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history as it happens may twenty ninth twenty twenty six the nakba nineteen forty seven to present the map shows what
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partition means the jewish state colored light the arab state dark jaffa to go to the arabs jerusalem internationalized the resolution of the daq committee for palestine was adopted by certain street boats thirteen against ten upstate during this time fighting between arabs and jews was a commonplace occurrence and there were many casualties on both sides through stabbing and shooting arab opposition to the partition scheme has been violent the call for a holy war against the jews went out from cairo jaffa itself has become an almost deserted city most of the seventy thousand inhabitants having left when the state of israel was
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proclaimed months before david ben gurion declared israeli independence in nineteen forty eight creating a jewish state in a mostly arab land the nakba was underway the nakba or catastrophe is the other half of israel's origin story that is often erased but without it it's impossible to understand today's catastrophe what started in nineteen forty seven continues today in the destruction of gaza and annexation of the west bank that's next as we report history as it happens i'm martin decaro there is
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a large red and white mast over there in the distance and that is the marker for the so called yellow
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line the middle east israel has been leveling thousands of civilian buildings in gaza
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in controlled explosions homes streets parks once
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bustling with life now in ruins this
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dynamic the impulse was there in forty eight with the nakba but it was there in nineteen oh nine this is the logic of a settler colonial movement that has achieved a victory through expulsion through genocide
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in the long and violent israeli palestinian conflict there is a lot of finger pointing like who started it well they did and now our side is defending itself you hear that now and you might have heard it in nineteen forty eight when israel's arab neighbors
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attacked it with arab invasion imminent hagana troops abandon underground activities to train for open war first arab attacks are fierce and tribal troops make quick work of conquest in old jerusalem this is a
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history full of competing claims to the same sliver of land of conflicting narratives no single incident or event may be more important to these narratives that have taken shape over the past century than what happened from late nineteen forty seven through nineteen forty eight starting with the un partition vote in november forty seven
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there was heated debate in the assembly this is the delegate from saudi arabia arguing against partition then senor aranha of brazil presiding calls on the nations to vote and announces how they vote saudi arabia no soviet union yes united kingdom abstain the united states yes the resolution of the duck committee for palestine was adopted by thirty three votes thirteen against ten abstentions and this was the scene next day in jerusalem the jewish people
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as historian ilan pape writes in the ethnic cleansing of palestine the partition resolution was adopted on the twenty ninth of november nineteen forty seven and the ethnic cleansing of palestine began in early december nineteen forty seven with a series of jewish attacks on palestinian villages and neighborhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centers that had been vandalized in the palestinian protest against the un resolution during the first few days of its adoption though sporadic he says these early jewish assaults were severe enough to cause the exodus of a substantial number of people almost seventy five thousand and then on january ninth nineteen forty eight he says units of the first all arab volunteer army entered palestine and engaged with the jewish forces in small battles over routes and isolated jewish settlements easily winning the upper hand in these skirmishes the jewish leadership officially shifted its tactics from acts of retaliation to cleansing operations the city
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of haifa and its harbor become the center of bitter conflict as the new jewish state is born in the tense atmosphere of civil war hagana troops search for arabs after capturing the city arab strong points are taken after being blasted to rubble during the mopping up operations haganah forces seek out every arab and barricades are set up to screen those who had not already fled the so
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even before the moment of world historical importance israel's declaration of independence in mid may nineteen forty eight and the war that immediately followed jewish forces started to expel arabs and destroy their homes and villages by the hundreds erasing their presence from their ancestral homeland and we can hear echoes of this initial erasure today
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the commission concluded that israel has committed genocide against the palestinian people in gaza and that it is continuing with that
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genocide residences homes hospitals universities schools museums churches mosques archaeological sites roads in march at least eight palestinians were killed by
