Out of the Frame

The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel

Ilan Pappe

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780745327259
• eBook ISBN: 9781783714209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

Ilan Pappe has long been a controversial figure in Israel, here; he gives a full account of his break with mainstream Israeli scholarship and its consequences.

Growing up in a conventional Israeli community and influenced by the utopian visions of Theodor Herzl, Pappe was barely aware of the Nakba in his high school years. This intellectual biography traces his journey of discovery, from the whispers of Palestinian classmates, to his realisation that the 'enemy's' narrative of 1948 was correct, and his vow to protect the memory of the Nakba. For the first time he gives the details of the formidable opposition he faced in Israel, including death threats fed by the media, denunciations by the Knesset and calls for him to be sacked from his post at Haifa university.

This revealing work, written with dignity and humour, highlights Israel's difficulty in facing up to its past and forging a peaceful, inclusive future in Palestine.

1

THE DEMONS OF THE NAKBAH

As a Jewish child born in Haifa in the early 1950s, I did not encounter the Arabic term Nakbah (catastrophe), nor was I aware of its significance. Only in my high school days did the word make its first appearance. There were two Palestinian Israeli pupils in my class, and we all participated in joint guided-tours around Haifa and its vicinity. In those days there was still evidence of Arab Haifa in the Old City: beautiful buildings, remnants of a covered market that had been destroyed by Israel during the 1948 war, mosques and churches.

These relics testified to the city’s more glorious past. Many of them are now gone, demolished by the bulldozers of an ambitious city mayor who sought to erase any urban features that pointed to the city’s Arab past. But, in those days, there were quite a few Arab houses squeezed between the modern concrete buildings. Guides on the school tours used to refer to them as hirbet al-shaykh, a vague reference to an Arab house from an unidentified period. My two Palestinian classmates muttered that these were houses left from the 1948 Nakbah, but they did not dare to challenge their teachers, nor did they expand on what they meant.

I did not deal much with history in my youth. I learned literary Arabic in school, in the ‘orientalist’ class, as it was called, which prepared pupils for a career in the intelligence corps in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). My three compulsory years in the army, including the 1973 war, were spent in that corps, and were not a bad workshop for polishing my Arabic, but quite poisonous if you believed what you were told about the ‘enemy’.

During my army days and BA studies in Jerusalem, in the department of Middle Eastern history, I was what one could call a left-wing Zionist, working in the Knesset as a voluntary adviser to the left-wing Zionist party, Mapam. I co-ordinated the party’s activities on university campuses and advised its parliamentary representatives on ‘Arab Affairs’. I viewed the reality around me through a leftist Zionist prism, which allowed a liberal pluralist critique of the ideology of the state of Israel, but inevitably vindicated its major precepts. Indeed, the logic was that this was a healthy and constructive criticism, as it would ensure a more morally valid and ideologically sound version of Zionism. How wrong I was, I learned only after I left the country in 1979 to embark upon my doctoral studies in Oxford.

But just before I departed some cracks appeared in the Zionist wall around me. The last seminar I attended as a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was given by Professor Yehoshua Porath, Israel’s leading historian on the Palestinian national movement at the time. He was then an ardent supporter of the Jordanian option and showed us how close the ties were between the Zionist movement and the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan. He argued, and I substantiated this in a modest essay I prepared, that the British Empire viewed favourably (as did Porath) the idea of a Zionist-Hashemite Palestine. Porath hoped that this triangular relationship would continue in the future. It was in that course that I decided to devote my advanced studies to the issue of 1948 – without realising what I would find out, and without grasping its wider implications for investigating the foundational mythology of the state.

I began working on the 1948 war in 1980 as a DPhil student at St Antony’s College, Oxford, under the supervision of Albert Hourani and Roger Owen. Hourani was near the end of his formal academic career, and would begin his magnificent and popular A History of the Arab Peoples¹ soon after my arrival. But I was his last student in Oxford. Roger Owen was in mid-career, already a renowned and established scholar who was working, among other things, on the economic and social history of mandatory Palestine.² I could not have asked for more in terms of supervision. Albert was someone who had already, in 1946, represented the Palestinian cause in front of the Anglo-American commission of inquiry and he remained a keen observer of the Palestine conflict, and Roger was transforming the conventional orientalist historiography of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the political and economic history of the area as a whole. Both were familiar with the Palestinian narrative of 1948. This meant not only recognising the version of the side that until then had been the ‘enemy’ for me, but also exposing the mythology and fabrication of the version to which I had subscribed since childhood. They both guided me into the archives. They, as much as I, were unsure of what I would find, or of how my own leftist Zionist politics at the time would affect my reaction to the newly-declassified documents on the 1948 war.

