LEZIONE QUARTA PARTE PRIMA LA QUESTIONE DEI RIFUGIATI ... · palestinesi fuggirono: 1. Per ordini...
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● LEZIONE QUARTA ● PARTE PRIMA ● LA QUESTIONE DEI RIFUGIATI ●PARTE SECONDA ●LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
Transcript of LEZIONE QUARTA PARTE PRIMA LA QUESTIONE DEI RIFUGIATI ... · palestinesi fuggirono: 1. Per ordini...
LEZIONE QUARTA
PARTE PRIMA
LA QUESTIONE DEI RIFUGIATI
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
PARTE PRIMA
LA QUESTIONE DEI RIFUGIATI
Riassumendo
Che cosa ci proponamo di indagare
Percheacute il Medio Oriente egrave nel mondo attuale
unarea di crisi senza fine origine del terrorismo
minaccia per la stabilitagrave dellintero pianeta
Riassumendo
Di che cosa abbiamo parlato finora
Qual egrave stata la causa iniziale che ha portato alle
conseguenze attuali
Riassumendo
Causa iniziale
Le nazioni occidentali hanno ritenuto di risarcire
la comunitagrave ebraica delle sofferenze ed eccidi
subiti per secoli (ultimo lOlocausto) scaricando la
questione ebraica sulle spalle delle popolazioni
arabe
Riassumendo
Quali fattori hanno favorito la creazione di uno
Stato di Israele
Il fattore fondamentale egrave da cercare nel contesto
internazionale della Guerra Fredda la divisione
del mondo tra il campo comunista e quello
occidentale
Riassumendo
Nel contesto della Guerra Fredda le relazioni tra
le grandi potenze (il grande gioco) Stati Uniti
Unione Sovietica e Gran Bretagna hanno favorito
la causa ebraica
Percheacute
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
PARTE PRIMA
LA QUESTIONE DEI RIFUGIATI
Riassumendo
Che cosa ci proponamo di indagare
Percheacute il Medio Oriente egrave nel mondo attuale
unarea di crisi senza fine origine del terrorismo
minaccia per la stabilitagrave dellintero pianeta
Riassumendo
Di che cosa abbiamo parlato finora
Qual egrave stata la causa iniziale che ha portato alle
conseguenze attuali
Riassumendo
Causa iniziale
Le nazioni occidentali hanno ritenuto di risarcire
la comunitagrave ebraica delle sofferenze ed eccidi
subiti per secoli (ultimo lOlocausto) scaricando la
questione ebraica sulle spalle delle popolazioni
arabe
Riassumendo
Quali fattori hanno favorito la creazione di uno
Stato di Israele
Il fattore fondamentale egrave da cercare nel contesto
internazionale della Guerra Fredda la divisione
del mondo tra il campo comunista e quello
occidentale
Riassumendo
Nel contesto della Guerra Fredda le relazioni tra
le grandi potenze (il grande gioco) Stati Uniti
Unione Sovietica e Gran Bretagna hanno favorito
la causa ebraica
Percheacute
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Riassumendo
Che cosa ci proponamo di indagare
Percheacute il Medio Oriente egrave nel mondo attuale
unarea di crisi senza fine origine del terrorismo
minaccia per la stabilitagrave dellintero pianeta
Riassumendo
Di che cosa abbiamo parlato finora
Qual egrave stata la causa iniziale che ha portato alle
conseguenze attuali
Riassumendo
Causa iniziale
Le nazioni occidentali hanno ritenuto di risarcire
la comunitagrave ebraica delle sofferenze ed eccidi
subiti per secoli (ultimo lOlocausto) scaricando la
questione ebraica sulle spalle delle popolazioni
arabe
Riassumendo
Quali fattori hanno favorito la creazione di uno
Stato di Israele
Il fattore fondamentale egrave da cercare nel contesto
internazionale della Guerra Fredda la divisione
del mondo tra il campo comunista e quello
occidentale
Riassumendo
Nel contesto della Guerra Fredda le relazioni tra
le grandi potenze (il grande gioco) Stati Uniti
Unione Sovietica e Gran Bretagna hanno favorito
la causa ebraica
Percheacute
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Riassumendo
Di che cosa abbiamo parlato finora
Qual egrave stata la causa iniziale che ha portato alle
conseguenze attuali
Riassumendo
Causa iniziale
Le nazioni occidentali hanno ritenuto di risarcire
la comunitagrave ebraica delle sofferenze ed eccidi
subiti per secoli (ultimo lOlocausto) scaricando la
questione ebraica sulle spalle delle popolazioni
arabe
Riassumendo
Quali fattori hanno favorito la creazione di uno
Stato di Israele
Il fattore fondamentale egrave da cercare nel contesto
internazionale della Guerra Fredda la divisione
del mondo tra il campo comunista e quello
occidentale
Riassumendo
Nel contesto della Guerra Fredda le relazioni tra
le grandi potenze (il grande gioco) Stati Uniti
Unione Sovietica e Gran Bretagna hanno favorito
la causa ebraica
Percheacute
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
mdash Advertisement mdash
Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Riassumendo
Causa iniziale
Le nazioni occidentali hanno ritenuto di risarcire
la comunitagrave ebraica delle sofferenze ed eccidi
subiti per secoli (ultimo lOlocausto) scaricando la
questione ebraica sulle spalle delle popolazioni
arabe
Riassumendo
Quali fattori hanno favorito la creazione di uno
Stato di Israele
Il fattore fondamentale egrave da cercare nel contesto
internazionale della Guerra Fredda la divisione
del mondo tra il campo comunista e quello
occidentale
Riassumendo
Nel contesto della Guerra Fredda le relazioni tra
le grandi potenze (il grande gioco) Stati Uniti
Unione Sovietica e Gran Bretagna hanno favorito
la causa ebraica
Percheacute
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Riassumendo
Quali fattori hanno favorito la creazione di uno
Stato di Israele
Il fattore fondamentale egrave da cercare nel contesto
internazionale della Guerra Fredda la divisione
del mondo tra il campo comunista e quello
occidentale
Riassumendo
Nel contesto della Guerra Fredda le relazioni tra
le grandi potenze (il grande gioco) Stati Uniti
Unione Sovietica e Gran Bretagna hanno favorito
la causa ebraica
Percheacute
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Riassumendo
Nel contesto della Guerra Fredda le relazioni tra
le grandi potenze (il grande gioco) Stati Uniti
Unione Sovietica e Gran Bretagna hanno favorito
la causa ebraica
Percheacute
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Riassumendo
1 A guerra finita la Gran Bretagna che aveva
dominato nel Medio Oriente era diventata una
potenza di secondo ordine
2 LUnione Sovietica mirava a eliminare
linfluenza britannica in Medio Oriente e pertanto
