FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
ASHKELON – “What should we do with the Arab population left in their homes?” Yigal Allon, Ytzhak Rabin and others among the young commanders of the newly formed Israeli army asked David Ben Gurion. It was in the midst of the battles for Lydda and Ramleh in July 1948. The Jewish forces were victorious, but around the hills of Jerusalem the Jordanian Legion resisted on the walls of the Old City and was reinforced from the heights of Jenin by the Iraqi Expeditionary Force threatened communications to Haifa. From the south, the Egyptians remained attested in the Negev.
The Arabs moved away
The presence of a group of hostile Arab populations on the strategically important road connecting Tel Aviv with Jerusalem could pose a danger. “Ben Gurion made a decisive hand gesture that said: Throw them out…” Rabin noted in his memoirs. Within hours, over 50,000 people, including the elderly and children, were “forcibly” forced to march some thirty kilometers in the heat to reach the hills of the West Bank. Until more than three decades ago, this was one of the best-known texts that explicitly spoke of a concrete plan to expel the Arab population during Israel’s War of Independence. It was written by a highly decorated soldier who had been at the head of the army, would have been prime minister twice and would have been assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist who rejected negotiations with Yasser Arafat in the name of dividing the country in exchange for peace. But the first publication in 1979 was kept quiet: In Israel, it was taboo for a long time to talk about the forced expulsion of Arabs. Official propaganda reported hasty escapes, widespread panic, entire villages persuaded by the leaders of the local Palestinian resistance and the Arab armies with the promise that “they would all return after victory.”
run away
It would have taken the phenomenon of the so-called “new historians” since the early 1980s – intellectuals like Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, Meron Benvenisti and many others – who, in some fundamental books, have gradually dismantled one of Israel’s original dogmas . Working mainly in local archives (Arab sources are generally closed), they showed that since the end of 1947 the project to limit the number of Arabs in the territories of the emerging Jewish state was growing. Today it is generally believed that over 700,000 Arabs were expelled from the territories of Israel. The operation was made easier, among other things, by the voluntary emigration of the middle and upper classes to Beirut, Damascus, Amman and Cairo in recent months. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, school teachers, landowners and much of the ruling body of the Palestinian people, as it had developed since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and under the British Mandate, and strengthened in its national identity by the struggle against Zionism, actually ran they left and preferred to seek refuge abroad. The fellahin, left to their own devices, had little hope of resisting. But there is more: the Arab armies that gathered under the hypocritical slogan of supporting the Palestinians had no coordination among themselves. In fact, they competed to occupy entire regions to the detriment of the “allies”. King Abdallah of Jordan had made secret agreements with Golda Meir, who visited him at his headquarters disguised as a Bedouin. So much so that in 1950 he annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A move contested by the Palestinians and paid for with his life: he was assassinated the following year by a Muslim Brotherhood jihadist linked to the Mufti of Jerusalem – Amin Al-Husseini, who had led the Palestinian resistance since the 1920s – during he prayed in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Holy City.
Historical allies
It was the United States that first de facto recognized Israel at the United Nations on May 14, 1948. But the Soviet Union recognized it de jure three days later. The new country focused primarily on welcoming those who had escaped Nazi fury. Any kind of help, wherever it came, was welcome. From 1945 until the founding of the state, 100,000 people had arrived, at least 70,000 survivors of the extermination camps who had to defy the prohibitions of the English mandate. However, a terrible reality emerged: almost all of Europe’s potential citizens had perished in the Holocaust. At that time it was decided to encourage the immigration of Jews from Arab countries. In the first four years of the state’s existence, the Ashkenazi leadership struggled to welcome the Sephardic masses, who made up more than half of the migrants. Strong social tensions arose, which were to further intensify.
– Ben Gurion reads the Declaration of Independence: It is May 14, 1948
At first it was not even clear what choice Israel would make in the context of the Cold War. For some time the Soviet leadership considered him an ally. Russian weapons, airlifted from Czechoslovakia, had contributed to the victory. Many Zionist leaders came from the provinces of the USSR, the kibbutz (which never reached 6 percent of the population but embodied collective values for several decades) was inspired by socialist economic models. In contrast, Americans were tied to the conservative Arab monarchies and Washington did not show much enthusiasm for a long time. It was only during the Korean War that Ben Gurion clearly decided to remain in the western camp.
Nightmares and conflicts
Then the two founding myths of the Jewish state and the Palestinian resistance were born: the Shoah, the annihilation; and the Nakba, the catastrophe of expulsion from one’s own country. Israel was the state created to defend all Jews. The nightmare of the Shoah became an excellent motivation to legitimize one’s own muscular defense. A concept that was forcefully repeated in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. At that time, the philosopher Hannah Arendt denounced the danger of political instrumentalization of the Jewish tragedy. “There was no enemy Arab leader who was not compared to Hitler,” Tom Segev often claims. Hence the Israeli concept of war “a breirà”, with no alternative, which must be waged and won at all costs and at any cost to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust.
– June 1956: Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser triumphs in the crowd after the withdrawal of British soldiers from the headquarters in Port Said. The Channel of Discord
Since then, for example, the 1956 war has been an example of “Breirà”, i.e. a voluntary decision. At that time, Israel decided to ally with France and England against the Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. A colonial conflict over control of the Suez Canal that ended in a complete flop and resulted in Washington intervening to force Israel to give up the newly captured Sinai and Gaza. However, local historians still argue about whether the Six-Day War was inevitable, i.e. existential like that of 1948, or whether it was a “Breirà” that could have been avoided. Nasser, by this point the charismatic leader of decolonization and Arab pan-socialism, had made Egypt a bridgehead for Soviet influence in the Middle East and the fight against Israel. A prisoner of his rhetoric, he closed Suez to the Israelis and blocked access to Eilat from the Red Sea. It was the casus belli: At dawn on June 5, 1967, the Israelis unexpectedly attacked the Egyptian air force, destroyed it, and then attacked Syria. They called on King Hussein of Jordan not to intervene. He responded by bombing West Jerusalem. Six days later, Israel’s victory had completely revolutionized the Middle East.
The article published here is the second installment in a series of articles reconstructing the history of the State of Israel and the wars that have shaped its history from independence to the present day. The first episode can be read here.