Palestine: a policy of deliberate blindness

Palestine: a policy of deliberate blindness
How the world backed itself into a corner

Last year President Jacques Chirac asked Régis Debray to study the situation in the Middle East. On 15 January 2007 Debray sent the French authorities the following document on Palestine. It is an important key to understanding a long policy drift whose results are now obvious.

By Régis Debray
Aug 2007

Dennis Ross, formerly the United States envoy to the Middle East, admitted back in 2000 that mistakes had been made in the 1978 Camp David accords: the diplomatic process had not taken enough account of developments on the ground, especially the settlements. The number of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories doubled from 1994 to 2000. As many Israelis have settled in the West Bank since the Oslo accords of 1993 as in the previous 25 years. With an international conference again being discussed, it would be a mistake to continue to ignore the real state of affairs. There is no need for a committee of inquiry. The report has already been drawn up, many times over. No conflict in the world is as well documented, mapped and recorded.

The OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), a United Nations agency, keeps up-to-date, detailed maps of the disputed territories, with photographs, population counts and graphs. It takes an hour to look at them, but doing so might forestall some of the never-ending statements of good intentions.

The maps show that the physical, economic and human basis for a viable Palestinian state is disappearing. The two-state solution and Israeli writer Amos Oz’s “fair divorce” (a territory shared between two national homes, one smaller than the other and demilitarised but sovereign, viable and continuous) are now empty phrases belonging to the realm of might-have-been. Some might argue that we have not yet reached the point of no return and that the Israelis may have won the territorial battle (with only 22% of British mandate Palestine now outside their control) but the Palestinians are sure to win the demographic battle. They invoke the resilience of the local population in the face of the steam roller that is slowly but surely implementing the 1968 Allon Plan and the 1984 “Road Plan 50”.

It is clear from developments on the ground that:

• the purpose of the security wall is not, as is believed, to trace a border that, however illegal (since it encloses over 10% of the West Bank), will at least serve as the dotted line for a future international frontier;

• it is true (as Ehud Omert said on Israeli army radio on 20 March 2006) that Israel’s strategic border lies on the Jordan: the whole valley has been declared a forbidden area and the intervening area has been nibbled away (cross-river transit is only possible at certain points);

• the new east-west bypass roads built at the expense of the old north-south axis clearly chart a territory in the process of annexation, with space for three or four Arab bantustans (Jenin, Ramallah and Jericho). The exhaustion of natural resources in these overcrowded enclaves will eventually lead to massive emigration (much of the elite, especially Christian, has already left); and

• with the construction of the separation wall, the ongoing judaisation of East Jerusalem and reconfiguration of the Jerusalem municipality, the UN’s repeated but purely formal condemnations have no effect on Israel’s grip on the whole city (1).

Away from the cameras

There is a huge gap between what is said because we want to hear it (local withdrawals, easing of travel restrictions, removal of one checkpoint out of 20, a change of tone) and what is being done on the ground, which we don’t want to see (interlinking of settlements, construction of bridges and tunnels, encirclement of Palestinian towns, expropriation of land, destruction of houses). Some would describe that gap as duplicity, others as ambiguity. The gradual encroachment happens out of sight of the cameras, without causing a stir and without an explicit colonial diktat. Nobody makes a formal complaint, even supposing they can find out what’s going on – difficult if you haven’t grown up locally. Israeli maps and school textbooks refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria and, following the Knesset’s recent rejection of a proposal from a Labour education minister, obliteration of the 1967 green line is now a legal fait accompli.

This is not just a gap between the de facto and de jure situations. It reflects a method and tradition going back to the earliest days of the Yishuv (2): the strategy of fait accompli. That strategy has always paid off: the Jewish state was there before it was declared and recognised in 1948, as was the army. What we have is a theatre with two stages: on the international stage we hear repeated vague and encouraging speeches concerning withdrawal, coexistence and a Palestinian state, but the things that count (settlements, roads, tunnels, water tables) happen on the operational stage next door, where the outcome is decided out of public view.

Understanding how public opinion works in a democracy, successive Israeli governments of the left and right take care to administer regular painkillers, plans for unilateral withdrawal or the partial dismantlement of settlements and encouraging announcements that are always conditional and come to nothing. The media live from day to day, with no attempt to remember. Who now recalls that the road map (3) was supposed to be “a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005”?

The Oslo process did not just remain a dead letter: with the military reoccupation of Zones A and B (4) in April 2002, it went into reverse.

Territorial fragmentation cuts off local authorities from any possible central Palestinian administration and from each other, while the systematic physical destruction of national institutions, Palestinian infrastructure and political leaders by the Israeli army ensures internal anarchy and the spread of clans and gang violence: bottomless chaos. Clearly the path that has been taken is not that of nation building but the deconstruction of all possible governance beyond the separation wall. It is the logical counterpart of a 30-year annexation process that will be endorsed, when the time comes, “in view of the new reality on the ground”.

Auto-suggestion

In these circumstances, constant invocation of the road map by all parties has more to do with auto-suggestion than a sober look at the consistent transformation of reality. That reality may not be visible from Geneva, Paris or New York, but it is immediately apparent to anyone travelling throughout the country after a few years’ absence. It is a land carved up by military force, where the Israeli settlements are no longer shapes on a Palestinian background – instead the Palestinian areas appear as shapes on a solidly-infra structured Israeli background: a land where water reserves are confiscated and a temporary travel restriction is very close to a permanent ban.

Some may take comfort in these ideas:

• since it was possible to withdraw settlements from Gaza, it should be possible in the near future in the West Bank. That is to ignore the fact that the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from one place in Gaza was soon followed by the unpublicised installation of 20,000 settlers in another (the West Bank/Jerusalem). Gaza is not part of the promised land, whereas Judea and Samaria are its backbone. Sharon did not make any secret of the fact that withdrawal on the margins would be compensated by strengthening the Israeli presence elsewhere (438,000 settlers to date, including 192,910 in East Jerusalem);

• the dismantling of four small settlements in the north (1,000 settlers) and the proposed concentration of 60,000 settlers in the most populous blocs, Maale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion, will create a free space. But with the settlements linked in a continuous string under cover of the security wall, the West Bank has been effectively cut in two. The wall separates Palestinians from each other even more than it separates them from the Israelis.

What is taking shape is not the Palestinian state announced and desired by all: it is an as yet unperceived Israeli territory enclosing three self-governing Palestinian enclaves.

All parties have a vested interest in preserving the international pretence (5).