appoggiograve la causa ebraica
3 Gli Usa non vollero lasciare che LUnione
Sovietica diventasse il campione degli ebrei
percheacute
A) Pressione dellopinione pubblica
internazionale B) Lobby ebraica negli Usa
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Riassumendo
Oltre al fattore fondamentale contribuirono
allesito della vicenda fattori aggiuntivi
1 Errori diplomatici dei paesi arabi
2 Capacitagrave militare di Israele (aiutata dai
sovietici)
3 Divisioni e propositi egoistici delle nazioni
arabe
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Nuovo argomento
Nella lezione di oggi ci chiediamo
Quali furono le conseguenze immediate della
creazione dello Stato di Israele
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La questione dei profughi
palestinesi
Il problema principale una volta approvato il
Piano di Spartizione dellOnu
Gli arabi sono la maggioranza o una forte
minoranza nei territori assegnati agli ebrei
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Il giudizio degli storici
Due interpretazioni contrapposte
Tesi 1 Gli arabi palestinesi fuggirono dal nuovo
stato di Israele percheacute sollecitati a farlo dagli stati
arabi vicini (Esodo volontario)
Tesi 2 Gli arabi palestinesi furono espulsi con la
forza dallesercito israeliano (Esodo coatto)
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La versione israeliana
Le autoritagrave israeliane (Governo Ministero della
Difesa Esercito) hanno sempre sostenuto che i
palestinesi fuggirono
1 Per ordini dei loro stessi capi o degli altri stati
arabi
2 Perchegrave presi dal panico per voci infondate
durante la guerra del 1948-1949
La maggior parte dei giornalisti e degli storici
israeliani ha sostenuto questa tesi fino al 1970
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La versione israeliana
Durante gli anni 70 vennero pubblicate memorie
dei veterani della prima guerra e inoltre alcuni
storici presentarono una descrizione piugrave
equilibrata degli eventi vale a dire
1 In alcuni casi i palestinesi fuggirono di propria
volontagrave
2 In altri furono espulsi con la forza dallesercito
israeliano
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Erskine Childers The Other Exodus 1969
Nessun ordine dalle radio arabe nel 1948
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La versione israeliana
Nei primi anni 80 le autoritagrave israeliane permisero
agli storici laccesso agli archivi che custodivano
documenti fino a quel momento tenuti segreti
Ne derivarono opere storiche piugrave obiettive che
riconoscevano il ruolo preponderante della
violenza nella espulsione dei palestinesi (New
Historians)
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Lo storico israeliano Benny Morris
The Birth of the refugee problem 1984
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
I fattori dellesodo
Attacchi ai villaggi 215
Espulsioni 53
Panico per notizie 59
Timori di rappresaglie 48
Notizie diffuse 15
Ordini arabi 6
(1 3)
Non accertati 44
Totale
440
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Ebrei appena usciti dai campi di
concentramento nazisti
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Via dal campo di concentramento
verso Israele
5 GIUGNO 1945
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Palestinesi che lasciano Haifa
mentre gli israeliani entrano in cittagrave
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Una scuola per i bambini dei rifugiati
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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הארץחדשותתרבותספורטספרים
סרטים מומלציםקפטן אינטרנטבחירות 2019
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Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Rifugiati allaperto 1948
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
I rifugiati
Palestinesi espulsi dallo Stato di Israele
700 mila
Ebrei espulsi dai paesi arabi e accolti in Israele
1 milione
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Campo di rifugiati palestinesi
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Esodo di rifugiati (Al Nakba) 1948
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Rifugiati 1948
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Ebrei espulsi da paesi arabi 1948
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
PARTE SECONDA
LA SECONDA GUERRA ARABO-ISRAELIANA
(29 ottobre-7 novembre 1956)
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Linvasione
Il 29 ottobre 1956 un battaglione di paracadutisti
israeliani fu paracadutato nella penisola del Sinai
sul Passo di Mitla
Iniziava la Operation Kadesh lattacco
israeliano allEgitto
Il giorno dopo 30 ottobre Francia e Gran
Bretagna ordinarono il cessate il fuoco In caso
contrario sarebbero intervenute
Il 31 ottobre iniziograve il bombardamento di cittagrave
egiziane da parte di aerei francesi e inglesi
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Paracadutista israeliano a Mitla
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La ragione della contesa
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Come si arrivograve alla guerra
Il Canale di Suez
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Importanza strategica
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Importanza strategica
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Dopo il 1945
1 LImpero inglese in India era cessato
2 Il 50 del traffico sul Canale era per petrolio
3 Il 70 del petrolio destinato allEuropa
passava per il Canale (12 milioni di barili al
giorno)
Gli Usa ricevevano 300 mila barili al giorno
attraverso il Canale
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Il ruolo della Gran Bretagna
La Gran Bretagna riteneva
indispensabile il Medio Oriente per ragioni
strategiche ed economiche e
indispensabile Suez per il controllo del Medio
Oriente
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
Trending Now
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
0 Zen 124 Tweet
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Feysal II re dellIraq (1935-1958)
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Top secret Israeli cyberattack firm
revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
Trending Now
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Nuri as Said Primo Ministro Iraq
