The man who saved Nazareth
Mitch Potter unwraps the little-known story of how a well-heeled Toronto warrior rejected orders in 1948 and shielded the childhood home of Jesus
The oldest Canadians among us may still know his name. And something of the astonishing campaigns lived seven decades ago by the unlikeliest of soldiers, a gentle giant of a man called Ben Dunkelman.
They may know about his exploits as an infantry leader with Toronto’s Queen’s Own Rifles in the Second World War — a grinding, 330-day slog of ground battles from D-Day in Normandy all the way to the shores of the Baltic, shrinking Hitler’s world.
They may know that before the Queen’s Own embraced him, Dunkelman had already been shunned by the Royal Canadian Navy simply because he was Jewish.
They may even know Dunkelman could have avoided the fighting altogether thanks to his father, David, whose Tip Top Tailors empire was inundated with orders for military uniforms at the onset of war. The family firm needed him. He volunteered to fight anyway.
Others will know of Dunkelman’s second war — how the battle-hardened Toronto soldier smuggled himself on a fake passport into besieged Jerusalem in1948, ultimately playing a critical military role in the founding of Israel. Zionism was the lifelong passion of his mother, Rose, and she lived to see her son help deliver statehood.
There remains, however, one epic but little-known part of the Dunkelman story that may well be his greatest glory: how he found the courage to say no, 67 years ago, to orders from his Israeli superiors at the very height of the1948 war, effectively saving the entire Arab city of Nazareth from unlawful expulsion.
Nazareth is today the largest Arab city within Israel proper because Dunkelman, as commander of Israel’s 7th Brigade, refused verbal orders to uproot a civilian population, whose surrender he secured on the promise that they could stay.
Dunkelman, who died in1997, seldom told of his warrior past, save for his 1976 memoir, Dual Allegiance. Excerpted in the pages of the Toronto Star upon its release, the book made no mention of the Nazareth episode.
But Dunkelman’s ghostwriter, the nowdeceased Israeli journalist Peretz Kidron, later produced a previously unpublished page that Dunkelman edited out of his manuscript, in which the Toronto native describes how he was “shocked and horrified” at the order to depopulate Nazareth, telling his commanding officer, Haim Laskov, “I would do nothing of the sort.”
Dunkelman was relieved of command in Nazareth a day after refusing the order. But he ceded control only after extracting his replacement’s “word of honour” that no harm would befall the population. “It seems that my disobedience did have some effect,” Dunkelman writes in Kidron’s lost page.
“It seems to have given the high command time for second thoughts, which led
them to the conclusion that it would indeed be wrong to expel. There was never any more talk of the evacuation plan, and the city’s Arab citizens have lived there ever since.”
Kidron leaked the story to the New York Times — along with an explosive account of how Dunkelman’s brother-in-arms Yitzhak Rabin carried out similar orders, dislodging the Arab civilians from the towns of Lod and Ramle within days of the Canadian soldier’s stand in Nazareth. The Times ran with the juicier Rabin exposé in October 1979, ignoring the Dunkelman story altogether.
Dunkelman ultimately took the reasons for omitting the Nazareth story to his grave. But in interviews with his widow, Yael, the Star was able both to confirm Dunkelman’s stand in Nazareth and to get a better sense of his motivations.
“Ben was a loving person. He was a humanitarian — that was the essence of it,” Yael, now 89, told the Star at her home in midtown Toronto. “The idea of forcing civilians from their homes was never some- thing he would ever be able to do.”
Dunkelman’s son Jonathan, a Toronto artist and one of six Dunkelman siblings, was unaware of the Nazareth story.
“He never talked about it — ever. Or anything else to do with the wars. He was just such a very gentle, soft-spoken man,” said Jonathan. “I think the term ‘reluctant soldier’ fits best. We knew he had been through terrible battles. But he was able somehow to lock it away.”
Douglas Gibson, who edited Dunkelman’s memoir for Macmillan of Canada, told the Star: “I don’t think I ever knew the Nazareth story. Or if I did, it’s lost in the mists of time, I’m afraid.
“But I will say, that fits precisely with his moral character, and it just shows again that Ben’s entire story is huge, even if it is largely hidden today.
“What he did was bring his hard-earned Canadian military professionalism to help organize a chaotic fighting force and help set down the rules of engagement. And that included saying, ‘No, we will not expel civilians.’
“My lasting memory is of a big, gentle, soft-spoken man. I remember how amazed I was when I read the first draft. I wanted confirmation, so I asked Ben, ‘Is there anyone in Israel who could write a foreword?’ He answered so softly, ‘Would Rabin do?’ . . . I almost fell out of my chair.” Reshaping Israel’s narrative For all that he achieved during a decade at war on two continents, Dunkelman’s stand against the depopulation of civilians of Nazareth is arguably his greater glory.
He won no medals for refusing to molest civilians, nor any credit from his Israeli superiors. The story of saving Nazareth remains something of a footnote, if that, in most chapters dedicated to the larger Dunkelman story.
Transpose that morality to the modern era and imagine how the U.S. military interrogations at Abu Ghraib might have played out with a Dunkelman in command.
But that rare courage raises other questions. If Dunkelman received verbal orders to expel a city, what orders were other
“What he did was bring his hard-earned Canadian military professionalism to help organize a chaotic fighting force and help set down the rules of engagement. And that included saying, ‘No, we will not expel civilians.’ ” DOUGLAS GIBSON EDITOR OF DUNKELMAN’S MEMOIR
Israel commanders under during the 1948 war? One of Israel’s early foundational narratives — the notion that the Arabs of Palestine became refugees of their own volition, fleeing, rather than being forced out, cracks under the saga of Dunkelman in Nazareth.
Small wonder, then, that Dunkelman left the story out of his 1976 memoir.
A later generation of Israeli historians emerged in the 1990s, willing for the first time to chip away at the early narratives. And they continue to do so. As recently as June, veteran Israeli activist Uri Avnery — a soldier in 1948, a dedicated peacenik ever since — invoked the memory of Dunkelman in an article emphasizing the rarity of such a stand, as seen through the lens of 1948.
Only a few years earlier, Avnery noted, the world saw “the mass expulsion of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states, which was accepted as natural.” There was no shortage of atrocities in 1948. On both sides.
But not in Nazareth.