• For the Israelis, history is being created under the cover of the pretence.
• The Palestinians cannot be told the truth – they are under occupation yet hoping for a better life and not self-destruction; wishful thinking provides notables, elected representatives and officials with a living, status, dignity and a raison d’être.
• The Europeans chose to salve their consciences by providing financial and humanitarian aid to apologise for their political passivity and voluntary blindness.
• The thinking of the Americans owes more to the Old Testament than the New; their link with Israel is a parent-child relationship beyond criticism. This shared illusion of self-protection results from the coincidence of opposing interests.

Is this situation tenable to the end of the century? It seems doubtful, given Israel’s obsession with security, which makes it less secure, and its disregard for the demographic and religious trends in the region (6). Could not at least one European government convey to our Israeli friends that we are not all taken in by the deception, and that those who deceive may not be be its first victims – but will certainly be its last?

____________________

Régis Debray is a writer and philosopher, and honorary chairman of the IESR (European Institute of Religious Studies), Paris

(1) See Dominique Vidal and Philippe Rekacewicz, “Jerusalem: whose very own and golden city?”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 2007.

(2) A Hebrew term used by the Zionist movement before the creation of the State of Israel to designate Palestine’s Jewish inhabitants and new immigrants.

(3) The road map, a proposal for ending the Israel-Palestine conflict, was adopted by the Quartet (UN, US, EU and Russia) on 30 April 2003.

(4) The Palestinian territories comprise the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip (45 km long and 10 km wide). The Oslo accords divided them into three zones:

– Zone A comprising, since 1994, Gaza and the towns of Jericho, Jenin, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Tulkarem, Nablus, Bethlehem (Hebron was the subject of a separate agreement in January 1997), in which the Palestinian Authority has civil jurisdiction and police powers; – Zone B comprising the remaining areas of the West Bank, in which the Palestinian Authority has civil jurisdiction but shares responsibility for internal security with the Israeli army;

– Zone C comprising the Israeli settlements establishing in the West Bank, Gaza (since dismantled) and East Jerusalem, which remain under the control of the Jewish state.

(5) See Alain Gresh, “Palestine wrecked”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, July 2007.

(6) See the report (PDF) submitted to the UN secretary general on 5 May by Alvaro de Soto, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.

Middle Eastern Jews (mizrahim) and the Zionist National Narrative

Middle Eastern Jews (mizrahim) and the Zionist National Narrative
Introduction

Many Mizrahim in Israel felt excluded and neglected by the labor Zionist governments of the 1950s and 1960s led by MAPAI and its successor, the Labor Party. Labor Zionism was a self-consciously European ideological synthesis that emerged in response to the crisis of Eastern European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It proposed to “normalize” the Jewish people by transforming them from a persecuted minority disproportionately composed of economically marginal petty merchants and craftsmen into citizens and productive workers and peasants: the proper subjects of a nation-state and what labor Zionists hoped would become a socialist economy. Secularism, socialism, redemption through physical labor, and a reformation of Jewish identity in national-political terms were the core elements of the labor Zionist solution to the Jewish problem. This ideology was articulated and implemented through highly centralized political parties—MAPAI, MAPAM (the United Workers' Party), and Le-Ahdut ha-‘Avodah (Unity of Labor)—that created the institutions that dominated the prestate yishuv (Jewish settlement) and the early state of Israel—the Histadrut, the kibutzim, the Haganah, and the Palmah.

Most Mizrahim shared little of the history in the diaspora or in the yishuv that informed the theory and practice of labor Zionism. Except for the descendents of the pre-Zionist “old yishuv ” and several thousand Yemenis who were brought to mandate Palestine by Zionist authorities seeking Jewish workers who would work for Arab wages, only a small minority participated actively in the Zionist project before 1948.^[38] The leadership of the Zionist movement and the early state of Israel was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi.

After open Zionist activity became impossible in Nazi-occupied Europe, all the Zionist parties of the yishuv began to send emissaries to Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. There had been small Zionist organizations in these countries before World War II. The combination of the emissaries' work, the reception of the news of the mass murder of European Jewry, and the more precarious conditions of Middle Eastern Jews due to the intensification of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict made Zionism a significant, though still a minority, orientation for Middle Eastern Jews after the war.

Some Mizrahim became active in the labor Zionist movement, but most had no links to the labor Zionist establishment and its key institutions. Hence, they had no patrons to ease their way into Israeli society. When they arrived in Israel in large numbers in the 1950s, their customs and lifestyles were commonly discounted as “primitive,” and they were expected to adopt the modern, healthy, tzabar culture. By a conscious decision of the state and Zionist authorities, large numbers of Mizrahim were settled in “development towns,” moshavim (cooperative agricultural villages), or in the former homes of recently departed Palestinian refugees in cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, and Tiberias. Their role in the Zionist project was to establish a Jewish population in territories and neighborhoods previously inhabited by Palestinian Arabs and to occupy the bottom ranks of the Jewish labor force. The immigration of the Mizrahim was vital for the demographic and economic stabilization of the Jewish state, but they were settled on the margins of Israeli economic, political, and cultural life.^[39]

Alienation from the political ideology, cultural and social norms, institutions, and economic benefits of labor Zionism drove many Mizrahim and their children to provide the votes that brought the first Likud government to power in Israel in 1977. The new regime made extensive efforts to find places for its supporters in the official national culture and historical narrative. Dozens of scholarly and popular books, articles, television programs, and public symposia revised the formerly Eurocentric history of Zionism, asserting that there had been a Zionist movement in Middle Eastern Jewish communities and that Mizrahim had contributed substantially to establishing the state of Israel. The inflection of Israeli public culture was transformed as the Middle Eastern origins of about half its Jewish population at last received public and official acknowledgement. Mizrahi Hebrew accents began to be heard on the radio and television news, and Arab-accented Hebrew music found its way to the top of the popular song lists. In response, Labor and other political parties began to promote “their” Mizrahi figures and to rediscover and revalorize the role of Mizrahim in the history of labor Zionism. The reassertion of Egyptian Jewish identity examined in Chapter 8 is both an expression of this broad movement of Mizrahi self-assertion and a particular phenomenon related to the course of Egyptian-Israeli relations.

