| Drama,
Poems, Essays |
ISRAEL, PART TWO |
|
<< Previous: Israel, Part One Further ThoughtsDavid Gilmour's Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians has made me aware that the creation of Israel in 1947-1948 came about through what we now call "ethnic cleansing." That is, the original Zionist movement of Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) envisioned finding a safe home for the Jewish nation (that is, people). This home would not necessarily be in Palestine. At first Herzl seriously considered Argentina, then Cyprus, the Sinai peninsula and Uganda. Only Palestine was attractive to most European Jews. In his 1902 novel Alteneuland, Herzl therefore imagined the idyllic development of Palestine as the Jewish homeland. Some commentators say that Herzl did not necessarily imagine that the Jewish national home would be a state. According to Michael Palumbo and others, Herzl hoped that a Jewish state in Palestine was the goal. It would be safer for Jews. But many Zionists were afraid to hope or agitate for such a state. So the desired place was referred to as a homestead. The first Zionists after Herzl sought to buy land from Arabs and their Turkish overlords. They tried to live peaceably with Arabs as a minority among them. But during the period in which Zionists came to Palestine before 1948, several important Jewish factions were already determined, not to live under the British Mandate, but to forge a Jewish state in Palestine. Ze'ev Vladimir Jabotinsky (who died in 1940), and his followers the Revisionist Zionists wanted the whole of David's and Solomon's kingdom; that is, all of the British Mandate on both sides of the Jordan, up into Southern Lebanon and perhaps into Sinai, including Jerusalem. Mainstream Zionists -- Ben-Gurion and the armed Jewish underground militia Haganah -- wanted as much as possible of the Mandate -- especially Jerusalem -- but would settle for less than the Revisionists. President Harry S. Truman had enormous sympathy for world Jewry and its plight after the Holocaust. He wanted "to make the world safe for Jews everywhere." He also had the strong desire to get its organized political clout behind him.3 He used all the influence and power of the United States to muscle the nations voting on a Palestine partition plan in the United Nations on November 29, 1947, to get the plan passed.4 Nonetheless, the Arab nations voted against it. The final vote was to 33-13 in favour of the plan, with 10 abstentions. Since this was a two-thirds majority, the partition plan passed. The Jewish Agency (I think this means Ben-Gurion) "reluctantly" approved the partition plan. The plan gave the proposed Jewish state over 60% of the Mandate west of the Jordan, though the Jews there numbered about 500,000 while the Arabs numbered perhaps 1,100,000 or so. The Plan set up two indefensible states, one for the Jews and one for the Palestinians, each in three pieces. All six pieces were on the west side of the Jordan and Dead Sea. The Jewish three-piece state would include all of the Negev Desert, though in the Negev there were 1000 Jews and 100,000 Arabs. (Earlier plans had given the Negev to the Arabs.) According to the adopted U.N. partition plan, Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to be in an international zone. The plan would go into effect six months after the British departed the Mandate (as, after the Arab revolt of 1935-1939 and years of Jewish terrorism, they were now keen to do). The Mufti of Jerusalem, at that time the chief Palestinian voice, rejected the partition plan. As I have said above, the Arab nations rejected it. I do not believe the Palestinian people ever got the chance to vote on the matter. Gilmour says: "The partition plan was thus rejected out of hand by the Palestinians. In practice it was also rejected by the Zionists. Although the Jewish Agency decided ostensibly to accept the resolution, many Zionists did not even bother to pay lip-service to it. Israel's [1977-1983---GS] prime minister, Menachem Begin [then the leader of the 5000-fighter Jewish terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi -- GS], then announced: ' The partition of the homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature by institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the Jewish people. All of it. And for ever.' The man soon to become Israel's first prime minister in May, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, was equally unwilling to accept the U.N.'s decision on Jerusalem: 'Tens of thousands of our youth are prepared to lay down their lives for the sake of Jerusalem. Everything possible will be done for Jerusalem. It is within the boundaries of the State of Israel just as Tel Aviv is.' " 5 Question: How did this attitude fit . . . with the Jewish Agency's approving the partition plan? # # # So officially the Jewish