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
Top secret Israeli cyberattack firm
revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
Trending Now
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Reazioni alla presenza inglese
La presenza inglese in Medio Oriente dopo la
seconda guera mondiale era vista dalle
popolazioni arabe come la persistenza
dellImperialismo
Continue manifestazioni contro gli inglesi erano
organizzate dai partiti nazionalisti arabi
Il movimento dei Fratelli Musulmani era
particolarmente attivo in Egitto
Anche il regno di Feysal in Iraq era in pericolo
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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revealed
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Lepisodio cruciale
Il 25 gennaio 1952 le truppe inglesi cercarono di
disarmare la polizia egiziana nella cittagrave di Ismailia
provocando 41 morti tra i poliziotti
Seguirono disordini in tutto il paese sia contro gli
occidentali che contro la monarchia di Farouk
asservita agli occidentali
Il 23 luglio 1952 un colpo di stato organizzato
dal Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali depose il re e
lo costrinse alla fuga
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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סרטים מומלציםקפטן אינטרנטבחירות 2019
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
I Liberi Ufficiali subito dopo il golpe
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Gamal Abdel Nasser
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La situazione si aggroviglia
Con il colpo di stato in Egitto l situazione del
Medio Oriente diventava il crocevia di tre tipi di
conflitti
1 Tra Usa e Urss per la logica della Guerra
Fredda
2 Tra arabi e israeliani per lesistenza dello Stato
di Israele
3 Tra il movimenti nazionalisti e i governi legati
alle potenze imperialiste (Francia e Inghilterra)
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
Trending Now
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
1 Gli effetti della Guerra Fredda
Gli Usa concepivano la loro politica estera
esclusivamente come lobiettivo di contenere la
potenza sovietica (politica del conteinment) in
tutte le aree del mondo
Essi ritenevano che tra tutte le aree il Medio
Oriente fosse la piugrave scoperta dove i sovietici
potessero piugrave facilmente penetrare
Per il governo di Washington divenne urgente
attuare una politica che scongiurasse questo
pericolo
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
Top secret Israeli cyberattack firm
revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
Trending Now
Subscribe
Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Il timore dei sovietici
Il diplomatico Usa Raymond Hare ricorda nelle
sue memorie
E difficile oggi crederlo ma a quel tempo
temevamo una vera invasione del Medio Oriente
da parte della Russia
Ci sembrava di sentire giagrave gli stivali sovietici che
calpestavano la sabbia del deserto
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
0 Zen 124 Tweet
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 28
Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
All Share Tweet Email
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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Start Download - View PDF
Ad
According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La politica di Eisenhower
Dopo il colpo di stato del 1952 gli Usa decisero
che lEgitto doveva diventare il loro punto di
forza in Medio Oriente
E falso che la Cia abbia orchestrato il colpo di
stato ma il responsabile della Agenzia in Egitto
Miles Copeland aveva legami con Nasser leader
del Movimento dei Liberi Ufficiali cosigrave come con i
Fratelli Musulmani
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
You Might also Like Recommended by
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Comments
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Il nuovo governo Usa dopo il 1952
Eisenhower Foster Dulles
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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copy Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd All Rights Reserved
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
Il tentativo di Foster Dulles
Il Segretario di Stato Foster Dulles si recograve in
Egitto nel 1953 per tentare di risolvere il dilemma
Chiese a Nasser di mettere da parte lostilitagrave
contro la Gran Bretagna per fare fronte unito
contro la Russia
Proposta di un organismo comune di difesa il
MEDO
La risposta di Nasser pistola e coltello
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
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revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
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Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 28
Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La controproposta di Nasser
Nasser chiarigrave a Dulles la sua intenzione di
basare la difesa del Medio Oriente sulla Lega
Araba della quale lEgitto avrebbe dovuto essere
il paese leader
E che la Lega avrebbe potuto costituire una
alleanza informale con gli Usa
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
I paesi del Patto di Baghdad (1955)
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
Top secret Israeli cyberattack firm
revealed
Ex-Mossad chief Russ
for president
Trending Now
Subscribe
Home
Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
mdash Advertisement mdash
Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
0 Zen 124 Tweet
All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 28
Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
mdash Advertisement mdash
EasyPDFCombine VISIT SITE
Start Download - View PDF
Ad
According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
All Share Tweet Email
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
La reazione di Nasser
1 Mobilitazione delle folle arabe in vari stati
contro il Patto di Baghdad (24 febbraio 1955)
2 Invio di aiuti ai patrioti algerini in rivolta contro
la Francia
3 Partecipazione alla Conferenza di Bandung
degli stati non allineati
4 Nazionalizzazione del Canale di Suez
