Please get facts right about Israel, the Arabs and the contested land
JENNIFER Harris (“Getting the facts right about Israel and the Arabs,” Cape Times Letters, January 4), a mediation specialist, needs to do a lot more homework on the facts surrounding the 1948 Naqba.
She claims that Israel was established where 8.6 percent of land was Jewishowned, 3.3 percent Israeli Arab-owned, 16.9 absentee Arab owners (who got out of the way while invading Arab armies intended to destroy Israel) and 71.2 percent by the mandatory power, which was allocated to Israel as legal heir. She concludes “the contention that the bulk of the land had belonged to Arabs has no foundation in reality”.
The magisterial work, All that Remains – the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, edited by Walid Khalidi, (1992) (the Institute for Palestine Studies, the Galilee Centre for Social Research and Birzeit University) referred to the Palestine Index Gazetteer and Village Statistics 1945: a Classification of Land and Area Ownership in Palestine (Palestine Government) to demonstrate that Palestinians owned between 42 and 98 percent of land – in nine of 16 districts this was more than 75 percent, in six between 42 and 75 percent and in one (Beersheba) 15 percent.
Zionists owned between 3 and 39 percent – in eight districts between less than 1 percent and 5 percent, and between 14 percent and 39 percent in the remainder.
The mandatory government ownership varied between 1 and 23 percent in 15 districts – in Beersheba it owned 85 percent of the land. Ms Harris is perpetuating a Zionist myth that the “people without a land returned to the land without a people”, and parading this as truth.
All that Remains chronicles the occupation and depopulation by Palmach (later IDF) brigades of 418 Palestinian villages located within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, based partly on IDF archival sources, partly on eye witness accounts, whereby co-ordinated moves by the brigades through a swathe of villages per region, resulted in attacks on villages (which were often resisted), the expulsion of most of the inhabitants and the dynamiting of their homes shortly thereafter.
IDF documents describe these operations in the north (near Galilee) as “cleansing” of the countryside – presumably to Judaise these areas.
There are also narratives of those who fled before this lot could befall them, but besides Husseini’s pro-Nazi and antisemitic calls there is no evidence of widespread calls from neighbouring Arab states for the people to flee – if anything, there were calls to stay and although Arab Liberation Army irregulars (largely volunteers) entered Palestine to defend the villages they were no match for the Zionist forces.
As Israeli historian Illan Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine), David Gilmour ( Dispossessed) and Benny Morris ( 1948) have demonstrated there had already been 250 000 to 300 000 expelled in early 1948 before the declaration of the State (May). Morris, himself a Zionist, in a frank interview with Haaretz (2004), confirmed the violence inherent in the expulsion of the refugees and justified this as historically necessary in the conflict between civilised Israelis and “barbarous” Palestinians. Pappe has referred to detailed evidence in Ben Gurion’s diaries (in Hebrew) which show him regarding the Palestinian peasants, small farmers and villagers as the real enemy of the Zionist project.
Churchill famously said: “the truth is incontrovertible; malice may malign it, ignorance undermine it, but in the end there it is.”In the end, 750 000 Palestinians lost their homes, their livelihood, and largely their identities, although they forged a new identity through their national liberation struggle against Zionist colonisation.
Finding a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis, and one which can be pursued through non-violent means, will perforce require negotiation and possibly mediation – if Ms Harris would like to contribute to that process she would make a good start by getting her facts right.
Dr Paul Hendler
Stellenbosch