Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Benny Morris is Professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel, and is the author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999.

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Making Israel

The University of Michigan Press

Contents

Abbreviations...........................................................................................................................................................viiHebrew Journal Titles Translated........................................................................................................................................ixBenny Morris Introduction..............................................................................................................................................1Benny Morris The New Historiography Israel Confronts Its Past.........................................................................................................11Mordechai Bar-On Remembering 1948 Personal Recollections, Collective Memory, and the Search for "What Really Happened"................................................29Yoav Gelber The History of Zionist Historiography From Apologetics to Denial..........................................................................................47Anita Shapira Hirbet Hizah Between Remembering and Forgetting.........................................................................................................81Avi Shlaim The Debate about 1948.......................................................................................................................................124Yossi Ben-Artzi The Contribution of Historical Geography to the Historiography of the Establishment of Israel..........................................................147Moshe Lissak "Critical" and "Establishment" Sociology in Israel's Academic Community Ideological Clashes or Academic Discourse?......................................178Uri Ram The Future of the Past in Israel A Sociology of Knowledge Approach............................................................................................202Yaron Tsur Israeli Historiography and the Ethnic Problem...............................................................................................................231Yechiam Weitz Dialectical versus Unequivocal Israeli Historiography's Treatment of the Yishuv and Zionist Movement Attitudes toward the Holocaust.....................278Mustafa Kabha A Palestinian Look at the New Historians and Post-Zionism in Israel......................................................................................299Bibliography............................................................................................................................................................319Contributors............................................................................................................................................................355Index...................................................................................................................................................................357

Chapter One

The New Historiography Israel Confronts Its Past

On 11 July 1948, the Yiftah Brigade's Third Battalion, as part of what was called Operation Dani, occupied the center of the Arab town of Lydda There was no formal surrender, but the night passed quietly. Just before noon the following day, two or three armored cars belonging to the Arab Legion, the British-led and -trained Jordanian army, drove into town. A firefight ensued. And the scout cars withdrew. But a number of armed townspeople, perhaps believing that the shooting heralded a major Arab counterattack, began sniping from windows and rooftops at their Israeli occupiers. The Third Battalion-about four hundred nervous Israeli soldiers in the middle of an Arab town of tens of thousands-fiercely put down what various chroniclers subsequently called a "rebellion" by firing in the streets, into houses, and at a concentration of prisoners of war (POWs) in a mosque. Israeli military records refer to "about 250" Arabs killed in the town that afternoon. By contrast, Israeli casualties in both the firefights with the scout cars and the suppression of the sniping were between 2 and 4 dead (the records vary) and 12 wounded. Israeli historians called the affair a rebellion in order to justify the subsequent slaughter; Arab chroniclers, such as Arif al-Arif, did likewise in order to highlight Palestinian resolve and resistance in face of Zionist encroachment.

Operation Dani took place roughly midway through the first Arab-Israeli War-the War of Independence in official Israeli parlance. The Arab states' invasion of the fledgling state on 15 May had been halted weeks before; the newly organized and freshly equipped Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were on the offensive on all fronts-as was to remain true for the remainder of the war.

On 12 July, before the shooting in Lydda had completely died down, Lt. Col. Yitzhak Rabin, the operation's officer of Operation Dani, issued the following order: "1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed toward Beit Nabala. Yiftah [Brigade headquarters (HQ)] must determine the method and inform [Operation] Dani HQ and Eighth Brigade HQ. 2. Implement immediately." A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighboring Arab town of Ramle.

On 12 and 13 July, the Yiftah and Kiryati brigades carried out their orders, expelling the fifty to sixty thousand inhabitants of the two towns, which lie about ten miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Throughout the war, the two towns had interdicted Jewish traffic on the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, and the Yishuv's leaders regarded Lydda and Ramle as a perpetual threat to Tel Aviv itself. About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: "Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants ['oskim begeirush hatoshavim]." Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward toward the Arab Legion lines, and many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads (and the legion's routes of advance westward), the tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding possessions along the way. Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammad Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march of dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness at the time described the spoor. The refugee column "to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women and children." Many of the refugees came to rest near Ramallah and set up tent encampments (which later became refugee camps supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees [UNRWA] and hot beds of Palestinian militancy).

Israeli historians in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were less than honest in their treatment of the Lydda-Ramle episode. The IDF's official Toldot Mu'hemet Hakomemiyut (History of the War of Independence), written by members of the General Staff/History Branch and published in 1959, stated: "The Arabs [of Lydda], who had violated the terms of the surrender and feared [Israeli] retribution, were happy at the possibility given them of evacuating the town and proceeding eastwards, to Legion territory: Lydda emptied of its Arab inhabitants.'

Two years later, the former head of the IDF History Branch, Lt. Col. Netanel Lorch, wrote in The Edge of the Sword, his history of the war, that "the residents, who had violated surrender terms and feared...