The War for Palestine : Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge Middle East Studies)

Rating:
Summary: Not very good
Review: I recommend "War and Remembrance" by Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath in the summer 2002 issue of Azure on the subject of this book. The revisionist historians in it have attempted to tell "new" history of Israel and consider the entire previous historical record to be propaganda for the Zionist cause. In this book, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said consider Jewish conduct in the 1947 and 1948, how the Jewish people defeated seven Arab armies, if the Jewish people were outnumbered and if they intended to expel the Arabs.

They dismiss all pre-revisionist Israeli history as a "quest for legitimacy," not honest accounting. That's pretty wild, because as Porath says Israeli universities and professors have supported views like these "for some time now" and have been honest about Israeli history. Yigael Alon and Israel Galili wrote the Book of the Palmah that gave Walid Khalidi material to argue in 1959 that the Dalet Plan was "the master plan of the Zionists" for wholesale expulsion of Palestinians and the 1973 History of the Hagana included the Dalet Plan's whole text.

Porath says the charge that Israel carried out a deliberate and systematic expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs is not "remotely substantiated by the extensive research that has been carried out in the last few decades."

They take material very selectively from the fringes of Israeli archives. Based on that, Porath says anyone could "make outrageously false claims"-- that Israel's victory resulted from "an imperialist conspiracy or an overwhelming advantage in manpower and arms." He says that is what these editors do, and I believe him, since he knows the Israeli record as well as any historian alive.

The book says the Arabs failed because they had no unified command, allying all the Arab forces. They were driven apart by intense disputes between their nations and the Arab regimes were afraid to send large forces to the front. That's not news. As Porath points out, it has been in traditional histories by people like Nathaniel Lorch and Meir Pa'il for a long time.

A chronology on the book's first few pages lists November 30, 1947 as "outbreak of civil war in Palestine." Porath says it would be more proper to call the 'civil war' "an assault upon the Jewish civilian population undertaken by the Palestinian Arabs" after they rejected the UN Partition Plan passed and accepted by the Jewish people the day before.

This book wants readers to think that 100 Arabs killed at Deir Yassin was the only massacre. It wasn't. Porath mentions other massacres too--the December 30, 1947 murder of about 50 Jewish Haifa refinery workers by their Arab co-workers and the April 13, 1948 massacre of more than 80 Jewish doctors, nurses and Hebrew University workers on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem.

Rashid Khalidi's essay on Palestinian Arab failure in 1948 covers Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, not very politely. Here's another oversight. Husseini was, in Porath's words, "an ardent and influential supporter of the Nazis and the Holocaust." A day after Hitler rose to power, Husseini gave Jerusalem's German Consul "his blessings in the name of 'three hundred million Muslims'," and urged the Nazis to take the whole world. He spent "much of the war" with the SS and Heinrich Himmler and in 1943 and 1944 talked Himmler out of trading Jewish lives for millions of dollars and military hardware. The Jews were murdered and at Husseini's request, the Nazis promised genocide for the Jews of Palestine, too.

Porath's review points out another of Khalidi's oversights. The Jewish defenders of the Etzion Bloc who surrendered to the Arab Legion of the Kingdom of Transjordan were treated under formal rules of war. But nearly all the 131 people who surrendered to Palestinian Arabs were murdered. Only two survived.

At the same time, Jordanian forces in Jerusalem removed from the city all the Jewish residents, numbering about 100,000. Porath wonders if anyone could "seriously examine the war of 1948" without noticing that a significant Arab minority stayed in the part of Palestine that became Israel, while those parts of the country that fell under the Jordanian or Egyptian rule "became Judenrein."

In another essay, Avi Shlaim considers the number of fighters on each side. Porath calls it "a remarkable study in scholarly distortion." By taxing itself to the limit, Palestine's Jewish community managed to gather 35,000 soldiers by mid-1948, a number that reached 95,000 by early 1949. That compared to 25,000 Arab fighters. Shlaim claims Jewish fighters outnumbered Arabs at every stage of the war. Porath says this is not true. "Shlaim himself admits that the Arab states sent only a small portion of their armies" to Palestine and could have sent far more had they wished.

Besides that, Porath tells us that Shlaim "ignores the huge difference in manpower reserves available to each side." By early 1949, Israel had at most 750,000 Jewish residents, compared to 50 million in the 7 Arab states in the war. Israel's Jewish people had taxed themselves to the maximum. The war had ground their small economy and "vital industries" to a halt. But "the Arab states, by comparison could have fought the war indefinitely without seriously affecting their citizens' way of life."