5 Trattative segrete con Urss per invio armi
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
You Might also Like Recommended by
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סרטים מומלציםקפטן אינטרנטבחירות 2019
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Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
I 30 partecipanti alla Conferenza di
Bandung (Indonesia aprile 1955)
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
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The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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copy Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd All Rights Reserved
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 18
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Survival of the Fittest
Historian Benny Morris who opened the Pandoras box of
Zionism has found a new way to deal with the demons he
unleashed He justifies the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948
bemoans the fact that the job was left unfinished and doesnt
rule out future population transfers In an interview Morris
lays out his self-described politically incorrect views
Jan 08 2004 1200 AM
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist People were mistakenwhen they labeled him a post-Zionist when they thought that hishistorical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem wasintended to undercut the Zionist enterprise Nonsense Morris saysthats completely unfounded Some readers simply misread thebook They didnt read it with the same detachment the same moralneutrality with which it was written So they came to the mistakenconclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that theZionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually beingcondemnatory that when he describes the large-scale expulsionoperations he is being denunciatory They did not conceive that thegreat documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with thosesins That he thinks some of them at least were unavoidable
Two years ago different voices began to be heard The historianwho was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israelhad no one to talk to The researcher who was accused of being anIsrael hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academicestablishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in theBritish paper The Guardian
Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrewtranslation of his massive work Righteous Victims A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 which was written in the oldpeace-pursuing style And at the same time historian Morriscompleted the new version of his book on the refugee problemwhich is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominateIsrael So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historianMorris worked as though there is no connection between them asthough one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating
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Ari Shavit ensp|ensp Send me email alerts
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Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
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1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 28
Both books will appear in the coming month The book on thehistory of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew byAm Oved in Tel Aviv while the Cambridge University Press willpublish The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (itoriginally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987) That bookdescribes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakba Isnt Morrisever frightened at the present-day political implications of hishistorical study Isnt he fearful that he has contributed to Israelbecoming almost a pariah state After a few moments of evasionMorris admits that he is Sometimes he really is frightenedSometimes he asks himself what he has wrought
He is short plump and very intense The son of immigrants fromEngland he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a memberof the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement In the past hewas a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do militaryservice in the territories He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva But sitting in hisarmchair in his Jerusalem apartment he does not don the mantle ofthe cautious academic Far from it Morris spews out his wordsrapidly and energetically sometimes spilling over into English Hedoesnt think twice before firing off the sharpest most shockingstatements which are anything but politically correct He describeshorrific war crimes offhandedly paints apocalyptic visions with asmile on his lips He gives the observer the feeling that this agitatedindividual who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandorasbox is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it stillfinding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are hislot and the lot of us all
Rape massacre transfer
Benny Morris in the month ahead the new version of your book onthe birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be publishedWho will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or thePalestinians
mdash Advertisement mdash
The revised book is a double-edged sword It is based on manydocuments that were not available to me when I wrote the original
All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 38
book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
mdash Advertisement mdash
EasyPDFCombine VISIT SITE
Start Download - View PDF
Ad
According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
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book most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives Whatthe new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts ofmassacre than I had previously thought To my surprise there werealso many cases of rape In the months of April-May 1948 units ofthe Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor ofthe IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly thatthey were to uproot the villagers expel them and destroy thevillages themselves
