In Image and Reality, Norman Finkelstein...the son of Nazi concentration-camp survivors, makes a significant contribution to the literature of the so-called New Historians. These mostly Israeli...have been engaged for two decades in the controversial task of reevaluating the official and heretofore largely unchallenged version of the history of Israel.No, there's people more motivated than Morris attempting to set the record straight.The findings of the New Historians have largely been made possible by the release of many documents from the archives of the Israeli government beginning in the late 1970s. The weight of the official version of a heroic and militarily precarious Israel, cruelly attacked by powerful Arabs, was so pervasive that even liberal Jewish participants in the events of 1948 were convinced of its validity. Israeli historian Simha Flapan, an active figure in Labor party politics in 1948, explained that despite his first-hand knowledge of contemporary events, he had no idea until much later that so much of what he believed was merely propaganda.
Finkelstein writes that in the spring of 1982 he was drawn into research on the topic of...In the wake of the Lebanon war, he became intrigued with the question of whether a Jewish state could also be democratic...The thesis that emerged from Finkelstein's dissertation, and which is synthesized in the first chapter of his book, is "that Zionism is a kind of Romantic nationalism fundamentally at odds with liberal values."
Finkelstein's point is that the aim of Zionism has always been to create a Jewish state by establishing a Jewish majority in Palestine irrespective of the rights of the indigenous Arabs ( p. 99). But at the beginning of the twentieth century, the sizable Arab population already living there made a Jewish majority seem impossible to achieve. For example, in 1917,...the Arab population of 600,000 outnumbered the Jews by more than 10 to 1.
In the next 30 years, a dramatic change in the demographic balance took place due to massive Jewish immigration, especially during the Hitler years and World War II and after. Even so, by the end of 1947, the Jewish population, which had reached 600,000, still represented only a third of the population of Palestine, as the Arab population had grown to about 1.2 million. Nevertheless, the Jewish community was much more unified, purposeful and effective...
How did it happen that about 750,000 Arabs left their homes to become refugees?... Not only does debate still rage over the refugee issue in such unsurprising places as the right-wing Zionist community, but Finkelstein also finds Zionist apologetics in more mainstream voices.
Finkelstein devotes a chapter to arguing that Benny Morris, the author of the authoritative The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge University Press, 1987), ultimately comes down on the side of Zionist apologetics on the crucial issue of responsibility for driving out the Palestinians....On the less reputable side of the spectrum, Finkelstein includes a chapter detailing his exposé of Joan Peters, author of the immensely popular From Time Immemorial (Harper and Row, 1984). According to Finkelstein, her book implies that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians simultaneously forged their genealogies in order to deny Jewish legitimacy to the contested land.
...For example, Finkelstein quotes from Anita Shapira's Land and Power (one of the "more substantial contributions on the Israel-Palestine conflict) and finds there the "remarkable ... acknowledgment ...that labor Zionism and the dissident right-wing Zionist organizations were in basic accord as far as the deployment of physical force against the Arabs was concerned." According to Shapira, Stalinist Russia was the inspiration for the brand of socialism embraced by the Yishuv... "Effectively this meant that for them ‘a historical mission liberates its bearers from the restrictions of simple morality in the name of higher justice' . . . .
Terror was thus explicitly condoned as a legitimate ‘means of struggle.' The highly respected kibbutz leader Yitzak Tabenkin was fond of quoting that favorite Stalinist stand-by, ‘when trees are felled, the chips will fly'" ( p. 113). ...Nor should it be surprising that liberal elements of Zionism joined in the hard line against the Arabs. The two peoples – Jew and Arab – have been contending for more than a century over a tiny land with limited resources. As in many other such struggles, when an opportunity arises for the stronger side to take decisive action, there is overwhelming pressure to do so. Finkelstein's message is that Zionism is no different from any other conquering regime.
Finkelstein compares Zionism to such settler movements as the British in North America, the Dutch in South Africa, and the Nazis in Eastern Europe. He makes clear that "to compare phenomena is not to equate them." However, he insists that the similarities he indicates are "significant" and "disquieting" (Chap. 4, p. 88).