Another Act in the Mizrahi-Palestinian Tragedy

Another Act in the Mizrahi-Palestinian Tragedy

By Reuven Abarjel and Smadar Lavie

On January 25, 2006, Hamas won a landslide victory in the democratic Palestinian legislative elections. The elections were conducted under tight U.S. supervision. Immediately thereafter, Israel's general attorney, Menny Mazouz, started exploring the legal procedures to jail the movement's leadership. Soon the IDF started executing the Gazan leadership of the movement by air strikes. Several dozen innocent Palestinian civilians were casualties in the process.

On June 24 the IDF land forces entered the Gaza strip and kidnapped two Hamas men. As a response, on June 25 Hamas captured Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier. The IDF immediately launched "Operation Summer Rains," to inflict large-scale destruction and to press for Shalit's release. On 12 July, Hizbollah captured two more Israeli soldiers--Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser--in the Lebanese border zone. From then on, IDF's "Operation Just Reward" has been inflicting heinous carnage and destruction all over Lebanon.

And now here we are, in front of the Israeli TV screen, bombarded by the discourse of experts. The channels are broadcasting live from studios and battlefields. Commercial interludes are part of the show. By default the majority of experts are Ashkenazi (European Jewish) males. They are flanked by a handful of Mizrahi men (Oriental Jews who immigrated to Israel mainly from the Arab World). These men climbed the public service ladder within the nationalist hegemonic confines. Together, they are Israel's knowledge mercenaries. Through the tube - Israel's tribal campfire -- they dictate the national agenda. The viewers are convinced it must be humanistic, because it is calmly narrated by handsome necktied men. They use professional lingo and have the standardized, de-Semitized Hebrew accent. These talking heads say this war is not only for our own good, but is also for the civic betterment of Palestinians and Lebanese. Their sober discourse facilitates public compliance with IDF's shift of tactics--from warplane "surgical killings" to a combination of marine, air and land forces, to destroy the Hizbollah using the massive weaponry that the U.S. allocates to the IDF.

The three Israeli TV channels bombard us with metaphors like "crushing Hizbollah," "the return of Israeli deterrence," and "the rehabilitation of the Israeli soldier's fighter image." Such imagery enables us to peer into the blood, smoke and devastation the IDF sows. Veiled by the fuss over Lebanon, Israel concurrently continues to plan and execute the socio-cide of both public and intimate spheres of the West Bank and Gaza. The present results: reaping the temporary unity of the Jewish victim-turned-warrior nation-state.

When the cannons roar, the Mizrahi communities fall silent. Like servants before the master, the Mizrahim habitually comply. They are the generations flowing from the Jews who were in Palestine from time immemorial, as well as descendants of those brought here from the Arab World and other non-European countries during the previous century. They are the local hosts for those fleeing the New European anti-Semitism. Mizrahim provide the demographic majority on whose civic docility the Eurocentric Israeli regime rests. Mizrahim have been the Jewish labour turning the cogs of the European-Zionist colonial project ever since its inception, with the Yemeni-Jewish labour migration of 1882. Mizrahim freed Zionism from its total dependency on indigenous Palestinian labour. Mizrahim were the Zionists' "natural labourers," employed in near-slavery conditions. In order for Mizrahim to work with efficacy, the Zionist hegemonic patriarchy ruptured Mizrahi extended families. For themselves, they used the appellation "ideological labourers," and went on to found Israel's socialist-liberal Left. It is this very Left that is now fighting yet another self-righteous Israeli war. The Zionist movement's leadership has always conducted itself, in front of the Mizrahim, the Palestinians, and the citizens of the Arab World, through the tools of occupation, oppression and humiliation. Yet Mizrahi communities keep silent. Along the way, the US-European minority has co-opted the Mizrahi moral, economic and cultural power to resist.

Israel has always compartmentalized its occupation into different categories, as if Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the Palestinian Diaspora were not all consequences of the 1948 Nakba and 1967 Naqsa. Yet even such a divisive strategy has failed to diminish the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle for a homeland. Despite the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, this strategy has nevertheless resulted in an almost across-the-board refusal of the Arab body of citizenry to normalize Israel into the region.

• The Ashkenazi leadership has repeatedly evoked the image that Israel is a European villa, planted in the midst of the regional jungle, from Bible times to the present day.
  

Mizrahi communities are intricately positioned along the Israel/Palestine divide as a result of the hegemonic sophistication of the Ashkenazim. Historically, under Menachem Begin, it was the Right who offered the Mizrahim a political home of sorts by not forcing them to secularize in imitation of the Labour party regime. Mizrahim are situated between the rock of economic-cultural oppression caused by the US-European capitalist Israeli rule, and the hard place of Palestine's war of independence. Zionism was superimposed on Mizrahi communities, yet they welcomed it with open arms. Many still believe in its deceitful vision of an integrationalist inter-racial utopia, even though they are systematically excluded from the centres of power due to Zionism's intra-Jewish racism. Those few who succeeded in securing high-ranking positions in the Ashkenazi regime have long since erased their own past, as they adopted their masters' worldview. Rebuilding the ruptured Mizrahi families was difficult, because they were denied access to the financial and cultural resources necessary to facilitate an equal participation in the Zionist patriarchy. Mizrahi men's feminism is epitomized in their struggle to mimic handsomely crested Sabra masculinity, hoping it might provide them with equal opportunities. Even with the arrival of South Asian maids in the 1990s, Mizrahi women continue to occupy the lowest-paying scale of the Israeli job market. Having lost their production line and house cleaning jobs to Filipinas, they work as lower level secretaries and service providers, and they constitute the majority of the unemployed.

Most of the Palestinian suicide attacks have occurred in the public spaces of the economically deprived and legally disenfranchised Mizrahi communities:

• bus rides taken by people who can't afford to have a private car,
• markets frequented by those who can't afford to shop in air conditioned malls and supermarkets, and
• 'hoods too poor to afford to purchase the patrol services of private security companies, and where the police avoid entering except during drug raids.

The majority of the dead and wounded have been

• Mizrahim,
  
• destitute immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and
  
• reign guest workers.
  

The majority IDF casualties of the al-Aqsa intifada since October 2000 have been

• Mizrahim,
  
• Druze,
  
• Russian immigrants, and
  
• Ethiopians - the marginal groups that comprise the majority of Israel's social fabric.
  

Since the 1982 Lebanon war, frontline military service is out of fashion among the Ashkenazi elite, who no longer find it necessary for upward mobility. Due to the historical conjunction of ethnicity and poverty typical of Mizrahi communities, young Mizrahi men are excluded from avenues of upward mobility that would require a major capital investment. Alas, combat zone service is one of the few routes for socio-economic mobility -- an integrationist phantom of sorts.

