Palestinian history is being erased — we must reclaim it
https://arab.news/nyv48
An investigative report by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on the 1948 massacre of Palestinians is a must-read, particularly for those who consider themselves Zionist or who, for whatever reason, support Israel.
“In the village of Al-Dawayima … troops of the 8th Brigade massacred about 100 people,” the newspaper reported, though the number of Palestinian victims later grew to 120. One of the soldiers who witnessed the horrific event testified before a government committee in November 1948: “There was no battle and no resistance. The first conquerors killed 80 to 100 Arab men, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks. There wasn’t a house without people killed in it.”
The Haaretz report of nearly 5,000 words is filled with painful details, including stories of elderly Palestinians who were unable to flee the invasion and ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine (1947-48), and were lined up against various walls and massacred; of an older woman who was shot four times at point-blank range; of other elders crammed inside a home and shelled by a tank; and of many Palestinian women raped.
Quite often, historians refer to the way Palestine was ethnically cleansed of its native inhabitants by making this typical assertion regarding Palestinian refugees: “Those who fled or were expelled from their homes.” The use of the word “fled” has been exploited by supporters of Israel, who claim that Palestinians left of their own accord.
It was Haaretz that, in May 2013, reported on how Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, fabricated that very history in order to protect Israel’s image. Document number GL-18/17028, which was found in the Israeli military archive, shows how the story of the fleeing Palestinians — supposedly at the behest of Arab governments — was invented by the Israelis.
Sadly, as the newspaper’s latest revelations prove, Palestinians who chose to stay, due to disability, age or illness, were not spared and were massacred in the most horrifying way imaginable.
But something else struck me about the report: The constant emphasis by delusional Israeli leaders, then, that those who carried out the numerous grisly murders were but a few and that they hardly represented the conduct of an entire army. Note that the “army” referred to here are Zionist militias, some of which operated under the title of “gang.”
Moreover, much emphasis was attached to the concept of “morality,” for example, “Israel’s moral foundations,” which, according to those early “ethical Zionists,” were jeopardized by the misconduct of a few soldiers.
“In my opinion, all our moral foundations have been undermined and we need to look for ways to curb these instincts,” Haim-Mosh Shapira, then-minister of immigration and health, was reported by Haaretz as saying during a meeting of the government committee.
It is time that those who have paid far more attention to the Israeli narrative abandon such illusions and listen to Palestinian voices, because the truth of the victim is a wholly different story from that of the aggressor.
Ramzy Baroud
Shapira, a voice of reason and ethics in Israel at the time, was not questioning Israel’s right to be established on the ruins of colonized — and eventually destroyed — Palestine. Nor was he questioning the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians or the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands during the Nakba. Instead, he was protesting the excess violence that followed the Nakba, when the future of Israel and the destruction of Palestine had been assured.
This branch of “humanistic” Zionism, that of selective and self-serving morality, still exists today. As odd as that may seem, the editorial line of Haaretz itself is the perfect manifestation of this supposed Zionist dichotomy.
Needless to say, few Israelis, if any, have been held accountable for the crimes of the past. More than 70 years later, Palestinian victims still cry out for a justice that continues to be deferred.
One might find this conclusion a bit harsh. Zionist or not, one may protest that, at least, Haaretz has exposed these massacres and the culpability of the Israeli leadership. Such assumptions are highly misleading, however.
Generations of Palestinians, along with many Palestinian historians — and even some Israelis — have known of most of these massacres. In its report, Haaretz refers to “previously unknown massacres,” including Reineh, Meron (Mirun) and Al-Burj. The assumption is that these massacres were “unknown” — read unacknowledged by the Israelis themselves. Since Haaretz’s editorial line is driven by Israel’s own misconstrued historical narrative, the killings and destruction of these villages simply never happened — until an Israeli researcher acknowledged their existence.
Walid Khalidi, one of Palestine’s leading historians, has been aware, along with many others, of these massacres for decades. In his seminal book “All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948,” he refers to Al-Burj, writing that its only claim to existence now is “one crumbled house on the hilltop.”
In reference to Meron (Mirun), the historian discusses what remains of the site: “While the Arab section of the village was demolished, several rooms and stone walls still stand. One of the walls has a rectangular door-like opening and another has an arched entrance.”
This is not the first time an Israeli admission of guilt, though always conditional, has validated Palestinian victimization. In other words, every Palestinian claim of Israeli misconduct, though it may be verified or even filmed on camera, remains in question until an Israeli newspaper, politician or historian acknowledges its validity.
Our insistence on the centrality of the Palestinian narrative becomes more urgent than ever, because marginalizing Palestinian history is a form of denial of that history altogether — the denial of the bloody past and the equally violent present. From a Palestinian point of view, the fate of Al-Burj is no different from that of Jenin, that of Mirun no different from that of Beit Hanoun, and that of Deir Yassin no different from that of Rafah — in fact, the whole of Gaza.
Reclaiming history is not an intellectual exercise but a necessity, with intellectual, ethical, political and legal repercussions. Surely, Palestinians do not need to rewrite their own history; it is already written. It is time that those who have paid far more attention to the Israeli narrative abandon such illusions and listen to Palestinian voices, because the truth of the victim is a wholly different story from that of the aggressor.
- Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books, and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. Twitter: @RamzyBaroud