...After the establishment of the state, "Zionist literature systematically, and with considerable effect, rewrote the history of Palestine – in particular, by writing the Arabs . . . out." Thus David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv's leader and the legendary first prime minister of Israel, wrote in his Personal History that "Palestine on the eve of Zionist colonization [was] ‘in a virtual state of anarchy . . . primitive, neglected and derelict.' Jewish settlements ‘revitalize the ‘Land of Israel' as they are built on ‘desolate tracts, on swamps and sands, on deserted and barren hillsides'" (p. 96). The Nazis also made use of the Wilderness myth. Hitler "depicted Eastern Europe as a virgin land or wilderness: ‘thinly settled,' ‘desert,' ‘desolate,' ‘wide spaces' . . . "(p. 92).
Tilting At Benny Morris
...Finkelstein uses Morris's invaluable data to demonstrate that the Israeli historian's repeated attempts at mitigating Israeli responsibility for the Palestinian exodus cannot be supported by the documentary record. Finkelstein objects to Morris's exculpatory formulation, that the Palestinian refugees were "born of war, not design." Instead, Finkelstein argues, the expulsions were the result of a long-standing Zionist desire to create a Jewish majority in Palestine and that when war came, organized planning to remove the Arabs was well developed.
One of Morris's major assertions is that the "main wave of the Arab exodus, encompassing 200,000-300,000 refugees, was not the result of a general, predetermined Yishuv policy... Finkelstein ...argues that Morris "obscures the fact that Israel's statehood declaration was actually the watershed date." Before that date the Zionist leadership was especially sensitive to international opinion partly because of threats, mainly from the United States, to rescind the U.N. Partition Resolution. After May 15, restraints on the Israelis were loosened by the Arab invasion. This allowed the Zionists to "pursue with virtual impunity a policy . . . openly and relentlessly bent on expulsion. At least as many and probably more Arabs fled after Israel's statehood declaration as before" ( p. 61-62; emphasis in original). ...After the U.N. Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, fighting immediately broke out in Palestine between the two sides. The stronger Jewish forces were so successful that virtually all the Arabs residents were forced to flee from such towns as Haifa, Safad, West Jerusalem and elsewhere before May 15. The hundreds of thousands of Arabs who became refugees created pressure for intervention in the Arab street on reluctant Arab governments, well aware that they were unprepared for war against Israel. The Arab "invasion" never threatened Israel's existence...Rather the Arab forces merely managed to put something of a brake on Israeli territorial conquests in areas that were designated to be in the proposed Arab state or in proposed international territory....
In his discussion of Abba Eban, Finkelstein makes clear that he cannot fault the Israeli diplomat for his spirited defense of Israeli policy, even if Israeli justifications do not coincide with the documentary record. Eban's job, Finkelstein concedes, was to defend Israel's interests.
Rather the author faults the "intellectual culture" that uncritically accepts Israeli justifications no matter the demands of simple justice and the human-rights implications for Israel's adversaries.
Similarly, in the epilogue to his chapter on the Joan Peters book, Finkelstein records how difficult it was, especially in this country in the mid-eighties, to get a hearing on his and others' exposure of Peters's "colossal and multifaceted hoax," even though her book went through eight cloth printings and received hundreds of positive notices by 1984 ( pp. 45ff.). One of Finkelstein's themes is the power of the "language of force," the rule that the stronger side dominates the political landscape. His book provides a welcome corrective to the power of the image over the reality when those who prefer to believe in the image control the agenda.
[Image]
May 11, 1998[Image]by Andrea Levin
Israel's 50th, the New Historians and NPR
Israel's 50th anniversary with its outpouring of media coverage has
been a numbing reminder of journalism's herd instinct, the tendency
of reporters to imitate one another, repeating the same themes and
citing the same experts. The line on Israel's birthday has been that
this is a time for some limited upbeat appraisal — the Israeli
high-tech sector is extraordinary — but much dour reassessment of
Israel's past.
In this vein many reporters have quoted the "new historians," a
self-styled group of Israeli writers who claim to have exposed the
falsity of Zionist "myths" about the founding of the nation. Israel,
according to writers such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim
and Tom Segev, bears little resemblance to the heroic image purveyed
in history books. For these authors the Zionist enterprise is deeply
flawed, if not rotten at its heart.