side approved partition. Actually, they had grave reservations. Did they intend to violate the plan? The statement of Ben-Gurion's would seem to indicate that he intended to fight for Jerusalem. (I have heard that Ben-Gurion had made a deal with King Abdullah of Transjordan to allow that monarch to keep the West Bank and East Jerusalem -- the only areas that Abdullah cared about. But I do not have a reference for this, if true.) There is some indication that Ben-Gurion felt that continued Jewish immigration would cause the Jewish state to be later able to expand. The British left on May 14, 1948. That day Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth (or rebirth) of the State of Israel. Now the partition wasn't supposed to happen for six months. So why did Ben-Gurion proclaim the Jewish state at once? Did he think he would have some fund-raising or inspirational or legal advantage by working within a state framework, even if he had jumped the gun on the partition plan? Did he feel he had to proclaim Israel, because of the threatened appearance of Arab armies just a few miles distant? I don't know. I think it was a combination of all of these reasons. And I think in the Zionists' minds (especially in the Revisionist Zionists' minds) was the idea that they had to seize the advantage and establish the possession of as much strategic Jewish territory at once as they possibly could. Israel's chief general in its war of independence was Yigal Allon (1919-1980); Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), Israel's prime minister from 1974-1977 and 1992-1995, was Allon's subordinate. They fought the battles against the invading Arab armies, and won. Deir YassinMenachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir (1914- ) -- then the leader of the 1000-fighter Jewish ultra-terrorist group Lohamei Herut Yisrael, also known as Lehi or the Stern Gang; later prime minister of Israel (1986-1992) -- and their forces had already attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem in April, 1948, and other strategic villages, and killed the inhabitants or forced them to flee. (In Deir Yassin they killed between 126 and 254 men, women, and children -- the number seems in doubt: Gilmour describes them as "civilians." The Red Cross reported that many were lined up against walls and executed.) Begin's biographer Silver sympathetically says the attack on the unoffending Arab village "got out of hand." The coast near Jaffa was "ethnically cleansed" by force6 as were parts of Galilee, and strategic regions to the west of Jerusalem. In places Arab women were raped by the Israelis, and some Arab men were simply executed.7 Palestinians were forced from their homes in many villages, and forcibly expelled. They were driven at gunpoint; some died on the journey. Other Arabs heard about the massacre at Deir Yassin, and like ones, and fled their villages. Some 650,000 to 800,000 fled (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia says 700,000), tens of thousands driven out by Haganah soldiers at the point of guns. Some Arabs fled to other parts of what would become Israel proper, but most to Arab-controlled territory in Jordan (Transjordan, as it was called then), Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt. The "huge" invading Arab armies we've all heard about were poorly, even pathetically, armed. According to one historian, they were never more numerous than the Israelis, and by the end of 1948 were much smaller in number than the Israelis. The one Arab force that was any good in 1947-1948 was Transjordan's Arab Legion commanded by Glubb Pasha, that is, British soldier Sir John Bagot Glubb (1897-1986). The Arab Legion held East Jerusalem and the area later to be called the West Bank for Transjordan (which later became King Hussein's The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). Of interest is Gilmour's account of Israeli-perpetrated atrocities (he is quoting two Zionists, Jon and David Kimche): "[On 11 July, Moshe Dayan and his troops] drove at full speed into Lydda, shooting up the town and creating confusion and a degree of terror among the population. . . . [A passage removed from Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs by a five-man committee of the Israeli cabinet reveals that Ben-Gurion had ordered this expulsion. -- GS] Its Arab population of 30,000 either fled or were herded on the road to Ramallah. The next day Ramle [a town near Lydda, different from Ramallah -- GS] also surrendered and its Arab population suffered the same fate. Both towns were sacked by the victorious Israelis."8 Gilmour then continues in his own voice: "Terrorism and the massacre of civilians were other techniques used by the Zionists. According to the Kimches again, the killing of unarmed villagers [emphasis mine -- GS] began in December 1947, soon after the U.N. debate. It