At the same time it turns out that there was a series of ordersissued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinianintermediate levels to remove children women and the elderly fromthe villages So that on the one hand the book reinforces theaccusation against the Zionist side but on the other hand it alsoproves that many of those who left the villages did so with theencouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself
According to your new findings how many cases of Israeli rapewere there in 1948
About a dozen In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered herand her father In Jaffa soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped onegirl and tried to rape several more At Hunin which is in the Galileetwo girls were raped and then murdered There were one or twocases of rape at Tantura south of Haifa There was one case of rapeat Qula in the center of the country At the village of Abu Shushanear Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four femaleprisoners one of whom was raped a number of times And therewere other cases Usually more than one soldier was involvedUsually there were one or two Palestinian girls In a largeproportion of the cases the event ended with murder Becauseneither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events wehave to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reportedwhich I found are not the whole story They are just the tip of theiceberg
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According to your findings how many acts of Israeli massacrewere perpetrated in 1948
Twenty-four In some cases four or five people were executed inothers the numbers were 70 80 100 There was also a great deal ofarbitrary killing Two old men are spotted walking in a field - theyare shot A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shotThere are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebronregion] in which a column entered the village with all guns blazingand killed anything that moved
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed) Deir Yassin (100-110)Lod (250) Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tanturabut war crimes were perpetrated there At Jaffa there was amassacre about which nothing had been known until now The sameat Arab al Muwassi in the north About half of the acts of massacre
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were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
You Might also Like Recommended by
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 48
were part of Operation Hiram [in the north in October 1948] atSafsaf Saliha Jish Eilaboun Arab al Muwasi Deir al Asad MajdalKrum Sasa In Operation Hiram there was a unusually highconcentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a wellin an orderly fashion
That cant be chance Its a pattern Apparently various officerswho took part in the operation understood that the expulsion orderthey received permitted them to do these deeds in order toencourage the population to take to the roads The fact is that noone was punished for these acts of murder Ben-Gurion silenced thematter He covered up for the officers who did the massacres
What you are telling me here as though by the way is that inOperation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicitexpulsion order Is that right
Yes One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31 1948the commander of the Northern Front Moshe Carmel issued anorder in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arabpopulation Carmel took this action immediately after a visit byBen-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth There is nodoubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion Justas the expulsion order for the city of Lod which was signed byYitzhak Rabin was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited theheadquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for adeliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion
From April 1948 Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transferThere is no explicit order of his in writing there is no orderlycomprehensive policy but there is an atmosphere of [population]transfer The transfer idea is in the air The entire leadershipunderstands that this is the idea The officer corps understandswhat is required of them Under Ben-Gurion a consensus oftransfer is created
Ben-Gurion was a transferist
Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist He understood that therecould be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in itsmidst There would be no such state It would not be able to exist
I dont hear you condemning him
Ben-Gurion was right If he had not done what he did a statewould not have come into being That has to be clear It isimpossible to evade it Without the uprooting of the Palestinians aJewish state would not have arisen here
More
Ari Shavit
Haaretz Correspondent
Send me email alertsn
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1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 58
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1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 68
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הארץחדשותתרבותספורטספרים
סרטים מומלציםקפטן אינטרנטבחירות 2019
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מניית טאואר
Haaretzcom the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel and analysis from Israel and the Middle EastHaaretzcom provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel the Jewish World and the Middle Eastincluding defense diplomacy the Arab-Israeli conflict the peace process Israeli politics Jerusalem affairsinternational relations Iran Iraq Syria Lebanon the Palestinian Authority the West Bank and the Gaza Stripthe Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora
copy Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd All Rights Reserved
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 58
Comments
Sign in to join the conversation
Trending Now
Trending Now
Haaretz | News
Rashida Tlaibresponds to anti-Semitism
Haaretz | News
US Jewish groupsstrike back atRashida Tlaib
Sponsored -trendingconsumergadgetscom
