14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
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Rewriting Palestine
The Israel/Palestine Question, Ilan Pappé, ed. London: Routledge (Rewriting Histories Series), 1999. pp278
That history is perhaps the most politicised of all discourse is a truism most palpable in writings on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In this regard, Ilan Pappé's reader, The Israel/Palestine Question, reflects an emerging discourse that is itself a manifestation of the contemporary state of the conflict and its ensuing scholarly debates.
Pappé combines articles by leading Israeli and Palestinian revisionist historians that aim at a state-of-the-field perspective on Palestinian history today, and similarly -- inevitably -- on Israeli history as well. The book is divided into six parts. The first deals with "The history of Palestine rediscovered," the second with the origins of Zionism and the third with the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The 1948 War, by far the defining event in the history of the conflict, is the subject of part four, and its resultant creation of a state of Israel that is home to Palestinians otherwise referred to by the oxymoron "Israeli Arabs" is the theme of part five. And, finally, part six deals with the 1987 Intifada in historical perspective.
The editor belongs to the self-proclaimed "new historians" school within Israeli historiography. To a large degree revisionists, the new historians are primarily interested in the social, economic and cultural history of Israel, a history which they believe cannot be studied in isolation from Palestinian existence and history. In contrast to the main trends within both Israeli and Palestinian historiography, which had for long focused on political and military perspectives in studying the history of Palestine and Israel, the new historians propose to study history from below. Similar historiographical trends have gained ground within Western academia for several decades now, but they have only recently begun to influence Middle Eastern historiography. The new historians' historiographical and political orientation has led them to re-examine many of the founding tenets of Zionism and Israeli nationalism and has resulted in the writing of history that is far more empathetic to the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians and more critical of Israeli policies.
In his introduction to the collection, Pappé gives an overview of the hitherto dominant paradigms within both Palestinian and Israeli historiography, as well as an exposé of the new historiographical orientations that seek to challenge the established grand narratives and include the marginalised in history.
The most controversial output of the "new historians" school has been Benny Morris's book on the 1948 war The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. In his article "The causes and character of the Arab exodus from Palestine: The Israeli defence forces analysis of June 1948," reprinted here from his book 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians, Morris empirically disproves the Israeli claim that it was Palestinian and Arab leaders who called upon Palestinians to flee during the War, thereby creating the seemingly insurmountable "refugee problem." In fact, the Arab Higher Committee and the governments of Arab states relentlessly tried to stem this exodus, which ran contrary to their political and strategic goals. However, Morris does not push the results of his own empirical research to their logical conclusions. Rather, he tries in his analysis to put forward a third alternative, so to speak, which is different from the Israeli claim of voluntary flight and the Palestinian narrative of forced expulsion.
He argues instead that "Jewish military operations indeed accounted for 70 per cent of the Arab exodus; but the depopulation of the villages in most cases was an incidental, if favourably regarded, side-effect of these operations, not their aim... The report's estimate of the proportion of villages depopulated by calculated, direct Jewish expulsion orders is none the less somewhat low. For the period up to 1 June 1948, something around 5 per cent seems closer to the mark than the 2 per cent cited. Even after adding to this the villagers 'nudged' into flight by deliberate military pressures and psychological assault, one is still left with only a small proportion of the exodus accounted for in this manner.... [F]or an understanding of the Palestinian exodus until 1 June, one must, according to IDF Intelligence, reach mainly for the vast middle ground between pre-planned, outright IDF expulsion and Arab-engineered, Machiavellian flight. There, amid the frightening, threatening boom of guns, the loss of confidence in Arab might, the flight of relatives and friends, the abandonment of nearby towns, and a general, vast fear of the uncharted future, one will find the bulk of the pre-June Palestinian refugees."
Thus Morris adamantly refuses to place moral and political responsibility for the tragedy of the refugees on the shoulders of the state of Israel and its institutions. This is a stance that has been rejected by several Palestinian historians, as well as by other "new historians" such as Ilan Pappé himself.
Nur Masalha's article, "A critique on Benny Morris," also takes issue with Morris's stance. Masalha demonstrates that Benny Morris's work itself traces the existence of a transfer policy in the thought and policy of David Ben-Gurion since the 1930s, a policy that did not have to be spelt out in an official blueprint. In fact, Masalha argues, Ben-Gurion's diaries and personal correspondence show that by 1937 he had clearly associated the idea of transfer with expulsion. In Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Morris himself documents Plan Dalet, formulated in March 1948 in anticipation of Arab military operations. The essence of this plan was, in Morris's words, "the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the prospective territory of the Jewish State." It thus "constituted a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders... and it gave commanders, post facto, a formal, persuasive covering note to explain their actions."