was a standard method used in forcing the Galilee Arabs to escape across the Lebanese or Syrian borders. At Ain al-Zeitouneh, thirty-seven boys were taken as hostage and never seen again; the other inhabitants were taken to the edge of the village and told to leave. An inhabitant of Safsaf (now called Silsufa) has described what happened to her village when Israeli troops captured it in October 1948: 'As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About seventy of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us. The soldiers took their bodies and threw them on the cement covering the village's spring and dumped sand on them.' " Gilmour again: "Similar atrocities took place in more than a dozen villages of Galilee, and also near Hebron. According to one Israeli soldier, a member of the Mapam Party, Israeli troops committed a horrific massacre at the Sunni village of Duwayman [apparently also called Dawayma; see Palumbo's The Palestinian Catastrophe, p. 12 and ff. -- GS], between Hebron and the coast: 'They killed some eighty to one hundred Arabs, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with clubs. . . . In the village there remained Arab men and women who were put in the houses without food. Then the sappers came to blow up the houses. One officer ordered a sapper to put two old women into the house he was about to blow up. The sapper refused, and said that he will [sic] obey only such orders as are handed to him by his direct commander. So the officer ordered his own soldiers to put the old women in and the atrocity was carried out. Another soldier boasted that he raped an Arab woman and then shot her. Another Arab woman with a day-old baby was employed in cleaning jobs in the yard. . . . She worked for one or two days and then was shot together with her baby. . . . Cultured and well mannered commanders who are considered good fellows . . . have turned into low murderers, but because of a system of expulsion and annihilation. The less Arabs remain, the better.' " 9 Clear enough? Ethnic cleansing. Assuming that these books of Gilmour's and Palumbo's are not black propaganda but factual (Gilmour seems to be a British journalist, Palumbo an American historian), it is clear that the 1947-1948 expulsion or "transfer" of the Palestinians involved terrorism, atrocities, forced evacuations at gunpoint, and arbitrary executions. I do not believe the Israelis ever punished anyone for these actions. I believe that this is a part of the creation of Israel which Israelis do not usually mention. NOTE ON JULY 19, 2002: I have recently been reading The Palestine-Israeli Conflict: A Beginner's Guide. It is by two scholars, an Israeli and a Palestinian. It makes it clear to me that, having gotten themselves into a duplicitous situation by their diplomacy in World War I, the British honestly tried to carry out their duplicitous promises to both the Jews and the Arabs. But the whole Mandate became untenable. Neither side could be satisfied. Clearly, the sufferings of world Jewry in the Holocaust were enormous. (About 6 million dead.) The Jews tried to save as many of their people as possible by bringing them to Palestine. The Arabs were understandably alarmed at the entrance of the foreign Jews, and the promise of the British that the Jews would have a "national home" among them. Neither the British nor the Americans wanted Jewish immigration to their own countries. So the Palestinian Arabs got stuck. Strangers came among them, and soon became determined to take over. Over time the mainstream Zionists became determined to have a national state, just as the Revisionist Zionists had earlier determined to have. So in 1947-1948 the better armed and organized and more determined Jews won out. They expelled many of the Arabs we now call Palestinians. These fought for many years to compel the world to acknowledge their rights. They are still fighting, using guerrilla methods and terrorism, since they can not practically face the Israeli Defence Force with its American-supplied battlefield tanks, cluster bombs, F-16 fighter aircraft, bombers and Blackhawk attack helicopters. In addition, Israel has on its side the full power of the United States, which can scarcely deny it anything and uses its full influence and wealth to support Israel. The wonder is that the Palestinians have got anywhere at all. # # # Many antisemites who know all or some of the above facts go on from here to condemn the Israeli land-grab and "transfer" of Arab populations that occurred in 1947-48, and the later seizure of Arab lands on any pretext as partial justification for their hatred or dislike of Jews. Actually, the real motive behind antisemitism is just hatred, i.e., there is no real reason. Nasty things actual Jews have done are simply red flags waving and provoking the antisemitic bulls. We should see the creation of Israel as yet