Israel’s Primal Myth: A Barrier to Peace

A Good Piece
By Barry Lando
Truthdig

".....There can be no peace in the Middle East until Israel and the Palestinians deal with one key issue: the Palestinian demand that Israel recognize their right of return. That demand is based on the Arab charge that the Zionist state created the refugee problem in the war of 1948-49 by a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. It’s an accusation that Israel’s leaders have consistently rejected......It has become increasingly evident, however, that the Israeli position is, in fact, a self-serving myth created when the Jewish state was born, perpetuated ever since by the country’s leaders and still blandly accepted by Washington.....

.....But since the early 1990’s a new generation of Israeli historians and investigative journalists—drawing on formerly classified documents of as well as recollections of Israeli leaders of the War of Independence—have demolished the traditional Israeli position. According to their research, the Palestinians fled their villages, not in response to a call from Arab leaders, but because of a concerted campaign of terror—including massacres and rape—perpetrated by military units of the newly declared Israeli state.....

According to Sylvain Cypel, a leading correspondent for Le Monde, the full version of that UN resolution [Resolution 181] was never published in its entirety in Hebrew. The reason for that oversight may be simple. From the beginning Israel’s future leaders were determined that the Jewish state, carved out of the British mandate, would be just a first step towards the eventual takeover of all the land of Palestine. As David Ben Gurion, who would become Israel’s first Prime Minister, confided to labor party members in 1941, “As soon as we gain power, once our state is established we’ll annul [the partition] and will spread out over all the territory of Israel.”.....

....In fact, according to Benny Morris, one of the first of the new Israeli historians European Zionist leaders had secretly discussed plans for transferring the Arab population out of Palestine as far back as 1937 in Zurich. They had few illusions that the relocation of up to 500,000 Arabs could be peacefully achieved. “It is hard to imagine a transfer without recourse to force,” Ben Gurion later wrote in 1941. Such blunt talk was for internal use only. Outwardly, a different myth was already being prepared. “They lied, oh, how they lied,” thundered Gideon Levy, “The Arabs were always the bad guys, and we were the just, absolute, and sole victims. That’s what we’ve been told.”....

....“In no case did a Palestinian population abandon its homes before an attack.” To the contrary, Israeli intelligence services had actually intercepted calls from Arab leaders asking Palestinians either to remain in their homes or to return if they had already fled. Morris and other Israeli historians concluded that the Palestinians’ flight was—as the Arabs had long claimed—the result of a purposeful policy of Israeli forces, whose communiqués at the time spoke openly of “cleansing” or “purifying” the conquered Arab villages.

According to General Yigal Allon, in May 12, 1948, as his men approached each Arab town, they tossed in tracts with the message in Arabic, “if you don’t flee immediately, you will all be slaughtered, your daughters will be raped.” Those were not empty threats......

According to Cypel, “Of the 875,000 Palestinians who found themselves in the expanded State of Israel at the end of the war, only 150,000 were left after the new expulsions following the cease fire with the Arab states. The others, that is 82 percent, were driven out half of them by military force, the rest under the combined influence of threat, terror, and a deep felling of abandonment and powerless..”

As if to destroy evidence of the Palestinian past, over the following years some 400 out of 500 Palestinian towns and ancestral villages were burned, dynamited and bulldozed, obliterated from the maps of Israel.

When the war in Kosovo broke out in 1999 an Israeli editorialist wryly wrote “How lucky we were then there was no CNN in 1948 or the whole world would have been able to see in Palestine the images we are seeing today.”......

....there is still widespread apprehension among Israelis to any questioning of the country’s self-image of moral superiority and perpetual victim of aggression. “The revelation of the slightest flaw, the revelation of the least stain, whether in the past or… the present, seems to evoke such fear that it challenges not only the existence but the very legitimacy of this society in the eyes of a large majority of its own members.”

While Israel’s difficulty in dealing with its own past may thus make some sense, much more remarkable is how successful the Israelis have been in convincing American leaders to play along with their founding myth."