Sderot, a borderzone Mizrahi town often bombarded by Qassam missiles, has a high percentage of Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, and high unemployment rates. It is the Israeli town closest to Gaza. The same demography is true of the development towns and agricultural co-ops on the Lebanese border, and even of some of the Haifa 'hoods hit by the Hizbollah Katiushas.

Mizrahi communities were pushed into the West Bank and Gaza post-1967 settlements through the back door. Both the Right and Left wing Israeli governments prevented any reasonably priced housing solutions for residents of Mizrahi slums. The mass Soviet immigration of the 1990s transformed Israel's centre, the source of most decently paying jobs, into a real estate bubble. This prohibited Mizrahi families from leaving the ghettos, unless for subsidized houses in the settlements. These were built by the housing ministry on the pristine West Bank hills and virgin Gaza beaches. They made the Israeli dream of a single-family dwelling come true. The superior public school system was an additional benefit. The Judaization of the Galilee project was designed for Ashkenazim who could not afford single-family dwellings in central Israel - gated communities with strict admission committees, whose majestic mansions overlook Palestinian villages situated within the 1949 Rhodes armistice agreement.

In the mid 1980s, when the welfare state disappeared from Mizrahi communities' lives (if it had ever been there), ultra-orthodox Sephardic Judaism entered the scene in the form of the SHAS party. At its height, during the 1999 elections, SHAS won 17 seats in the Knesset. Four of them were ministers of influential government offices, and four were deputy ministers. SHAS offered an apparatus of education and food to rehab Mizrahi honour, either by preaching the return to the forefathers' pious morality or by exposing the racism in the disenfranchisement and poverty. Eventually, such an intrusion was destructive. In fact, the ultra-orthodox Mizrahi new sages adopted the old Ashkenazi method of discipline: a controlled dispensation of charity so that the very act of dispensing becomes a shock absorber against any possible social upheaval. Since SHAS's entry into the public sphere, even the feeble resistance of Mizrahi ghettos has ceased to exist.

The centrist walls of the Arab nation-state cracked during the Intifada with Anwar Sadat's Opening-to-the-West policy. Multinational cultural and market globalization forces entered the Arab World's civic sphere. Forming alternative societal institutions, the Islamist movements started substituting for the state. Like SHAS, these institutions were constructed on the premise of injecting pious morality into the civic sphere. The communalist power of both SHAS and the Islamist movements rested in part on a reformulation of strict religious familial patriarchy as a liberating feminist praxis. Concurrently, the Islamist movements, as in the cases of Egypt and the Occupied Territories, have integrated women into all spheres of their public activism but fighting.

We do not wish here to judge Arab society. Yet to the best of our understanding, the impact of Islamist movements in the Arab public sphere has been diametrically opposite to that of SHAS in the Mizrahi ghettos. With a middle class professional core, the Islamists presented the Arab world with a new agenda. All the while, the Mizrahi ultra-orthodoxy imposed the forefathers' morality as yet another strategy for integrating the Mizrahim into the bosom of the Zionist lived reality. But how could they not? SHAS sensed it had no other option. Its middle class emerged from the rank and file of party apparatchiks. The Question of Palestine was one of the unifying themes of the Islamist movements. During the 1980s, Sabra and Shatila reverberated into the First Intifada. Palestinian nationalism gathered constituencies in the West. Hoping to counter Palestine's secular nationalism, the worried Israeli regime nurtured the Islamist movements in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories. Assuming that these movements would be nothing but SHAS-style charities, the Israeli regime hoped they might also serve as its tools to deny yet again the Question of Palestine. As the PLO welfare apparatus relocated from Lebanon to Tunis, the Islamist movements patched the cracks and flowered forth. The 2006 democratic elections in the Palestinian authority ended in a sweeping Hamas victory, which of course disappointed Israel's expectations. This time around, the Zionist regime preferred the necktied and conventionally handsome Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over hennaed and long-bearded Muhammad abu-Tir. Henceforth Israel, backed by the US, sweepingly refused to recognize and negotiate with the legitimate government of the Palestinian people.

These days the Mizrahim are the ones who pay the high price required to join Israel's "family of blood," a key concept in the Zionist discourse of national honour. They fall like ripe fruit into Ashkenazi-Zionist militant adventurism. The Western pro-Israeli lobby, with its Israeli branches, does not pay the price. On the contrary, it shares the profits with the G-8 superpowers. This axis of evil will come to an end only if Mizrahi communities are able to conjoin the memories of their Arab past with a vision for a future that will be shared with the people of this region--not just the Palestinians, but the rest of the Arab World as well.

As long as the Arab World's public discourse does not differentiate between Yahud (Jews), Sahyoniyin (Zionists), and Yahud-Arab (Arab Jews), and as long as all Israelis are considered Yahud-wa-bas (just Jews), such a process is impossible. As long as the Western peace discourse does not designate separate categories for Mizrahi Jewry, the majority of Israel's Jewry, for the Ashkenazi peace movements, and for Zionism, Mizrahi communities' processual reworking into the region will lack the transnational aura necessary to render it possible. As long as the Arab leadership, not to mention the Palestinians, prefers talking peace with the ruling Ashkenazi minority -- be it Zionists, post-Zionists, even anti-Zionists - Mizrahi communities will continue to view the peace discourse as part of the repertoire of exotic antics that the Ashkenazi cosmopolitan elite perform for the West. At the same time, they will continue to conceive of the Arabs, particularly Palestinians, only as lethal enemies.

Those who present themselves as seekers of peace -- Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin -- are actually supporting the present destruction of civil society in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. They are the spokesmen explaining the necessity for the atrocious measures taken by the Israeli government. Mizrahim remember them mainly as those who started the move to privatize and outsource labour from their community into the globalised economic wonderland that the peace dons termed "the New Middle East." For Mizrahi communities, unemployment and debt were the most immediate results of the Oslo agreement's peace festival. These days the peace dons also brandish a Moroccan defence minister, Amir Peretz, to execute their policies, even though they are the ones who publicly dissed him and failed him along his political career. No wonder this discourse of peace is so alien to Mizrahi communities.