Masalha's most poignant critique of Morris is that he fails to place his findings in a wider theoretical framework. He has studied the 1948 War and exodus almost in isolation from Zionism. But the transfer of the indigenous Arab population -- voluntarily or forcefully -- figured in Zionist ideological discourse before the 1948 War, and this is enough to negate Morris's contention that it was the side effect of a war. Despite the impressive and crucial documentation that Morris offers in his numerous studies, as the critique by Nur Masalha demonstrates, there is still a wide gap between the orientations of Palestinian historians and their Israeli counterparts, "new" or otherwise.
In an inspiring article, Palestinian historian Beshara Doumani deconstructs both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist narratives, exposing the ideological formulations underlining them. By focusing on military and political history and the activities of a dominant elite, both these narratives have excluded the common people. Doumani thus calls for "the writing of Palestinians into history." Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine and empowering Palestinian historical actors shatter Zionist myths of a barren, underdeveloped Palestine before the advent of modernisation at the hands of Zionist settlers. By rewriting Palestinians into history, Doumani hopes to empower modern day Palestinians.
This theme is carried through in Butrus Abu-Manneh's article "The rise of the sanjak of Jerusalem in the late nineteenth century." Traditional Israeli historiography has argued that a distinctive Palestinian identity and nationalism developed in reaction to Zionism. They argue that "Palestine" did not exist even as an administrative entity prior to the British mandate. Abu-Manneh's research on the rise of Jerusalem as an independent sanjak in the late Ottoman period, however, shows the development of a proto-Palestinian identity separate from that of the Levant in general, the Bilad Al-Sham, and at once inspired by and reflected in administrative divisions prior to the advent of colonialism.
Zachary Lockman's article discusses the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from below, writing another category of hitherto marginalised subjects into history. By analysing relations between Palestinian and Israeli railway workers, which oscillated from conflict to cooperation, Lockman focuses on the interaction between the two communities as opposed to the approach taken by the dominant schools, which study such communities in isolation from one another. He promotes a relational approach to studying the history of Arabs and Jews in Palestine, one that focuses on their interaction as a key factor in shaping identities and practices.
Just as workers have often been ignored from traditional historiography, so too have peasants. The role of Palestinian peasants in the national liberation movement has often been downplayed or silenced outright. Ted Swedenburg's article on the role of the Palestinian peasantry in the 1936-1939 revolt reverses that. Swedenburg explains that the master narrative of the 1936 rebellion often defines peasants as "traditional, backward, fanatical or even terrorists." To counter that argument he has stressed the achievements and accomplishments of the peasantry, which resorted to various traditions of resistance against the hegemony of a ruling class as well as against the aggression of both British mandate authorities and Zionist organisations.
Though the collection of articles assembled in this reader is undoubtedly impressive, the reader is equally interesting for what it leaves out. The voice it gives to Palestinian history is primarily through Doumani and Abu-Manneh's accounts of Ottoman Palestine and Ted Swedenburg's analysis of the role of the peasantry in the 1936 revolt. The subsequent decades of Palestinian existence, their social and economic history under occupation especially since 1948, are conspicuously absent in this collection, which purportedly aims to give voice to the voiceless and space to the marginalised.
Nevertheless, the collection will remain compulsory reading for those interested in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict -- new, revisionist or otherwise. It also points to common intellectual orientations among the younger generations of Palestinian and Israeli academics, suggesting that perhaps in the future their respective analyses of the conflict and the Palestinian predicament might not necessarily remain mutually exclusive.
It is perhaps fitting that one should conclude this (re)view by quoting from Pappé's introduction, which clearly expresses his agenda and expectations, as well as those of the new Israeli historians in general.
"There will probably be, on both sides, a growing recognition of the other side's historical version and a more critical view of each side's own history... One can only hope that although peace does not seem to be coming soon to Israel and Palestine, these constructive orientations will continue none the less to develop and contribute to a better coexistence in the torn land of Palestine. ... A more common agenda on the past is in the making, and it is one which can create a common agenda for the future. A new narrative is being constructed as a bridge which connects conflicting versions as well as leading into a possibly better future."
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