Magic HeaterTakes Italy ByStorm The Idea Is
From The Web
Sponsored -breakthroughtrendcom
Night DrivingGlasses Everybodyin Italy is Talking
From The Web
Haaretz | News
This ultra-Orthodox womanis looking to make
Haaretz | News
Palestiniannarratives arealways right
Sponsored -techdiscountfindercom
MilitarySmartwatchEverybody in Italy
From The Web
Sponsored -internationalla-croixcom
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From The Web
Trump andNetanyahu AgreeDesperate TimesCall for DesperateSpeeches
Erdogan Rejoicedat Trumps SyriaPullout Then HeRealized It WasTrump
After NataliePortman DisasterGenesis PrizeGoes to a LoyalFriend ofNetanyahu ndash andTrump
The Rashida Tlaibanti-Semitism SlurReveals the LoudIlliberal Face of theanti-BDSMovement
All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 68
Massive Manipulation ForeignInfluence Campaign and Cyber TheThreats to Israels ElectionAmitai Zivensp|ensp Yesterday
This ultra-Orthodox Woman Is Lookingto Make History in the Israeli ElectionJudy Maltzensp|ensp 18 Hours Ago
Shawarma the Iconic Israeli StreetFood Is Slowly Making a Comeback inTel AvivEran Laorensp|ensp 37 Minutes Ago
Senate Democrats Block RubioMideast Policy Bill That SparkedHeated BDS DebateAmir Tibonensp|ensp Yesterday
As an American-Israeli I Am Thrilledfor the Palestinians and for RashidaTlaibBradley Burstonensp|ensp Yesterday
Israeli Ex-minister Once Jailed forSmuggling Ecstasy Gets 11 Years inPrison for Spying for IranAaron Rabinowitzensp|ensp Yesterday
What Do You Call a Rabbi WhoProtects and Defends JewishTerroristsEric H Yoffieensp|ensp 22 Hours Ago
Whats Behind the Snub Erdogan GaveBolton and Why Some in Israel AreStill OptimisticAnshel Pfefferensp|ensp Yesterday
Analysis Does Iran Really Want toDestroy IsraelZvi Barelensp|ensp Yesterday
1 4
4 8
23
1 15
7 9
All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 78
ICYMI
Security amp Aviation
Rashida Tlaib Responds to anti-Semitism AccusationsHaaretz JTA Ron Kampeasensp|ensp 19 Hours Ago
LISTEN What Happened When 450Park Avenue Synagogue CongregantsTried to Hold an Egalitarian Prayer inIsraelHaaretz Weeklyensp|ensp 06012019
Palestinian Narratives Are AlwaysRight Israeli Jewish Views Are JustPropagandaCarra Glattensp|ensp Yesterday
Foreign CountryIntends toIntervene in IsraeliElections Shin BetChief Says
LISTEN Israeli F-15 Loses Canopyat 30000 FeetPilots MakeEmergencyLanding
Serious MistakeErdogan SnubsBolton Over SyriaKurds Blasts USfor Double-speak
As Trade WithChina Grows USPressuring Israelto Choose Sides
31 4
48
All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 88
FAQ | Contact us | Newsletters | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy |Cancellation of Digital Subscriptions | Management | Editorial |Accessibility | Advertise on Haaretzcom | Cookie Settings
Israel NewsMiddle EastJewish WorldUSWorldBusiness
PartnershipsHaaretz LabelsDan Hotels in Tel AvivIsrael Real EstateKnoji Promo CodesStart-Up NationCentral
ArchaeologyLifeScienceSports
CulturePurimBooksTravelTheaterMovies and TVFoodPoem of the Week
ColumnistsBradley BurstonChemi ShalevAllison KaplanSommerAnshel PfefferDavid Rosenberg
OpinionEditorialDaily CartoonLetters to the Editor
הארץחדשותתרבותספורטספרים
סרטים מומלציםקפטן אינטרנטבחירות 2019
סקר בחירות
TheMarkerחדשות
שוק ההוןצרכנות
נדלן
Financeתא 35
מדד תל אביב בנקים 5מניית טבע
מניית טאואר
Haaretzcom the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel and analysis from Israel and the Middle EastHaaretzcom provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel the Jewish World and the Middle Eastincluding defense diplomacy the Arab-Israeli conflict the peace process Israeli politics Jerusalem affairsinternational relations Iran Iraq Syria Lebanon the Palestinian Authority the West Bank and the Gaza Stripthe Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora
copy Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd All Rights Reserved
Top Secret IsraeliCyberattack FirmRevealed
Ex-Mossad ChiefRussia Ran Trump forPresident
2500-year-old PersiaMilitary Base Found Israel
All Share Tweet Email
1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 68
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LISTEN What Happened When 450Park Avenue Synagogue CongregantsTried to Hold an Egalitarian Prayer inIsraelHaaretz Weeklyensp|ensp 06012019
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Foreign CountryIntends toIntervene in IsraeliElections Shin BetChief Says
LISTEN Israeli F-15 Loses Canopyat 30000 FeetPilots MakeEmergencyLanding
Serious MistakeErdogan SnubsBolton Over SyriaKurds Blasts USfor Double-speak
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31 4
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All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 88
FAQ | Contact us | Newsletters | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy |Cancellation of Digital Subscriptions | Management | Editorial |Accessibility | Advertise on Haaretzcom | Cookie Settings
Israel NewsMiddle EastJewish WorldUSWorldBusiness
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ArchaeologyLifeScienceSports
CulturePurimBooksTravelTheaterMovies and TVFoodPoem of the Week
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OpinionEditorialDaily CartoonLetters to the Editor
הארץחדשותתרבותספורטספרים
סרטים מומלציםקפטן אינטרנטבחירות 2019
סקר בחירות
TheMarkerחדשות
שוק ההוןצרכנות
נדלן
Financeתא 35
מדד תל אביב בנקים 5מניית טבע
מניית טאואר
Haaretzcom the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel and analysis from Israel and the Middle EastHaaretzcom provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel the Jewish World and the Middle Eastincluding defense diplomacy the Arab-Israeli conflict the peace process Israeli politics Jerusalem affairsinternational relations Iran Iraq Syria Lebanon the Palestinian Authority the West Bank and the Gaza Stripthe Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora
copy Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd All Rights Reserved
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 78
ICYMI
Security amp Aviation
Rashida Tlaib Responds to anti-Semitism AccusationsHaaretz JTA Ron Kampeasensp|ensp 19 Hours Ago