They claim, for example: the Jews were not a vulnerable, outnumbered
force in 1948 but a cleverly organized, well-armed military that
overwhelmed weaker opponents; the Jews expelled Palestinian Arabs
from Mandate Palestine in a violent and calculated plan; the Jews
did not face implacable Arab enmity, but passed up promising
opportunities for compromise; Palestinian Jews deliberately turned
their backs on European Jews in the Holocaust. And more.
All these assertions have been systematically examined and refuted
in articles and books by Israeli scholars, including Shabtai Teveth,
Itamar Rabinovich, Efraim Karsh and others, but the media have
lionized the revisionists and their themes and virtually ignored the
refutations and the authorities making them.
In the first weeks of April alone leading up to Israel's birthday,
dozens of articles cited the views of revisionists without any
indication their claims have been discredited. Only one reporter,
Nicholas Goldberg in Newsday, included the rebuttals.
He quoted Efraim Karsh, Chairman of the Mediterranean Studies
Department at Kings College London and author of Fabricating Israeli
History. Karsh's research finds the so-called "new historians" have
manipulated and misrepresented original sources, and in effect
invented a history to suit their current political agenda.
Nowhere were these revisionist writers cited more deceptively than
in an April 9 broadcast on National Public Radio. Correspondent Eric
Weiner devoted a long segment to Deir Yassin, an Arab town overrun
by Jewish forces fifty years ago to the day. Controversy has raged
over whether Arab casualties occurred in the course of a military
operation or as a deliberate massacre.
Although it is clear that Arab forces in Deir Yassin were attacking
Jewish convoys trying to break the siege of Jerusalem, that the Jews
counterattacked trying to dislodge those forces, and that Arab
civilians were killed in the course of the conflict, Weiner offers
not a word about these issues. Instead, in an unabashedly one-sided
presentation he promotes Ilan Pappe's version, that Jews massacred
Arabs there. And he repeats Pappe's outrageous claim that "massacres
were part of a Zionist plan to forcibly expel or kill as many Arabs
as possible."
In a particularly scurrilous segment Weiner interviews an Arab
eyewitness at Deir Yassin who claims the Jews prevented the Red
Cross from treating a badly injured Arab infant whose mother was
dead. The NPR reporter offers no corroboration for the claim, nor
does he challenge the speaker. Though there are Jewish eyewitnesses
who would present the other side, Weiner fails to interview them.
In fact, counter-evidence in the Deir Yassin story has been offered
repeatedly not only by Jewish but by Arab sources. For example, as
the Jerusalem Report noted in an April 2, 1998 article:
In a BBC television series, "Israel and the Arabs: the 50
Year Conflict," Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the
Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948,
describes an encounter at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's
Old City with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian
leaders, including Hussein Khalidi, the secretary of the
Arab Higher Committee (the representative body of the
Arabs of British Palestine).
"I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story,"
recalled Nusseibeh, now living in Amman. "He said, 'We
must make the most of this.' So we wrote a press release
stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered,
pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities."
A Deir Yassin survivor identified as Abu Mahmud, said the
villagers protested at the time. "We said, 'There was no
rape.' [Khalidi] said, 'We have to say this, so the Arab
armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews.'"
Weiner, in citing Pappe's crude revisionist history, casts Pappe as
a beleaguered reformer trying — thus far unsuccessfully — to
introduce his enlightened version of history in the Israeli school
system. Unmentioned are Pappe's extremist political agenda as an
activist in the Israeli Communist party and former candidate in the
1996 Knesset elections on the Communist party ticket. The party
platform opposes the Zionist character of Israel and calls for
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of formulas
that would entail the dissolution of Israel.
It is unfortunate that a reporter for National Public Radio should
offer his audience "news" more reminiscent of Hazem Nusseibeh's
self-confessed 1948 propaganda than of responsible journalism.
Speaking at a conference of Arab-Americans a year ago, NPR Foreign
Editor Loren Jenkins assured the audience that 90% of the criticism
received at the network faults the coverage for being "pro-Arab." He
said the complaints are "overwhelming on one side." Needless to say,
Jenkins did not address the bias and distortion in NPR coverage that
are the basis of those complaints.
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Andrea Levin is National President of CAMERA - PO Box 428, Boston,
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