another example of the colonization of land by wandering peoples; such colonization has been going on as far back in the history of mankind as you can look. Consider the wanderings of the Sarmatians and the Scythians, the Huns and the Goths, the Vandals and the Teutons, the Franks and the Saxons and Hungarians, the Mongols and so on and so on. At one point, after all (1300 B.C.E.?), the Hebrews came into the land of Israel from Egypt (or so we are told; these days archeologists are not sure this happened: there seems to be no archeological record in Israel of early Hebrew events). Many peoples for tens of thousands of years wandered over Eurasia looking for better hunting and gathering places. They colonized lands occupied by others, and killed, drove off or intermarried with the previous occupiers. In turn they were often driven off by later migrants. What is a little unusual is that the colonization of Palestine happened in our time. We don't usually think of peoples' being driven off their land as a contemporary event. We imagine, I think, that in our time injustices of this kind have somehow ended. Actually, of course, some very large dispossessions occurred in the 20th century. More are going on now. Some of the largest occurred after the Second World War. Millions of people were displaced. The Sudeten Germans. The Poles of eastern Poland. Jews (what remained of them, alas). The people from Eastern Europe the Germans had used in their factories as slave workers. And many more Eastern Europeans and Russians than I can even name. The Soviet communists under Stalin had killed further millions of people in the 1930s. They had deported and displaced many more millions. The deportations caused many, many more deaths. Some peoples, like the Chechens, were eventually allowed to return to their homes. Many hundreds of thousands had become partisans against either the Soviets or the Germans. After World War II the Allies set up organizations to aid in the return of these so-called "displaced persons" (sometimes called DPs). The Jews who emigrated to Israel after the war were simply one of the DP groups. In the 1990s we witnessed population displacements in the former Yugoslavia. Peoples who had reluctantly lived together under the communist regime of Marshall Tito seized the opportunity as that country disintegrated after Tito's death to create their own states, and to expel other nationalities who were inconvenient to their plans. I think the total who died in these expulsions and massacres was about 100,000. Many who survived can never return. Currently in Africa millions have been displaced in the military invasion of eastern Congo by various nations, and in resulting tribal fighting. At least 1,000,000 have been killed or have starved to death, though this has been almost entirely out of the news. (UPDATE in March 2004: A Toronto Sun columnist recently suggested that the number of deaths in the eastern Congo in the last few years is 5,000,000 people. I am stunned at the size of this number. Is anyone paying attention? Does anyone care?) So invasions, colonization and dispossession are nothing new. Nor have they stopped. The wandering of the peoples continues. I don't know what relevance the history of the wanderings has for Israel. At some point, if security is to be established borders have to be recognized and settlements given permanence. Thereafter previous injustices will be swept under the carpet and ignored, in the name of stability. In the case of Israel there has been some attempt to make a permanent solution. In 2003 the Saudis suggested this plan: the 1948 borders would be recognized by all sides, and all the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza would be removed in return for peace. But clearly this is not going to fly. Israel, having conquered the West Bank and Gaza, clearly intends to keep parts of this territory. The events of the 1967 war and the partial colonization of the West Bank and Gaza will have to be partly recognized. Perhaps a two-state solution is no longer possible. Perhaps an Israel that is a Jewish State (that is, predominately) is no longer possible. Perhaps only a one-state solution is possible, a democratic state. After all, in 2003 Ariel Sharon himself described the present situation on the West Bank as an "occupation" and seemed to imply it could not continue. # # # UPDATE on March 25,2004: The recent Israeli strategy has been to build a "security fence" (an 8-metre-high wall) around the areas Israel intends to keep within Israel. This cuts somewhat into the West Bank, rather deeply in places, and so has been protested by the Palestinians. The wall goes ahead. Sharon seems clearly to intend to abandon Gaza to the Palestinians (there are only about 10,000 Israelis there, though they occupy fully one-third of Gaza). # # # # # [To Be Continued and Revised] << Previous: Israel, Part One Notes1 Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, pp. 23-29, particularly p. 28 (paperback edition). 