LISTEN What Happened When 450Park Avenue Synagogue CongregantsTried to Hold an Egalitarian Prayer inIsraelHaaretz Weeklyensp|ensp 06012019
Palestinian Narratives Are AlwaysRight Israeli Jewish Views Are JustPropagandaCarra Glattensp|ensp Yesterday
Foreign CountryIntends toIntervene in IsraeliElections Shin BetChief Says
LISTEN Israeli F-15 Loses Canopyat 30000 FeetPilots MakeEmergencyLanding
Serious MistakeErdogan SnubsBolton Over SyriaKurds Blasts USfor Double-speak
As Trade WithChina Grows USPressuring Israelto Choose Sides
31 4
48
All Share Tweet Email
1012019 Survival of the fittest - Haaretz - Israel News | Haaretzcom
httpswwwhaaretzcom15262454 88
FAQ | Contact us | Newsletters | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy |Cancellation of Digital Subscriptions | Management | Editorial |Accessibility | Advertise on Haaretzcom | Cookie Settings
Israel NewsMiddle EastJewish WorldUSWorldBusiness
PartnershipsHaaretz LabelsDan Hotels in Tel AvivIsrael Real EstateKnoji Promo CodesStart-Up NationCentral
ArchaeologyLifeScienceSports
CulturePurimBooksTravelTheaterMovies and TVFoodPoem of the Week
ColumnistsBradley BurstonChemi ShalevAllison KaplanSommerAnshel PfefferDavid Rosenberg
OpinionEditorialDaily CartoonLetters to the Editor
הארץחדשותתרבותספורטספרים
סרטים מומלציםקפטן אינטרנטבחירות 2019
סקר בחירות
TheMarkerחדשות
שוק ההוןצרכנות
נדלן
Financeתא 35
מדד תל אביב בנקים 5מניית טבע
מניית טאואר
Haaretzcom the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel and analysis from Israel and the Middle EastHaaretzcom provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel the Jewish World and the Middle Eastincluding defense diplomacy the Arab-Israeli conflict the peace process Israeli politics Jerusalem affairsinternational relations Iran Iraq Syria Lebanon the Palestinian Authority the West Bank and the Gaza Stripthe Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora
copy Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd All Rights Reserved
Top Secret IsraeliCyberattack FirmRevealed
Ex-Mossad ChiefRussia Ran Trump forPresident
2500-year-old PersiaMilitary Base Found Israel
All Share Tweet Email
1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
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1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
1
Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos written 5 October 1937
Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies Beirut
5 October 1937
Dear Amos
I was not angry at you but I was very sorry indeed that there was no reply from you I cannot accept the excuse that you have no time I know you have a lot of work at school in the field and at home and I am happy that you are so preoccupied with your studies But it is always possible to find free time if necessary not only on Sabbath days but even during weekdays Your excuse that I keep moving from one country to another is not convincing You can write to me in London Here they [the Jewish Agency office] always know where I am and they are efficient in forwarding my mail As to the question of my membership in the executive committee [of the Jewish Agency] I shall explain to you in person if I meet you in Tel Aviv upon my return Here what I want to talk about is the conflict you are experiencing between your reason and your emotions with regard to the question of the state Political matters should not be a question of emotions The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us what will lead to the objective and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail
It seems to me that I too have emotions [quotation marks in original Hebrew regesh] Without these emotions I would not have been able to endure decades of our hard work It definitely does not hurt my feelings [regesh] that a state is established even if it is small
Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure But the country that they [the Royal (Peel) Commission] are partitioning is not in our actual possession it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English What is in our actual possession is a small portion less than what they [the Peel Commission] are
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
2
proposing for a Jewish state If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have though of course much less than we merit and desire The question is would we obtain more without partition If things were to remain as they are [emphasis in original] would this satisfy our feelings What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish [emphasis original] A unified Eretz Israeli would be no source of satisfaction for me-- if it were Arab
From our standpoint the status quo is deadly poison We want to change the status quo [emphasis original] But how can this change come about How can this land become ours The decisive question is Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country
My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning
When we acquire one thousand or 10000 dunams we feel elated It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself but because through it we increase our strength and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole The establishment of a state even if only on a portion of the land is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country
We shall admit into the state all the Jews we can We firmly believe that we can admit more than two million Jews We shall build a multi-faceted Jewish economy-- agricultural industrial and maritime We shall organize an advanced defense forcemdasha superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors or through some other means
We must always keep in mind the fundamental truths that make our settlement of this land imperative and possible They are two or three it is not the British
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
3
Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration These are consequences not causes They are the products of coincidence contingent ephemeral and they will come to an end They were not inevitable They could not have occurred but for the World War or rather they would not have occurred if the war had not ended the way it did