It was my hunch that I should first choose the British angle in my new journey into 1948. My proposition was that the overall British policy in 1948 was neutral in the sense that London’s principal policymakers detested both sides. Methodologically, it meant a research unrestrained by any theoretical premises, a straightforward work of deciphering diplomatic documents and organising them into a coherent description of policy. As Roger Owen reminded me every now and then, the academic account of a policy is always far clearer than the policy itself, which is full of contradictions and paradoxes. After a few months in the archives I realised that British policy in the 1948 war was less neutral than I had originally thought: it was first and foremost anti-Palestinian. His Majesty King George VI’s government viewed a division of historical and mandatory Palestine into two political entities, a future Jewish state and a future Jordanian state, as the best solution for the conflict and the best means of safeguarding the British Empire’s interests in the area. This was an anti-Palestinian policy, and – as Avi Shlaim, my colleague, chose to call it – a collusion between Israel, Jordan and Britain that almost wiped out Palestine and the Palestinians.³

Armed with a thesis that was wholly based on archives, most of which had not been declassified before, and a simple narrative, I was still convinced, when I finished my dissertation in 1984, that my work was purely academic and had very little relevance to contemporary issues or to politics. I toiled for several years searching for an academic job, while at the same time turning my thesis into a book that appeared in 1988 as Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951.⁴ In it, I debunked one Israeli foundational myth: that in 1948 Britain was the enemy of Zionism and Israel. Based on my research I went further, saying that Britain played a major role in allowing the Zionist movement to found a state in Palestine through the ethnic cleansing of its indigenous people.

Around that time, two more books by Israeli authors appeared that challenged other elements in the accepted version of the 1948 war. One was Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem⁵ and the other was Avi Shlaim’s Collusion across the Jordan.⁶ Morris was the first Israeli historian who, on the basis of archival material, conceded that a mass expulsion of Palestinians took place during the 1948 war. He claimed, however, that this was not the result of a blueprint or master plan, but rather the consequence of a war that developed according to circumstances on the ground. No less important was his exposure of Israel’s anti-repatriation policy – the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and dozens of urban neighborhoods in the summer of 1948 in order to render impractical any idea of a Palestinian return, as demanded by the international community.

Shlaim dealt in depth with the history and nature of the collusion between the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan and Israel’s leaders to divide Palestine between themselves at the expense of the Palestinians. From his book, it became clear that Israel’s Arab policy had been aggressive and coercive as early as 1948, a theme that he would develop later in The Iron Wall, which comprehensively analysed Israel’s Arab policy between 1948 and 2000.

The liberal Jewish journal Tikkun became the first vehicle through which these new historiographical developments were presented and their broader implications explored.⁷ In 1988, the journal’s editors convened some of the so-called ‘new’ and ‘old’ historians for a workshop at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. The gathering was summarised by Morris in an article in Tikkun, which introduced to the world the concept of the ‘new history’ of Israel.⁸ His inclination and that of others was to describe the three books (and a previous book, The Birth of Israel,⁹ written by the non-professional historian Simha Flapan), by the more appropriate term of ‘revisionist history’. In Israel, however, ‘revisionist’ refers specifically to the Revisionist Movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, leader of a right-wing Zionist group that preceded the Likud party. Thus, we settled for the less satisfying term ‘new history’, which in Germany, Italy and France means an attempt to justify some of the more unpleasant chapters in those countries’ pasts. Not the best of associations, yet the term stuck and won legitimacy without any negative connotation. For my part, I summed up the debate in a narrative that was published in 1992 in a book entitled The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951.¹⁰

In that debate at the Van Leer Institute, it was clear that the ‘new history’ was a partial reconstruction of the events of 1948 as these related only to an analysis of Israeli policy. Nonetheless, it was a significant contribution. In this new narrative, the accepted Zionist version of how Israel had behaved in its early years was fundamentally challenged. The ‘new history’ was, however, very conservative in its approach to ‘truth’ and adhered closely to a positivist and empiricist methodology.

This kind of history writing has two deficiencies. It restricts the scope of historical discussion to ‘new revelations’ and relieves historians of the necessity of discussing their insights and the wider implications of the new perspective. Second, as an elitist history, it excludes most members of the societies involved in the country’s historical development. Its greatest merit was that it adopted many, but not all, of the principal chapters of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. By doing this, and despite the historians’ attempt to remain objective, the new works contributed to our knowledge of the past as well as affecting our understanding of the present. In 1993, during the early negotiations of the Oslo Accords, when Palestinian negotiators doubted the sincerity of their partners’ peace plans, Yossi Beilin, the chief Israeli negotiator, produced copies of the ‘new history’ books to convince his interlocutors that there was indeed a fresh perspective on the key issues in Israel.