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settlers nine others were killed in israeli army operations in the occupied west bank do palestinians have the right to return
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to gaza if they left while the
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rebuilding was happening it would be my
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hope that we could do something really nice really good where they wouldn't want
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to return why would they want to
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return the place has been hell it's been one of the meanest one of the meanest toughest places on earth and
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right now it's it's i've seen every
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picture from every angle better than if i were there and nobody can live there you can't live there the expulsion of some seven hundred fifty thousand palestinian arabs in nineteen forty seven forty eight about half the population was a crime whose consequences remain unresolved that fueled generations of violence and resentment on both sides of the conflict yet what is known about the nakba the arab word for catastrophe isn't nearly as well known or understood as the triumphant story of israel's founding i myself only recently learned some of these details that david ben gurion and his consultancy as it was called had been planning this ethnic cleansing one of the first of the post world war two era an era that was supposed to see an end to such ethnic violence so how did the story of the nakba disappear for so long only relatively recently did historians and the broader public begin to understand what took place mark levine teaches the history of the modern middle east at the university of california irvine and is the author of overthrowing jaffa tel aviv and the struggle for palestine and most recently art beyond the creativity and conflict in a world on fire our conversation next tap subscribe now in the show notes for ad free listening early access and all of our bonus content or go to historyasithappens dot com mark levine welcome to the show really great to be here thanks for having me joining us from nigeria so how do you define ethnic clothes cleansing and was the nakba or catastrophe the expulsion of palestinians from the british mandate of palestine was that an example of ethnic cleansing well i think
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ethnic cleansing can be defined as the removal of a population that has lived on a territory for a long period of time that if not indigenous in the international legal sense has certainly been there for generations it's forcible removal by a more powerful force permanent removal evil so that it can't return in that sense obviously nineteen forty eight the nakba was one of the singular events of ethnic cleansing in the world certainly wasn't the first it may not have even been the largest in the sense of the number of people who were expelled certainly during partition of india millions and millions of people were ethnically cleansed or exchanged the creation of greece i mean after world war one there's many examples of ethnic cleansing what makes the nakba so singular and so important is that it was at the start of a process a longer well first of all it wasn't even the start it was a conclusion of a process of ethnic cleansing that actually goes back at least to nineteen oh nine in palestine and continued long after nineteen forty eight to the present moment what made it so important for me as a historian of palestine and israel and zionism is that it really at this point is in the middle it's a fulcrum point of a much longer process you know history
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often doesn't operate along a straight line but when you're considering the origins of today's conflict today's catastrophe you can draw a pretty straight line back to nineteen forty eight or even before that right i mean this is the key moment that sets the stage for everything that happens after that doesn't mean that all the events since forty eight were inevitable there are opportunities to take a different turn off this road like the oslo peace process for instance even to define
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nineteen forty eight well i just said it was a fulcrum sure and certainly historically in terms of periodization it certainly acts like a fulcrum but i do think the act that started it is the moment that zionism in reality not just as an ideology going back we know the date really to nineteen oh nine when the still fledgling zionist movement and leadership in palestine as opposed to the earliest zionist leadership who were largely outside of palestine once you get the zionist leadership in palestine trying to colonize this country realizing that the growing number of jewish immigrants simply could not sustain themselves they could not create an economy a viable jewish economy and they certainly could not compete in the larger economy with the indigenous palestinian arab population because they'd been there for centuries generations and centuries most of them and therefore any kind of work that was autochthonous to palestine was something they knew how to do and the jewish immigrants simply would take years if not generations to acquire the same level of skills and familiarity so at that moment in nineteen oh nine they had been trying for several years to what they termed conquer the labor market to create enough jobs for jews to make a viable society and they realized it just wasn't going to happen and that's when they decided that the only way to conquer the labor market was to conquer territory was to create spaces that were exclusively jewish in which there was no competition from palestinian arabs and therefore they could create a jewish economy without this competition from the indigenous population that starts in nineteen oh nine that is when as the israeli sociologist and historian gershon shafir said zionism becomes a militant nationalist enterprise while it was inevitable that nineteen forty eight would happen that you'd get this massive ethnic cleansing because if world war one didn't happen and the ottoman empire remained in control who knows what would have happened but certainly as history unfolds that initiatory moment of an ideology that now on the ground was all about conquering territory and removing the indigenous population from it once the opportunity arose it was always going to produce what happened to your