But on the other hand there are fundamental [emphasis original] historical truths unalterable as long as Zionism is not fully realized These are
1) The pressure of the Exile which continues to push the Jews with propulsive force towards the country
2) Palestine is grossly under populated It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit There is no Arab immigration problem There is no Arab exile Arabs are not persecuted They have a homeland and it is vast
3) The innovative talents of the Jews (a consequence of point 1 above) their ability to make the desert bloom to create industry to build an economy to develop culture to conquer the sea and space with the help of science and pioneering endeavor
These three fundamental truths will be reinforced by the existence of a Jewish state in a part of the country just as Zionism will be reinforced by every conquest large or small every school every factory every Jewish ship etc Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if we have a state Our strength vis-agrave-vis the Arabs will likewise increase The possibilities for construction and multiplication will speedily expand The greater the Jewish strength in the country the more the Arabs will realize that it is neither beneficial nor possible for them to withstand us On the contrary it will be possible for the Arabs to benefit enormously from the Jews not only materially but politically as well I do not dream of war nor do I like it But I still believe more than I did before the emergence of the possibility of a Jewish state that once we are numerous and powerful in the country the Arabs will realize that it is better for them to become our allies
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
4
They will derive benefits from our assistance if they of their own free will give us the opportunity to settle in all parts of the country The Arabs have many countries that are under-populated underdeveloped and vulnerable incapable with their own strength to stand up to their external enemies Without France Syria could not last for one day against an onslaught from Turkey The same applies to Iraq and to the new [Palestinian] state [under the Peel plan] All of these stand in need of the protection of France or Britain This need for protection means subjugation and dependence on the other But the Jews could be equal allies real friends not occupiers or tyrants over them
Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state In such event the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower financial resources or creative initiative It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial military organizational and scientific assistance It is also possible that they will not agree People donrsquot always behave according to logic common sense or their own practical advantage Just as you yourself are sometimes split conflicted between your mind and your emotions it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us ldquoWe want neither your honey nor your sting Wersquod rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit itrdquo If this occurs we will have to talk to them in a different languagemdashand we will have a different languagemdashbut such a language will not be ours without a state This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs We must expel Arabs and take their place Up to now all our aspirations have been based on an assumption ndash one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country ndash that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves But if we are compelled to use force ndash not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan but in order to guarantee our right to settle there ndash our force will enable us to do so
Clearly in such event we will have to deal not only with the Arabs living in Eretz Israel since it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
5
come to their aid But our power will be greater not only because we will be better organized and equipped but also because behind us stands a force still greater in quantity and quality This is the reservoir of the millions in the Diaspora Our entire younger generation of Poland Romania America and other countries will rush to our aid at the outbreak of such a conflict I pray to God that this does not happen at all Nevertheless the Jewish state will not rely only on the Jews living in it but on the Jewish people living in every corner of the world the many millions who are eager and obliged [emphasis original] to settle in Palestine There are not millions of Arabs who are compelled or willing to settle in Palestine Of course it is likely that Arab adventurers and gangs will come from Syria or Iraq or other Arab countries but these can be no match for the tens and hundreds of thousands of young Jews to whom Eretz Israel is not merely an emotional issue but one that is in equal measure both personal and national
For this reason I attach enormous importance to the conquest of the sea and the construction of a Jewish harbor and a Jewish fleet The sea is the bridge between the Jews of this country and the Jewish Diaspora ndash the millions of Jews in different parts of the world We must create the conditions that will enable us in times of necessity to bring into the country in our own ships manned by our own seamen tens of thousands of young men Meanwhile we must prepare these young men while they are still in the Diaspora for whatever task awaits them here
I am confident that the establishment of a Jewish state even if it is only in a part of the country will enable us to carry out this task Once a state is established we shall have control over the Eretz Israeli sea Our activities in the sea will then include astonishing achievements
Because of all the above I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions Both declare to me A Jewish state must be established immediately even if it is only in part of the country The rest will follow in the course of time A Jewish state will come
My warm greetings [Hebrew Shalom Rav]
When do you return to Kadoorie [agricultural school] Write to me Show this letter to your mother and sisters
6
Sincerely
Your father
6
Sincerely
Your father