Finally Columbia University professor Edward Said offers a personal account of his family's departure from the Talbieh neighborhood of Jerusalem. Porath says this is most useful in its unintended effect. Traditional Israeli histories always claimed that urban Palestinians left their homes voluntarily as they wearied of the war. Khalil al-Sakakini provides one of the best such accounts of his family's departure from Katamon in Jerusalem, but there are many others in the Israeli and British sources of the time. Porath says that Said's account "matches the testimonies of Sakakini and many others like him, and serves therefore to confirm further the traditional account."

I didn't like this book at all. But if I had any doubts, Yohoshua Porath sealed it for me.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting material plodding book
Review: Israel has won most of the propaganda battles over the story of its formation and its version of history has come to dominate current thinking. In recent years ironically a group of Israeli historians known to the world as the Revisionists have been exploring this history and suggesting that previous histories are inaccurate self-serving myths.

This book is an attempt to look at the war that gave rise to the creation of Israel as a state. The book is a collection of articles and with the exception of one article written by Benny Morris is rather leaden and academic never the less it raises some interesting issues. The last chapter by Edward Said moves away from academic objectivity and is a bit of pro-Palestinian propoganda but the other articles are interesting.

The basic foundation myth of Israel is that following the United Nations passing a motion supporting a partition plan, hostile Arab states invaded the area and were defeated by a heroic outnumbered Israeli army. Local Arabs reacting to calls from the invading powers left the area to become refugees. Their plight was self inflicted their claims to have their property returned were thus somehow illegitimate or irrelevant.

What the book shows is that most Arab states were reluctant to intervene and were not in a position to do so effectively. What in fact happened was that two wars occurred. The first prior to May 1948 saw the Haganah crush the local Arab forces. This led to strong pressure for the surrounding Arab states to intervene. However the surrounding states for their own reasons were reluctant to do so. Syria was more concerned about possible aggression from Jordan. Jordan had been busy negotiating a secret deal with Israel to occupy those parts of Palestine which were designated Arab. The Egyptians did not have the military capacity to launch a military action and it only occurred when Farouk overruled objections of his military commanders. At all times the Haganah had an advantage in numbers and was soon able to gain a decisive advantage in heavy weapons.

Benny Morris again shows that the flight of the Palestinians was not due to mythical broadcasts and his new essay is a significant departure from his earlier work suggesting that violence played a greater role than he previously suggested.

The book also makes it clear how the war altered the history of most of the Arab states. The failure of the Arab armies destroyed the legitimacy of those regimes who took power after de-colonisation. This in turn led to military coups in most Arab countries and started a tradition by which the military routinely became involved in politics. It also distorted the economy of these states as arming for further wars with Israel became a significant priority.

An interesting if book although it is rather dry and distinctly non riverting.

Rating:
Summary: Worthless
Review: It has been a while since 1948, when five Arab nations launched an attack on Israel. The purpose of the attack was not to protect anyone. It was to obliterate human rights of Jews in the region. In effect, the Arabs were fighting for pride while the Jews were fighting for their lives. Not surprisingly, the Jews fought harder. And the Jews won.

Now some scholars have decided that the time has come to deny all this and rewrite this history, claiming not only that the Jews were arrogant aggressors, but that most Jews conspired to tell the same lies about it. It certainly serves no purpose to blame the victims of the Arab invasion in such a manner. If the cause the authors are fighting for loses, what will they have accomplished? If their cause wins, they will have struck a very counterproductive blow against scholarship, justice, and human rights.

Rating:
Summary: More Than a Glimps of Historical Truths
Review: The historian's task is continually to reappraise existing adn new
evidence, rather than to tranmit a set of already "fixed"
facts. For some reason, when this process is applied to the
"wrong" subjects it is labelled
"revisionism". Anyway, this book is a rather tame
reevaluation of various Zionist myths - such as the idea that the
Palestinian Arabs left of their own accord rather than being forced
out by Zionist colonisers. It is indeed welcome to see such facts
revealed, although they have been known and accepted in Israel for
some time.

Rating:
Summary: More Than a Glimps of Historical Truths
Review: This book has helped me discover the source of the tragedy that Israel is living in. I encourage Jews, Christians, Muslims and others interested in peace to learn about the history of this great land from alternative sources as a prequisite to finding a way to live together.