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point even with a lot of zionist land purchases jews only own six percent of the land in the british mandate of palestine by nineteen forty eight yeah so yeah and of course inevitability i mean the british leaving the mandate giving up the mandate after the second world war created an opportunity that maybe wasn't foreseen thirty years earlier it's really important to emphasize this population transfers ethnic cleansing i mean that is often the norm through history the united states the united states was founded in part on greatest exemplar but the thing about this is this example the nakba was largely forgotten or erased it's the other half of the story as ilan pape said in his great book published twenty years ago why was that why is this incident or event not well known not well
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known to whom you know the idea that israelis don't know what happened in nineteen forty eight i don't know i lived there long enough there's this idea oh we didn't know we don't know i think it's kind of an excuse i think every israeli knows it's like asking white people in america in the south in the fifties is there racism oh no there's no of course they're gonna they were gonna say there's no racism oh we treated black people well slaves are well treated everyone knows that's a lie and in the same way i do not believe that most israelis never knew specifically because there were the ruins of the villages specifically because the neighborhoods were still there in the towns that were taken over specifically because there were jews who came in and literally moved into homes that still had the dinner plates on the table i mean there was a willful refusal to discuss and then of course new generations and history books but it's not like no one spoke about this so i think within israel it was certainly known and has always been known which is the reason why it was so important to keep palestinians and from speaking to keep them silenced because everyone did know and knew that if that could be talked about openly very similar let's say to the armenian genocide which is why in turkey it was still criminalized it's not like turks don't know about the armenian genocide everyone knows about it you can't talk about it precisely because everyone knows about it and they know what it means in terms of the world well obviously in the arab world everyone knew about it in america is the interesting place where there was this kind of forced forgetting if you look at the news at the time in the late forties in newspapers it was they were reporting what was happening newsreel show forced forgetting later in the back streets of
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tel aviv jerusalem and jaffa the thugs of both sides build up the armored cars for war against each other in between them victims of the struggle stand the great majorities of simple people of both sides
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so what makes it more interesting is the fact that that it was a forced forgetting it wasn't like it was never known it was known and people understood that it couldn't be known and even though it was still known to so many it couldn't be talked about i think the reason for that is that it was a very particular type of settler colonialism you know you have lots of genocides you have lots of ethnic cleansings in the history of colonialism and imperialism they come under multiple forms one would be the ethnic cleansing of typical imperialism or administrative colonialism when you have the takeover of a foreign territory and you clear out indigenous populations so you could take over their land and then create plantations or farms or mining or whatever you want to use that territory for that you need to remove the population then you have the settler colonialism of the algerian type where it's a settler colony but it has its own metropole back home and it was not really a replacement colony even south africa as horrific as the colonization was was not a replacement colony in palestine it was a replacement colony by a people that had nowhere that had no home just to go back to and so that made the ethnic cleansing that much more intense there's a quote from begin when they were about to conquer jaffa the forces the paramilitary forces under his control and it's now prominently displayed in the beit ergun the museum of the irgun or lechi right on the beach near jaffa in the neighborhood of manshia and it says we are about to start this battle and paraphrasing show no mercy to them as they showed no mercy to you so this was an understanding what was going on it was never really forgotten because you just needed to go into that museum no one was hiding it but the fact that palestine zionism in palestine was a replacement settler colony similar to the us which is why now you see even today donald trump and the republicans trying to get rid of this history saying we can't teach this history erasing it from national parks and museums and so on because it legitimates the very founding myth without which the legitimacy of the entire enterprise is in question