The experts on TV tell us that the purpose of the present destruction is to secure the release of the "kidnapped" soldiers. If this were indeed the purpose of operations "Summer Rains" and "Adequate Pay," the release of all Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners from Israeli jails would be far more cost effective, whether in blood or money. But, alas, when the canons stop roaring, when we finish counting our dead and cleaning up our ruins, we are likely to return to point zero--1882. The Mizrahim, Palestinians and foreign guest workers will resurrect Lebanon, Palestine and Israel from under the rubble, at near-slavery wages and with no social benefits. The US will provide the funding. As long as Mizrahi communities fail to understand that these wars commemorate their disenfranchised poverty, as long as there is no insistence on organized, popular Mizrahi resistance, no just peace will be achieved in our region.

Reuven Abarjel is co-founder of the Israeli Black Panthers;
Smadar Lavie is a Professor of Anthropology and Mizrahi Feminist Activist


.

Five myths that help Israel’s war crimes

Five myths that help Israel’s war crimes
July 25, 2006
by Jonathan Cook

This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show, pitted against David Horowitz, a “Semite supremacist” who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the rest of us.

It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States on Middle East matters -- well, apart from the regular whackos who fill my email in-tray. But five minutes of listening to Horowitz speak, and the sympathy with which his arguments were greeted by Laura (“The Professors -- your book’s a great read, David”), left me a lot more frightened about the world’s future.

Horowitz’s response to every question, every development in the Middle East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria or Iran, is the same:

“They want to drive the Jews into the sea”.

It’s as simple as that. Not even a superficial attempt at analysis; just the message that the Arab world is trying to finish off the genocide started by Europe. And if Laura is any yardstick, a lot of Americans buy that stuff.

Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the round hole of his claims that the “Jews” are facing an imminent genocide in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks of US apologists for Israel -- regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura’s -- are promoting at least four myths regarding Hizbullah’s current rockets strikes on Israel. Unless they are challenged at every turn, the danger is that they will win the ground war against common sense in the US


The first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military hardware because Hizbullah began “raining down” rockets on the Galilee. Anyone with a short memory can probably recall that was not the first justification we were offered: that had to do with the two soldiers captured by Hizbullah on a border post on July 12.

But presumably Horowitz and his friends realised that 400 Lebanese dead and counting in little more than a week was hard to sell as a “proportionate” response. In any case Hizbullah kept telling the world how keen it was to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap.

Hundreds of dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured and more than half a million refugees -- all because Israel is not ready to sit down at the negotiating table. Even Horowitz could not “advocate for Israel” on that one.

So the chronology of war has been reorganised: now we are being told that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the barrage of Hizbullah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The international community is buying the argument hook, line and sinker. “Israel has the right to defend itself”, says every politician who can find a microphone to talk into.

But, if we cast our minds back, that is not how the “Middle East crisis”, as TV channels now describe it, started. It is worth recapping on those early events (and I won’t document the long history of Lebanese suffering at Israel’s hands that preceded it) before they become entirely shrouded in the mythology being peddled by Horowitz and others.

• Early on July 12 Hizbullah launched a raid against an army border post, in what was in the best interpretation a foolhardy violation of Israeli sovereignty. In the fighting the Shiite militia killed three soldiers and captured two others, while Hizbullah fired a few mortars at border areas in what the Israeli army described at the time as “diversionary tactics”. As a result of the shelling, five Israelis were “lightly injured”, with most needing treatment for shock, according to the Haaretz newspaper.
  

• Israel’s immediate response was to send a tank into Lebanon in pursuit of the Hizbullah fighters (its own foolhardy violation of Lebanese sovereignty). The tank ran over a landmine, which exploded killing four soldiers inside. Another soldier died in further clashes inside Lebanon as his unit tried to retrieve the bodies.
  

• Rather than open diplomatic channels to calm the violence down and start the process of getting its soldiers back, Israel launched bombing raids deep into Lebanese territory the same day. Given Israel’s worldview that it alone has a right to project power and fear, that might have been expected.
  

• But the next day Israel continued its rampage across the south and into Beirut, where the airport, roads, bridges, and power stations were pummelled. We now know from reports in the US media that the Israeli army had been planning such a strike against Lebanon for at least a year.
  

• In contrast to the image of Hizbullah frothing at the mouth to destroy Israel, its leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation. For the first day and a half, he limited his strikes to the northern borders areas, which have faced Hizbullah attacks in the past and are well protected.
  

• He waited till late on June 13 before turning his guns on Haifa, even though we now know he could have targeted Israel’s third largest city from the outset. A small volley of rockets directed at Haifa caused no injuries and looked more like a warning than an escalation.

• It was another three days -- days of constant Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, destroying the country and injuring countless civilians -- before Nasrallah hit Haifa again, including a shell that killed eight workers in a railway depot.

• No one should have been surprised. Nasrallah was doing exactly what he had threatened to do if Israel refused to negotiate and chose the path of war instead. Although the international media quoted his ominous televised message that

  “Haifa is just the beginning”,

  Nasrallah in fact made his threat conditional on Israel’s continuing strikes against Lebanon. In the same speech he warned:

  “As long as the enemy pursues its aggression without limits and red lines, we will pursue the confrontation without limits and red lines.”

  Well, Israel did, and so now has Nasrallah.
  

The second myth is that Hizbullah’s stockpile of 12,000 rockets -- the Israeli army’s estimate -- poses an existential threat to Israel. According to Horowitz and others, Hizbullah collected its armoury with the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state.

If this really was Hizbullah’s intention in amassing the weapons, it has a very deluded view of what is required to wipe Israel off the map. More likely, it collected the armoury in the hope that it might prove a deterrence -- even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now discovering -- against a repeat of Israel’s invasions of 1978 and 1982, and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards.

In fact, according to other figures supplied by the Israeli army, at least 2,000 Hizbullah rockets have already been fired into Israel while the army’s bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000 rockets. In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth of Hizbullah’s arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within range of the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being expunged. The Galilee may be emptier, as up to third of Israeli Jews seek temporary refuge in the south, but Israel’s existence is in no doubt at all.


The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war by targeting only terrorists, Hizbullah prefers to bring death and destruction on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

It is amazing that this myth even needs exploding, but after the efforts of Horowitz and co it most certainly does. As the civilian death toll in Lebanon has rocketed, international criticism of Israel has remained at the mealy-mouthed level of diplomatic requests for “restraint” and “proportionate responses”.

One need only cast a quick eye over the casualty figures from this conflict to see that if Israel is targeting only Hizbullah fighters it has been making disastrous miscalculations. So far some 400 Lebanese civilians are reported dead -- unfortunately for Horowitz’s story at least a third of them children. From the images coming out of Lebanon’s hospitals, many more children have survived but with terrible burns or disabling injuries.

