasy."
Holocaust "national identity"
Raphael Ahren. "The mandatory VIP visit to Yad Vashem: vital history lesson or emotional blackmail?", Times of Israel, 18 April 2012.
Tom Hundley. "2 Views of a Horror", Chicago Tribune, 9 May 1993.
"Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni [...] complained that the death camp pilgrimages, including ones sponsored by her own ministry, were turning students into aggressive, flag-waiving xenophobes. Young Jews, she said, "march with unfurled flags, as if they've come to conquer Poland."
It might surprise you to learn that Holocaust scholars around the world are generally critical of Israel's policies toward Palestinians and have been sounding the alarm for many years about likely future genocide and ethnic cleansing in Israel-Palestine. For example:
—A panel of four Holocaust and genocide scholars discussing the current Israel-Hamas war
—Raz Segal. "Israel [and Joe Biden] must stop weaponizing the Holocaust", The Guardian, 24 Oct 2023. Segal is Prof. of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Modern Genocide at Stockton Univ.
"retreated into silence"
For example, Shlomo Ambar, a solder in 1948 who later became an IDF general, said when questioned about the massacre at Tantura which had remained secret until 1998: "I did not talk then, why should I talk now?" and "I want to forget what happened there." More on Tantura below:
Jonathan Ofir. "Nakba denial in Israel is long and deep, new documentary shows", Mondoweiss, 21 Jan 2022.
Alon Schwarz. "How to Cover Up a Massacre", Ha'aretz, 12 Aug 2022.
Ilan Pappe. "The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial", Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 30. no. 3, Spring 2001.
“reasons behind it” Unless you rely on only one historian or perspective, it is clear that there was more than factor motivating the Nakba expulsions, and various participants were motivated differently. Some examples:
A desire for preemptive self-defense (to what degree, historians differ),
Retaliation (at times);
Population engineering with a goal of reducing the Arab population in Jewish Palestine below an agreed threshold (a fairly explicit desire of David Ben-Gurion and most political leaders in Israel’s early history).
Keep in mind that the “Nakba” refers not only to the expulsion of Arabs, but the intentional prevention of their return after hostilities had ended.
Regarding the massacres, some seem to have been spontaneous and uncontrolled while others were planned and sanctioned (how many in each category, historians differ). But unlike the Holocaust massacres referenced earlier, the Nakba massacres seem to have been aimed at terrorizing Arab civilians to encourage their flight rather than motivated by a genocidal desire wipe out whole populations (historians agree on this point). If you wish to dig deeper and form your own opinion you might peruse the work of Ilan Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine) and Benny Morris (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem), two Israeli Jewish historians who provide a slightly different interpretation of the same facts and events.
As is relates to the purpose of Salam 25, perspectives of past events are not presented in order to satisfy a historian’s desire for perfect objectivity— an elusive, but noble goal. Rather, they are presented to facilitate a better future. Toward that end, what is most relevant are the residual effects of the past that must be resolved and certain dysfunctional perspectives that must be corrected before there can be a final resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Ilan Pappe explores this concept in his paper “The Role of the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing in the Contemporary Peace Process”:
“peace mediation in the [Israel-Palestine] conflict regarded history in general an obstacle for progress and the Palestinian victimization in 1948 as a marginal and irrelevant issue. This peace process, which ignored the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and its impact on the contemporary reality, failed dismally […] only a courageous encounter with the crime committed in 1948 and an authentic search for rectifying it through restitutive justice, and not retribution, can open up a genuine process of reconciliation in Palestine.”
"endorsed it" - present-day Israeli citizens
Shibley Telhami. "How Israel's Jewishness is Overtaking Its Democracy", Brookings, 11 March 2016. A commentary on a Pew Poll which reported that half of Israeli Jews agree that Arabs currently residing within Israel (including Arab citizens of Israel) should be transferred outside the country.