The reconstruction of the past was now clearly connected to contemporary efforts to find a political settlement to the conflict. That this was intentional was strongly denied by Benny Morris and to a lesser extent by Avi Shlaim. It took me a decade after the Tikkun article to be convinced that this was the most valuable aspect of the ‘new history’ in Israel – that it reflected the major claims about 1948 that the Palestinians had put forward for many years. All three of us, on the other hand, failed in the 1990s to produce any works that went beyond an analysis of Israeli diplomacy and military action. We explored a crucial part of Palestine’s history, but by no means an exclusive one. Ever since 1996, I have written about the need to expand the territory of this historical research and eventually attempted it myself.¹¹ These two issues, the wider political and ideological context in which history is written and the need to write a more encompassing history extending beyond the realm of the political elite, informed my academic work in the 1990s.

Although I moved far away from that association, especially with Morris who transformed to become a racist anti-Arab pundit and less of a professional historian, I still fondly recall our early days as the ‘new historians’. Benny, Avi and myself were a rare sight in the Israeli academic scene and we felt, quite wrongly I am sure, that much depended on our continued commitment to the ‘truth’. When, in 1992, we were invited to a conference in Jerusalem after participating in one in Tel Aviv, we decided to go by car. Knowing the doubtful driving abilities of my colleagues I insisted on being the driver, fearing that otherwise an accident would kill the new history ‘all together’.

I also moved away from my Oxford origins. As a young doctoral student there, I chose 1948 as the subject of my thesis. In a direct link to what I had studied in Jerusalem, I wrote about British policy in that critical year. It was an important subject and I think contributed significantly to a better understanding of Britain’s moral and political responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. For me, it had more far-reaching implications: the solid evidence of Israel’s crimes compelled me never to let go of the Nakbah. This subject matter turned my professional career into an attempt to preserve the memory of these tragic events and to struggle for the rectification of the evil done. I found abundant proof for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine, and was taken aback by the speed at which the Judaisation of former Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods was carried out after the displacement of the local population. This information was accessible beforehand, due to the work of Palestinian historians and knowledge of the Palestinian struggle in general, but I needed my own personal journey to ascertain what was in front of me all the time, yet concealed by layers of denial and distortion.

The villages from which the Palestinian population was evicted in 1948 were renamed and resettled in a matter of months. This scenario contrasted sharply not only with what I had learned at school about 1948, but also what I had been taught as a BA student at the Hebrew University, even though several of my courses had covered the history of Palestine. Needless to say, what I discovered also contradicted the messages conveyed to me as a citizen of Israel during my initiation ceremony into the army, at public events such as the annual Independence Day, and in the daily discussion in the country’s media on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When I returned home to Israel in 1984 to begin an academic career, I discovered the phenomenon of Nakbah denial. It was part of a larger phenomenon of excluding the Palestinians altogether from the local academic discourse. This was particularly evident, and bewildering, in the field of Middle Eastern Studies in which I was now a lecturer. Towards the end of the 1980s, as a result of the First Intifada (1987–93) the situation improved somewhat, with Palestinian history being introduced into Middle Eastern Studies as a legitimate subject. But even then this was done mainly through the perception of academics who had been intelligence experts on the subject in the past, and who still had close ties with the security services and the IDF. This Israeli academic perspective erased the Nakbah as a historical event, preventing local scholars and academics from challenging the overall denial and suppression of the catastrophe in the world outside the universities’ ivory towers.

As mentioned after the Tikkun article, the term ‘new history’ was introduced into the Israeli academic discourse by Benny Morris and myself as part of an attempt to arouse public awareness regarding the existence of a non-Zionist counter-narrative of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was a year or so before the newspaper Ha’aretz became interested in the subject and most of the printed and electronic media in Israel soon followed. For a while, these public forums were full of lively debates about what had occurred in 1948. But this brief era of pluralism was to last only from 1990 to 2000. As happens so often in an eventful state like Israel, the debate did not last long and soon gave way to other more pressing problems. However, its relevance to topical issues such as the peace negotiations with the Palestinians, the relationship between Israel’s Jewish majority and Palestinian minority and the overall questions of legitimacy and identity of the Jewish state ensured its return, every now and then, to the public arena and consciousness.¹²

There was only a slight rebuke from my colleagues in the university, and I did not have tenure at that time. I think most of them did not read my doctorate, and when it became a book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, it was still written in the style of a doctoral thesis, which has a way of muting even the strongest critiques. Publication in the press, on the other hand, had introduced me for the first time to hate letters and death threats by email and snail mail. Some were sent express or registered to stress the urgency of the ‘well-wishers’. Then came the telephone calls – anonymous of course, and poisonous. Delivering public lectures became a second career for me, with every encounter with the public resembling a rugby match more than an academic occasion, but verbal violence very rarely turned into anything physical. I should have been aware of things to come when a well-publicised conference on the ‘new hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Demons of the Nakbah
• 2. The Arming of the Zionist Mind
• 3. The Katz Affair
• 4. The Trial and the Acquittal
• 5. The Best Runner in the Class
• 6. The Battle for the Historiography of 1948
• 7. The Home University
• 8. The Last Straw: Lebanon and Gaza
• 9. The Killing Fields of Gaza
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index