The best estimates, though no one knows for sure, are that Hizbullah deaths are not yet close to the three-figures range.

In the latest emerging news from Lebanon, human rights groups are accusing Israel of violating international law and using cluster grenades, which kill indiscriminately. There are reports too, so far unconfirmed, that Israel has been firing illegal incendiary bombs.

Conversely, the breakdown of the smaller number of deaths of Israelis at the hands of Hizbullah -- 42 at the time of writing -- show that more soldiers have been killed than civilians.

In fact, although no one is making the point, Hizbullah’s rockets have been targeted overwhelming at strategic locations: the northern economic hub of Haifa, its satellite towns and the array of military sites across the Galilee.

Nasrallah seems fully aware that Israel has an impressive civil defence program of shelters that keep most civilians out of harm’s way. Unlike Horowitz I won’t presume to read Nasrallah’s mind: whether he wants to kill large numbers of Israeli civilians or not cannot be known, given his inability to do so.

But we can see from the choice of the sites he is striking that his primary goal is to give Israelis a small taste of the disruption of normal life that is being endured by the Lebanese. He has effectively closed Haifa for more than a week, shutting its port and financial centres. Israeli TV is speaking increasingly of the damage being inflicted on the country’s economy.

Because of Israel’s press censorship laws, it is impossible to discuss the locations of Israel’s military installations. But Hizbullah’s rockets are accurate enough to show that many are intended for the army’s sites in the Galilee, even if they are rarely precise enough to hit them.

It is obvious to everyone in Nazareth, for example, that the rockets landing close by, and once on, the city over the past week are searching out, and some have fallen extremely close to, the weapons factory sited near us.

Hizbullah seems to have as little concern for the collateral damage of civilian deaths as Israel -- each wants the balance of terror in its favour -- but it is nonsense to suggest that Hizbullah’s goals are any more ignoble than Israel’s. It is trying to dent the economy of northern Israel in retaliation for Israel’s total destruction of the Lebanese economy. Equally, it is trying to show Israel that it knows where its military installations are to be found. Both strategies appear to be having an impact, even if a minor one, on weakening Israeli resolve.

The fourth myth is a continuation of the third: Hizbullah has been endangering the lives of ordinary Lebanese by hiding among non-combatants.

We have seen this kind of dissembling by Israel and Horowitz before, though not repeated so enthusiastically by Western officials. The UN head of humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, who is in the region, accused Hizbullah of “cowardly blending” among the civilian population, and a similar accuation was levelled by the British foreign minister Kim Howells when he arrived in Israel.

In 2002 Israel made the same charge: that Palestinians resisting its army’s rampage through the refugee camps of the West Bank were hiding among civilians. The claim grew louder as more Palestinian civilians showed the irritating habit of gettting in the way of Israeli strikes against population centres. The complaints reached a crescendo when at least two dozen civilians were killed in Jenin as Israel razed the camp with Apache helicopters and Caterpillar bulldozers.

The implication of Egeland’s cowardly statement seems to be that any Lebanese fighter, or Palestinian one, resisting Israel and its powerful military should stand in an open field, his rifle raised to the sky, waiting to see who fares worse in a shoot-out with an Apache helicopter or F-16 fighter jet. Hizbullah’s reluctance to conduct the war in this manner, we are supposed to infer, is proof that they are terrorists.

Egeland and Howells need reminding that Hizbullah’s fighters are not aliens recently arrived from training camps in Iran, whatever Horowitz claims. They belong to and are strongly supported by the Shiite community, nearly half the country’s population, and many other Lebanese. They have families, friends and neighbours living alongside them in the country’s south and the neighbourhoods of Beirut who believe Hizbullah is the best hope of defending their country from Israel’s regular onslaughts.

Given the indigenous nature of Hizbullah’s resistance, we should not be surprised at the lengths the Shiite militia is going to ensure their loved ones, and the Lebanese people more generally, are not put directly in danger by their combat.

If only the same could be said of the Israeli army and airforce. One need only look at the images of the victims of its strikes against residential neighbourhoods, car, ambulances and factories to see why most of the dead being extracted from the rubble are civilians.

And finally, there is a fifth myth I almost forgot to mention. That people like David Horowitz only want to tell us the truth…

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book

“Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democatic State”

is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

History Erased

History Erased
By Meron Rapoport
Mon., July 23, 2007 Av 8, 5767

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

A member of the establishment is responsible for the documentation: Shmuel Yeivin, then the director of the Department of Antiquities, the forerunner of the present-day Antiquities Authority. Yeivin, as noted by Raz Kletter, an archaeologist who has studied the first two decades of archaeology in Israel, was neither a political activist nor a champion for Arab rights. As Kletter explains, he was simply a scientist, a disciple of the British school and a member of the Mandate government's Department of Antiquities who believed that ancient sites and holy places needed to be preserved, whether they were sacred to Jews, Christians or Muslims. In line with his convictions, he fired off letters of protest and was considered a nudnik by the IDF.

"I received a report that not long ago, the army blew up the big building in the ruins of Ashkelon, which is known by the name of Maqam al-Nabi Hussein and is a holy site for the Muslim community," Yeivin wrote on July 24, 1950, to Lieutenant Colonel Yaakov Patt, the head of the department for special missions in the Defense Ministry, and sent a copy to chief of staff Yigael Yadin and other senior officers. "That building was still standing during my last visit to the site, on June 10 - in other words, the army authorities found no reason to demolish it from the conquest until the middle of 1950. I find it hard to imagine the site was blown up due to infiltrators, as they have not stopped infiltrating the area during this entire period."

The detonation, by the way, was extremely successful. Of the ancient and holy site, not so much as a stone remained.

Yeivin's complaint was seemingly related to procedural matters, but only seemingly. The army, he wrote, needed to understand that there were "sanctified buildings," and if it wanted to touch them, "it is proper, honest and courteous first to talk to the institutions that supervise these areas and buildings, and to consult with them in order to find ways to avoid destruction." But that is not happening, Yeivin stated. "I was told that simultaneously, the mosque in the abandoned village of Ashdod was blown up," Yeivin added. "This is not the first case. I already have had many occasions to draw your attention to similar cases elsewhere, and the chief of staff issued explicit directives with regard to the preservation of such buildings and places, but apparently none of this avails commanders of a certain type ... I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should be brought to trial and punished, because in this case there was no justification for a swift, war-contingent operation."