2 David Gilmour, Dispossessed, p. ( Sphere paperback edition). 3 Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, p. 24. 4 Gilmour, ibid. pp. 59-60. Also Truman, McCullagh, pp. for an account of how the American Jewish lobby influenced Truman. 5 Gilmour, ibid., p. 61. 6 For a detailed and credible account, see Palumbo, ibid., the chapters on Haifa and Jaffa. 7 Gilmour, ibid., p. 68. 8 Kimche, pp. 227-228. 9 Gilmour, ibid., p. 69. Related Books of InterestAbu-Lughod, Ibrahim. The Transformation of Palestine. al-Asmer, Fouzi. To Be an Arab in Israel. Allon, Yigal. Book of the Palmach. This book seems only to have been published in Hebrew. Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening. Aronson, Geoffrey. Creating Facts: Israel, Palestinians & the West Bank. Ashrawi, Hanan. This Side of Peace: A Personal Account. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism. Banks, L.R. Torn Country: An Oral History. Bar-On, Mordechai. The Gates of Gaza: Israel's Road to Suez and Back, 1955-1957. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. This book was originally published in Hebrew in 1992. Begin, Menachem. The Revolt. 1951. This is Begin's version of events in which he participated as leader of Irgun. It was written and published in Hebrew before or during 1951, then translated, edited, and published in English in London that year. The current and revised version was published by Nash Publishing in the United States in 1977, and as a paperback by Dell in 1978. Very interesting for Begin's versions of the Altalena affair and Deir Yasin (pp. 21-23 of the paperback). I hope to say more about these matters eventually. Bellow, Saul. To Jerusalem and Back. New York: Avon Books, 1976. Ben-Gurion, David, with Moshe Perlman. Ben-Gurion Looks Back. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965. -------. My Talks With Arab Leaders. Bilby, Kenneth. New Star in the Middle East. Chomsky, Noam. The Fateful Triangle: Israel, the United States, and the Palestinians. -------. Pirates and Emperors. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987. Illuminating about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, as well as about the issue of terrorism. Revised and greatly expanded in 2002. -------. Middle East Illusions. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003. Cohen. Truman and Israel. Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, and Dawoud El-Alami. The Palestine-Israeli Conflict: A Collins, Larry, and Dominique Lapierre. "O Jerusalem!" New York: Simon & Schuster, Crossman, Richard. Palestine Mission. Dayan, Yael. A Soldier's Story. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967. Dimont, Max. Jews, God and History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. A good standard history of the Jews up to the mid-20th century. Dunkelman, Ben. [The book referred to is a memoir that Palumbo says was censored by Israel. Dunkelman was a Canadian Jew who fought in the 1947-48 war as a brigadier. He seems to have been responsible for the decision to honour previous agreements and leave certain Arabs in their homes in Galilee. According to Palumbo, this was against the wishes of Ben-Gurion and others of the High Command, who wanted to evict nearly all the Arabs of Galilee to clear space for Jews. The censored passage referring to the Galilee situation is said to have been released to the press by ghost writer Peretz Kidron. More information to follow.] Elon, Amos. Herzl: A Biography. -------. Jerusalem, City of Mirrors. -------. Flight Into Egypt. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1980. Epp, Frank. The Palestinians. Flaphan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon Books, This book has an excellent passage about the Altalena affair in which Haganah attacked a ship owned by Menachem Begin's Irgun, killing 15 of Begin's men and sinking his weapons. A briefer account is in The Palestine-Israeli Conflict (see above). Begin's version is in his The Revolt. Friedman, Thomas A. From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Girous, 1989. Edition with new chapter, Anchor Books, 1995. Friedman is an astute Jewish-American commentator for the New York Times. The revised edition of this book is especially interesting for its last chapter, reporting Friedman's reactions to the Oslo-Madrid peace process and his suggestion that the Palestinians must get away from dwelling on their past "rights" and make the best deal they can with the all-powerful Israelis. Gilbert, Martin. The Arab-Israeli Conflict. -------. Israel: A History. London: Doubleday; and Toronto: Turnerbooks, 1998. -------. The Jews in the Twentieth Century. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2001. Gilmour, David. Lebanon: The Fractured Country. Oxford: Martin Robertson & Company, 1983. -------. Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians. London: Sphere Books, 1990. Glubb, Sir John Bagot. A Soldier With the Arabs. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957. -------. The Middle East Crisis: A Personal Interpretation. 1967. Goldberg, David J. To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought from its Origins to the Modern State of Israel. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. A Concise History of the Middle East. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1979, 1983, 1988. Goldston, Robert. The Sword of the Prophet. Grayzel, Solomon. A History of the Jews. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Grossman, David. The Yellow Wind. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1988. -------. Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. 1993. -------. Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo. Translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine. New York: Olive Branch -------. The Palestinians. -------. Palestine: Loss of a Heritage. Halamish, Aviva. The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Hart, Alan. Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited, 1984. Hasan, Sana. Enemy in the Promised Land: An Egyptian Woman's Journey Into Israel. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Beautifully written and fascinating, Hasan's books gives inside looks at several key players she met, including Begin and Sharon. -------, with Amos Elon. Between Enemies: A Compassionate Dialogue Between an Israeli and an Arab. Herzl, Theodor. Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State"). 1896. Herzl was a well-educated Jewish-Austrian journalist. Prior to the Dreyfus trial in France, he had advocated that European Jews assimilate to Christianity. Then there would be no Jewish problem in Europe. But the trial convinced him that European prejudice against Jews would never end. Therefore he became a Zionist, wrote Der Judenstaat to advocate Zionism, and organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel. Until the end of his life in 1904, Herzl made heroic efforts to find some place to create a Zionist homestead or state. -------. Old-New Land ("Alteneuland"). New York: Bloch Publishing Company and Herzl Press, 1960. Translated by Lotta Levensohn, this is Herzl's 1902 novel in which he depicts an idyllic Jewish socialist state in Palestine. Palumbo charges that Herzl in his diary was aware that many Arabs would have to be displaced from Palestine in order to make the Jewish state possible. -------. The Complete Diaries. Hess, Moses. Rome and Jerusalem. 1862. Hess was a Franco-German Jew who decided that Jewish assimilation to Christianity would never work. In this book he therefore advocated a Jewish state in Palestine. He was perhaps the first intellectual to embrace the Zionist cause. Hirst, David. The Gun and the Olive Branch. John, Robert. Palestine Diary. Kimche, David, and Bawly, Dan. The Sandstorm: The Arab-Israeli War of 1967. New York: Stein & Day, 1968. -------, Jon and David. A Clash of Destinies: The Arab-Jewish War and the Founding of the State of Israel. New York: Praeger, 1960. This is an early book by an Israeli Zionist soldier (Jon) and his brother (David), a journalist, about the 1947-48 war that founded Israel. The book concerns the circumstances that led to the war, its strategy, and its results. Touches glancingly on a few atrocities, evictions, and what seem like (terrorist?) raids deep into Arab territory, but is mostly about the Jewish strategy and tactics of the war. Apparently blowing up Arab houses was standard operating procedure from late 1947. A first draft of history from a Zionist perspective. -------, Jon. Palestine Or Israel: The Untold Story Of Why We Failed. Martin Secker & Warburg, 1973. This is the story of how two chances for peace were missed, in the author's opinion, in 1917-23 and 1967-73. Koestler, Arthur. Promise and Fulfillment. Lamb, David. The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage. New York: Random House, 1987. Lacqueur, Walter. The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict. Citadel Press, 1969. The Israel-Arab Reader has been through numerous editions and expansions. I am using the sixth revised and updated edition published in paperback by Penguin Books in 2001. It is co-edited by Barry Rubin, the author of a new political life of Arafat. -------. A History of Zionism. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1972, 1989. La Guardia, Anton. War Without End: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for a Promised Land. New York: Thomas Dunne Books [imprint of St. Martin's Press], 2003. Levin, Harry. Jerusalem Embattled. Lorch, Netanel. Israel's War of Independence. Morris, Benny. 