"endorsed it" - Benny Morris
A comical example of endorsing Arab expulsions is the historian Benny Morris who revealed the truth about the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the Western world with his landmark histories beginning in the 1980s after accessing recently (and temporarily as it turns out) declassified documents from Israeli archives. Although many Arabs had "revealed" this truth previously, it seems the Western world would only listen to one of their own. Some in Israel criticized Morris for being unpatriotic with his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. However, Morris says he was simply stating the facts, and he is actually an unapologetic Political Zionist. He says, "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing".
For a fun commentary on Morris, see: Jonathan Ofir. "‘Ethnic cleansing’ becomes ‘No ethnic cleansing’ in Israeli history by Benny Morris", Mondoweiss, 10 Oct 2016.
Or see the next footnote for excerpts from Morris' interview with Ari Shavit.
(cont'd) Interview with Benny Morris from "Survival of the Fittest", Ha'aretz, 8 Jan. 2004.
[Morris]: "...the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."
[Shavit]: "And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?"
[Morris]: "That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history." [...]
[Shavit]: You went to research Ben-Gurion and the Zionist establishment critically, but in the end you actually identify with them […]
[Morris]: "You may be right. […] But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered."
[Shavit]: "[…] Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too few Arabs?"
[Morris]: "If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. […] 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[r] expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River […]"
"endorsed it" - Ari Shavit
Ari Shavit, the interviewer in the above footnote, is a well-known journalist and the author of My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. He is a secular Israeli Zionist, like Morris, but without the rampant racism. Shavit wrote his book after some historians began to undo the tendency to deny the Nakba in Israeli scholarship. He attempts to present Zionism in a positive light to a new generation, endorsing the 1948 expulsions as a patriotic/nationalistic necessity while acknowledging their tragic nature:
“Do I wash my hands of [political] Zionism? Do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the deed of Lydda [a campaign within the Nakba]? […] the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda were no accident. They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of our story […] either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda. […] the bleeding-heart Israeli liberals of later years condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed. […] I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the State of Israel would not have been born.” —from ch. 5 “Lydda”
A critique of Ari Shavit’s book by Norman Finkelstein:
"Like the tobacco industry after the Surgeon General's warning in the 1960s, the formidable challenge confronting Zionist true believers is to repackage the old product such that it still sells despite its disquieting contents." —from Old Wine, Broken Bottle
"great powers will intervene". Rich Wiles. Behind the Wall: Life, Love, and Struggle in Palestine.
"censorship... various opinions"
Avi Shlaim. "The Debate about 1948", Int'l Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 27 no. 3, Aug 1995.
Greg Shupak. "Erasing the Nakba, Upholding Apartheid: Atrocity Denial in the U.S. Media", Institute for Palestine Studies, no. 8, 2022.
Hagar Shezaf. "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs", Ha'aretz, 5 July 2019.
“voluntarily”. The idea that the Nakba was an accidental occurrence or took place with the volition of the fleeing Palestinians or at the direction of Arab leaders has been thoroughly debunked. For example, here is a copy of an Israeli Military report from June 1948 that was drawn-up to provide an update to Israeli leadership on the progress of the population transfer campaign.
"never fully ended"
Netael Bandel. "Documents Reveal Israel’s Intent to Forcibly Expel the Bedouin From Their Lands", Ha'aretz, 31 Jan 2022.
"1949-1956 Palestinian expulsions" (Wikipedia)
"1967 Palestinian exodus" (Wikipedia)
Some infographics on displacements since 1967
U.N. Special Committee Report, 1971. Do a key word search for "expulsion", "deportation", "transfer", etc.
"even in 2023 before October 7"
"Countdown to genocide: the year before October 7" (Jewish Voice for Peace). This is a very helpful (and brief) background on the October 7 attacks.
"UN experts condemn forced eviction of east Jerusalem families", U.N. press release, 12 July 2023.
Settler violence chronological updates (B'Tselem)
Videos of recent home demolitions (B'Tselem)