A perusal of the IDF Archives shows that Lieutenant Colonel Patt forwarded Yeivin's complaint to Yadin. However, Yadin, who would later become Israel's preeminent archaeologist and whose father, Eliezer Sukenik, was an archaeologist of repute in his own right and Yeivin's colleague in the Mandate Department of Antiquities, was not unduly upset. Below Patt's letter addressing Yeivin's complaint are handwritten remarks: "1. Confirm receipt of letter and inform that the matter is being dealt with; 2. Add to Dayan's material for my meeting with B.-G." - referring to then prime minister and defense minister David Ben-Gurion.

It stands to reason that the handwriting is Yadin's, as it is unlikely that anyone else could have met with Ben-Gurion concerning "Dayan's material." And Yadin, as is clear from another note written on the letter, did not attribute any great importance to the complaint. "Teven la'afarayim," it says, roughly the equivalent of "coals to Newcastle" - in short, there is nothing new in Yeivin's complaint.

Nor was Dayan unduly upset. In a response he sent to the chief of staff's bureau, apparently on August 10 under the heading "Destruction of a holy place," Dayan wrote: "The detonation was carried out by the Coastal Plain District, at my instruction." The first words of the sentence have been struck out, but a letter dated August 30 removes all doubt. Dayan replied to a letter concerning "damage to antiquities in the Ashkelon area": "The chief of staff approached me and I gave him my explanations; the action was carried out at my instructions."

That reply was so embarrassing that Yaakov Prolov, the head of the Operations Department in the General Staff, sent a letter to the chief of staff's bureau asking for guidelines on how to reply to Yeivin. "A mistake was made here and it can be assumed it will not happen again," someone instructed him in script that looks like that attributed to Yadin in the previous letter. Whitewashing, it turns out, is not a new invention.

Blots on the landscape

Not surprisingly, it did in fact happen again. At the end of October, Yeivin sent another letter, this time directly to Yadin, to complain about "the blowing-up of the ancient mosque at Yavneh," a 1,000-year-old structure whose minaret is still standing on a hill south of Yavneh, close to the train station. Yeivin reminded Yadin that he had been promised that those responsible would be punished this time. But it turned out there was an unexplained disparity between the explicit orders prohibiting damage to mosques and the actual policy in the field.

"I have just received an official reply from your bureau chief [Michael Avitzur], and after reading it I am totally at a loss," Yeivin wrote to Yadin. "On the one hand, I have in front of me your explicit order, which speaks unequivocally about preserving places of archaeological or historical value ... On the other hand, I read in the letter of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Avitzur that the mosque at Yavneh 'was exploded on July 9, 1950, before the date on which the cessation of blowing up mosques was announced.' How can these two things be reconciled?"

Yeivin's quotation from Avitzur's letter makes it clear that blowing up mosques was widespread enough that it required a special order to stop it. Yeivin himself wrote later in the letter, "I am extremely concerned following my talks with a number of people involved in the policy on this question." Yeivin did not specify whom he spoke to, but noted, "I do not see myself as being able to write explicitly about everything."

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

Kletter reveals in his book that Yeivin and his staff occasionally tried to stop the destruction - not always, not consistently, and not for moral reasons or out of any special respect for the people (the Arabs) who lived for centuries in these towns and quarters. Their grounds were scientific, and Kletter believes this approach stemmed from their background. Before 1948 they worked for the Department of Antiquities of the Mandate government under British management, alongside Arab employees. Kletter relates that in the department they fought for the "Judaization" of the names of ancient sites, but nevertheless remained loyal to the department - so much so that after the United Nations passed the partition plan, in November 1947, Yeivin proposed that the department remain unified even after the country's division into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Eliezer Sukenik went one step farther: "I do not believe the Jewish state will preserve its antiquities," he said in a December 1947 discussion. "We must place scientific sovereignty above political sovereignty. We are interested in the archaeology of the whole land, and the only way [to ensure this] is a unified department."

Perjury at Megiddo

"Yeivin was not the greatest archaeologist in the world, but he had personal integrity, which is the most important trait of the British heritage," Kletter says. "But that heritage did not suit the nationalism of the 1950s, because Ben-Gurion wanted to erase everything that had been, to erase the Islamic past."

Ben-Gurion saw everything that existed here before the revival of the Jewish community as wasteland. "Foreign conquerors have turned our land into a desert," he said at a meeting of the Society for Land of Israel Studies in 1950. Thus the failure of Yeivin and his colleagues was a foregone conclusion. In the 1950s, when archaeology was a fad and archaeologists like Yadin were cultural heroes, people of science were nudged out of management positions. Yeivin was forced to resign and "technocrats" like Teddy Kollek were effectively put in charge of managing Israel's major archaeological sites.

The Department of Antiquities was formally established in July 1948, as a unit of the Public Works Department in the Ministry of Labor. Even before this, the veterans of its Mandatory predecessor tried to preserve antiquities, and in particular to prevent looting, but did not always succeed. The museum in Caesarea was emptied out by thieves, and the same fate befell the findings and documents at Tel Megiddo, which were concentrated in the offices of the University of Chicago archaeological expedition, which had been digging there since the 1920s. Rare collections, such as the one at Notre Dame Monastery in Jerusalem, disappeared almost completely, and private collections and antique shops in Jaffa and Jerusalem were also targeted by thieves. "All the objects have disappeared from the government museum [more than 100 fragments of inscriptions and parts of pillars]," reported Emanuel Ben-Dor, who would later become Yeivin's deputy director, after visiting Caesarea. "The collection in the office of the Greek patriarch was destroyed." The Megiddo incident was particularly embarrassing, as the dig was carried out by American archaeologists and the U.S. consulate wanted to know who was responsible for the devastation. An investigation was launched under Yeivin's supervision, and the local commanders said that Arab units had wrecked the site. Yeivin discovered that this was untrue, and that Israeli soldiers had looted the site and then burned the archaeological expedition's offices.

In a confidential report, Yeivin quoted from an internal letter of the local unit: "In consultation with the battalion commander and with the brigade's operations officer, we agreed that in the event of an investigation by the U.S. consul general ... we will (shamefully) lie and say the place was found in this condition when it was captured and that the crime was committed by the Arabs before they fled."

But the theft of antiquities was only a small part of the problem. The major problem was the destruction. In August 1948, the army started to demolish ancient Tiberias, apparently in the wake of a local decision. The attempts to salvage some of the town's archaeological gems were to no avail. In September the site was visited by Jacob Pinkerfeld, from the Department of Antiquities' monument conservation unit.