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians. Oxford (?), U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1984. -------. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge University Press, 1987. New edition, 2004. -------. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-1999. New York: Knopf, 1999. Benny Morris is an Israeli journalist and historian. His books are pro-Israel, but in a fair-minded way. He is said to have aroused anger among Israeli Jews for his first books, which depicted what really happened in 1947-1948. In Righteous Victims Morris corroborates for the most part what Gilmour said in 1990. Morris believes Palestinian society was more "primitive" and disorganized in 1947 than Jewish society; thus the Palestinians lost. He believes that the Palestinians have remained less well organized than the Jews. Oz, Amos. In the Land of Israel. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. Oz, an Israeli novelist who fought for Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars, is a noted writer and "peacenik." The conclusion of the English-language 1993 edition has prescient things to say about how to solve the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians. Palumbo, Michael. The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People From Their Homeland. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1987. In English we see little of the Arab-Israeli war of 1947-48 from a point of view sympathetic to Arabs; most Arab writings on that period have not been translated. Further, to write from such a viewpoint is almost politically incorrect, because of the Holocaust. In this therefore extremely politically incorrect book Palumbo paints a thoroughgoing revisionist picture of the events of 1947-48. Palumbo attempts to explode many persistent Israeli myths. He shows with gritty detail and many, many citations from a variety of sources exactly how about one-third of the 750,000 Arabs were expelled from their Palestinian homes and villages, driven out by Israeli mortars, machine-guns, rifle fire and atrocities. Palumbo also makes plain why another third of the Palestinian Arabs sensibly fled in absolute terror of the Jews. This was because of atrocities committed against the Arabs, news of which was deliberately spread to Arab areas in Arabic on clandestine Israeli radio stations. Other psychological warfare techniques, such as having cars with loudspeakers enter Arab villages at night and warn the inhabitants to flee because the Jews were coming to do with them as they had to the villagers of Deir Yassin. Palumbo describes many, many incidents -- the massacre at Deir Yassin, for example, is dealt with in detail -- and makes the best case I have read that several thousand Arabs were allowed by Ben-Gurion and the Israeli leadership to be cruelly and barbarously killed. Palumbo proceeds carefully and apparently judiciously, clarifying and illuminating atrocity after atrocity (there are more to deal with than I had known about), and citing contemporary account after contemporary account. These are from all the parties involved. In the end, his account is depressing and all too plausible. Palumbo, an American who has been to Israel and seems to have carefully researched not only Israeli archives, which in 1987 were still censored, but British, American and U.N. archives (unlike, he says, Israeli scholars up to 1987), presents credible evidence that the Arabs were mistreated, expelled and brutalized by the Jews because of decades-old, long-held, explicit plans for their expulsion and the confiscation of their land. The evidence he presents is sobering. (I wonder what Palumbo's reputation is as a historian? Has he influenced revisionist Jewish historians like Benny Morris? Does anyone know?) -------. Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank Paris, Erna. The Garden and the Gun. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1990. Payne, Robert. The Splendor of the Holy Land: Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Peretz, Don. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, Inc., 1990. Porter, Jack Nusan and Peter Dreier. Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1973. Price, Randall. Fast Facts on the Middle East Conflict. Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 2003. Rabin, Yitzhak. The Rabin Memoirs. New York: Little, Brown, 1979. This is the version sanitized by a five-man committee of the Israeli cabinet. The missing passage about Ben-Gurion's ordering Dayan and Rabin to expel Palestinians from Ramle and Lydda was leaked to the New York Times by Rabin's translator, published there on October 29, 1979, and never denied. (The passage is quoted in one of the books here mentioned; I'll provide the reference when I can.) The book is very interesting. Randall, Jonathan C. Going All The Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the War in Lebanon. New York: Random House Inc., 1983. A fascinating and thorough book about Lebanon, its history and peoples, and the circumstances leading to the Israeli invasion in 1982. What happened in the invasion and occupation is detailed better here than in anything else I have read. Rubinstein, Danny. The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home. This work was originally published in Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1990 under the title The Fig Tree Embrace. Rubinstein explains how the Palestinians' very identities are constructed out of their houses and villages. They may be the most locally rooted people on the earth. Thus they cling tenaciously even to the memory of what they once owned. Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel. Said, Edward. After the Last Sky. Schechtman, Joseph B. The Jabotinsky Story: Fighter and Prophet. -------. The United States and the Jewish State Movement. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1966. Schmidt, Dana Adams. Armageddon in the Middle East. New York: John Day Segev, Tom. 1949: The First Israelis. -------. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000. One Palestine was published first in Hebrew in 1999. Selzer, Michael. The Aryanization of the Jewish State. Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques. The Chosen and the Choice: Israel at the Servan-Schreiber is a French intellectual, author of Le Défi Américain (The American Challenge), a bestselling book of the late 1960s which presciently discussed the business challenge America, with all its computers and business schools, presented to Europe at that time. Sheean, Vincent. Personal History. New York: Random House, 193-. Shipler, Daniel K. Arab and Jew. Shipler says he is neither Arab nor Jew. His book is very good, particularly at explaining the Deir Yassin and Kfar Kassem massacres. Shlaim, Avi. War And Peace In The Middle East. Silverberg, Robert. If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: American Jews and the State of Israel. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970. A popular book about the emergence of the Jewish state, told from an American Jewish point of view, and especially interested in the contribution of American Jews to the founding of Israel. Typical of books in North America about the founding of the Jewish state -- until, that is, recent revisionist developments. Fascinating for its description of the pro-Israel reaction of both Gentiles and non-religious Jews to the 1967 war. Although Silverberg is the author of several fine popular non-fiction books about, for example, archeology, he is best known as the multiple Hugo award-winning author of many science-fiction stories and novels; perhaps his best novel is Dying Inside. Snetsinger, John. Truman, the Jewish Vote and the Creation of Israel. Sternhell, Zeev. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism and the Making of the Jewish State. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998. Teveth, Shabtai. Moshe Dayan: The Soldier, the Man, the Legend. London and Typical of books about revered Israeli figures available in North America. -------. Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Tuchman, Barbara W. Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age Tuchman (1912-1989), the late distinguished and popular Pulitizer-prize-winning Jewish-American historian, is concerned narrowly with the [British] Balfour declaration of November 1917, the events leading up to it, and its fallout. It covers this adequately. The book seems to ignore all the intriguing and vital issues surrounding the creation of Israel. Rather unsatisfying. Viorst, Milton. Sands of Sorrow: Israel's Journey From Independence. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. -------. What Shall I Do With This People?: Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism. New York: The Free Press (Simon & Schuster), 2002. Weizmann, Chaim. Trial and Error. -------. Weizmann's Papers and Letters. Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. The Controversy of Zion. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wolfson, Marion. Prophets in Babylon. Zayid, Ismail. Zionism: The Myth and the Reality. Indianapolis, Indiana: American Trust Fascinating. Zayid was a medical doctor living at time of publication in Canada. His angry anti-Israel book charges Zionism with being a form of European imperialism and a form of racism. He seems to show that the former is true and the latter perhaps technically true by (I would argue, improper) U.N definitions. Ziff, William. The Rape of Palestine. Other MaterialHarper's magazine. Various issues. The New York Review of Books. Various issues in 2002. Home | About Grant | What's New | Links | Coming Soon | Send E-Mail Last modified: 9:19 PM 07/07/2004 |