"In ancient Tiberias the army began to blow up a hefty strip of buildings in the Old City," Pinkerfeld wrote in his report. "In talks with all the responsible parties at the site, we emphasized the special importance of the ancient stone with the relief of the lions on it, which was built into one of the walls. We were promised that this antiquity dating back 3,000 years would be specially guarded, but in my last visit I found precisely this stone blown to bits." So sweeping was the destruction of Tiberias that even Ben-Gurion was taken aback when he visited the city in early 1949.

The list for destruction sometimes assumed ludicrous proportions. During a visit to Haifa in August 1948, Yeivin discovered the army was laying waste to large sections of the Arab city around Hamra Square (now Paris Square) under the direction of the city engineer. In his restrained language, Yeivin expressed his astonishment at the destruction: "With our own eyes we saw the ruins of half of a building that had served as a synagogue on the Street of the Jews ... According to Jews who live there and wandered about among the ruins, another two or three synagogues were also destroyed there ... It would appear that with attentiveness, the damage inflicted to these holy buildings could have been avoided."

Depressing impression

The leveling of the villages began as soon as the fighting ended. During his visit to the North, Yeivin saw the army blowing up villages near Tiberias and Mount Tabor. He asked that before villages were demolished, consultations be held with representatives of the Department of Antiquities, because "in many villages, ancient building stones are embedded in the houses." At Zir'in (now Kibbutz Yizrael) a Crusader tower was blown up, and the fortress at Umm Khaled, near Netanya, was reduced to rubble.

But there were successes, too. An order was issued to raze the fortress at Shfaram, but Antiquities Department staff arrived at the last minute and blocked the demolition. And at Al-Muzeirra, a village south of Rosh Ha'ayin, a miracle occurred: the army used a handsome building of pillars in the middle of the abandoned village for target practice, apparently without knowing it was "the only mausoleum that survived in our country from the Roman period," according to Yeivin. When, nonetheless, the decision came to blow up the mausoleum in July 1949, an antiquities inspector arrived at the site and prevented the blast. The site is now known as "Hirbat Manor" (the Manor Ruin) and is recommended in all sightseeing guides for the area.

Kletter relates that in February 1950, at the initiative of Yeivin and others, who grasped that without government intervention, the country's urban past would simply disappear, Ben-Gurion agreed to establish a government committee "for sacred and historic sites and monuments." The committee was staffed by senior government and military personnel. The report, which was submitted in October 1951, stated that certain sites had to be preserved as "whole units" - "Acre, a few quarters in Safed, small sections of Jaffa and Tiberias, small sections of Ramle and Lod, a few sections of Tarshiha." The rest of the towns, and hundreds of villages, were already lost.

However, the state institutions failed to honor even these conclusions. According to Kletter, Yeivin was one of the first to fight the August 1950 decision to demolish all of Jaffa. Afterward, artists who had moved into the abandoned city joined the struggle, as did Development Authority personnel, and thus a few sections were spared total annihilation. Yeivin was less successful in Lod. In June 1954, he wrote a protest letter to the education minister, in the wake of a decision on "the destruction of the ancient quarter in the city of Lod." Israeli law, pursuant to British law, stipulated that only what was built before 1700 was considered an "antiquity," but Yeivin wrote that the other sites should also be preserved - both for tourism and because they are "cultural and educational assets and living historical testimonies that every enlightened state is obliged to preserve."

Kletter's book leaves the impression that the destruction was not accidental and that its perpetrators were aware of its significance. The ideological foundation of the devastation is set forth in the August 1957 Foreign Ministry letter sent at the behest of Golda Meir. After the author of the document, A. Dotan, requested the Ministry of Labor to "clear the ruins," he specified "four types" of "ruins" and the grounds for their destruction:

"First, it is necessary to get rid of the ruins in the heart of Jewish communities, in important centers or on central transportation arteries; rapid treatment must be given to the ruins of villages whose residents are in the country, such as Birwe, north of Shfaram, and the ruins of Zippori; in areas where there is no development, such as along the rail line from Jerusalem to Bar Giora, one receives a depressing impression of a once-living civilized land; attention must also be directed to ruins in distinctly tourist areas, such as the ruins of the Circassian village in Caesarea, which is intact but empty ... Accordingly, the Ministry of Labor should assume the mission of clearing the ruins ... It should be taken into account that the participation of nongovernmental elements requires caution, as politically it is desirable for the operation to be executed without anyone grasping its political meaning."

Kletter says he was surprised to discover the scale of the destruction, but that to some extent he understands those who were behind the operation. The decision not to allow the Palestinian refugees to return was unavoidable, he believes, if the idea was to establish a Jewish state here. Those were the rules of the game in that period, he says, and if the Jewish community had lost in 1948, the Arab victors would likely have treated the Jews in the same way. And because it was impossible to preserve hundreds of abandoned Palestinian towns and villages, there was no choice but to demolish most of them, Kletter maintains.

He also has nothing against the archaeologists who in the early years of the state were concerned almost exclusively with Jewish sites, or in the best case with Christian or Roman sites, and ignored Muslim sites almost completely. It is natural for researchers to be interested first and foremost in their own culture, Kletter says; and besides, relative to the political pressure exerted on them by people like Ben-Gurion, who declaredly wanted to erase the Arab past of this country, they behaved honorably. "Early Israeli archaeology has something to be ashamed of and much to be proud of," Kletter writes.

Still, Kletter says, his book is "about loss, about what could have been but was not. The loss of archaeology that began with a scientific tradition and did not continue, the loss of vast historical information, the loss of the village landscape. I don't think this village landscape belongs to us - it belongs to the people who lived here - but still, there is longing for that lost landscape. We cannot bring it back, but at least we should be aware of the truth and not lie to ourselves."

Kletter says this country's great good fortune lies in the fact that it contains so many monuments that it was impossible to destroy all of them. But even those that were destroyed somehow continue to live a different life. Mash'had Nabi Hussein, the holy site in Ashkelon, was leveled in 1950, but the Muslim believers did not forgo it. A few years ago, the Shi'ite Ismaili sect, which is based in central India, established a kind of small marble platform at the site, on the grounds of Barzilai Hospital, and since then thousands of believers have come there every year. In Yavneh, only the minaret remains of the razed ancient mosque, standing alongside heaps of rubble and one fig tree, but in a visit to the site a week ago I saw a group of elderly Ethiopians there on the hill, praying ardently under the fig tree. It was as if the place had remained holy even if its inhabitants had changed.