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is a country illegitimate if it's founded on settler colonialism replacement settler colonies that's a very difficult question to answer but yeah i think you're right it wasn't that it was forgotten so much as it was erased elon pape in his book that i mentioned talks about how it was half the story that was left out from the common retelling or the common memory because origin stories are so important to any nation and of course they want to leave out the ugly parts especially the timing here right we're in the post nineteen forty five era where this type of thing's not supposed to happen anymore and it's being done by people the zionists who are seeking a refuge from having something like this happen to them in europe yeah
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so it's being done by the victims of the very thing that's supposed to make this impossible to do again right at the moment i mean it's it's very telling and not at all coincidental that the nakba happens the same year as the genocide convention by the un so they go together and the forgetting and the violence of the nakba is not an antecedent to the convention it's not outside of the convention it's very much the twin of the convention and helps us understand why there keeps on being genocides and they seem so hard to stop because the genocide convention can't deal with ethnic cleansing it can't deal with political genocides it can't deal with cultural genocides it itself was a fatally flawed document for all the good it has done to raise awareness about it legally it is a very highly problematic document as lemkin the author of the concept himself knew and tried to make more robust but the countries the states had no intention of enabling that kind of full and robust idea of genocide to become international law even though most of his examples of genocides were settler colonial genocides the herrero and other genocides in the americas he talked a lot about native americans and their extermination so he knew everyone understood but states don't want to be circumscribed in their power
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that way sure and before anyone flips out i just want to clarify i was not saying that what happened to the jews in europe is the same as what happened to the arabs of palestine the broad point of forcing people out of a country that you don't want to coexist with one of pape's many excellent observations and this is something that i only learned about fairly recently in my life i never knew what the nakba was until i think i got to college you know the whole story about plucky israel the underdog in the middle east nearly snuffed out paul newman yeah at its birth in nineteen forty eight by the evil arab countries that wanted to destroy it right a couple of things that pape points out that kind of poke holes in that narrative is number one zionism ideologically called for population transfers it was incompatible fundamentally with peaceful coexistence with a palestinian presence and number two the ethnic cleansing the expulsion of the arabs that began in forty seven was planned it wasn't just an accident or an opportunity taken it was planned ahead of time absolutely and
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this is of course where there's a big fault line within israeli scholarship you know the people who first talked about it even really before pape people like benny morris who wrote the birth of the palestinian refugee problem did an amazing job of looking at all these newly opened files forty years after the creation of the state in nineteen eighty eight when they were released because israel had a forty year declassification program all of a sudden israeli scholars had access to documents about nineteen forty eight but what benny morris did and what a lot of the new historians did that generation not pape but ones who remain within the zionist fold was they showed that yes there was this expulsion that happened you can't deny it but it was haphazard it wasn't planned it was a consequence of war and by the way if the arabs had just recognized israel in the lesser boundaries the smaller boundaries it had with the nineteen forty seven partition plan this wouldn't have happened anyway you're absolutely right and then you have the scholars like pape who went much further and of course palestinian scholars norma salha and so many others who said you're just reading the documentation wrong and it's very clear that there was an intention but again you can't even ask this question if you go back to the early twentieth century forgetting about herzl infamously saying that the poor arrows will be spirited across the border we all know this quote anyone who's ever looked at the conflict it's much more about the mechanics of settlement my first book was on the history of jaffa and tel aviv when the society the sort of real estate group a group of sixty jews from jaffa some of whom were north african some of them were european bought this territory north of jaffa right near the neighborhood of manshia to create this new garden suburb that would be called tel aviv their bylaws said it had to be exclusively jewish the land that was purchased was an orchard it was a marginal orchard but it was an orchard and who has ever been in israel palestine knows that the sands are incredibly fertile you can be in a sand dune then there'll be orange trees growing right out of it because of the nature of the soil and the sand in palestine so this idea that it was a city as the founders of tel aviv said born out of the sands is simply not true but it had to be imagined that way the erasure that you're talking about actually begins discursively imaginatively ideologically half a century almost before nineteen forty eight and then as they gained more and more territory in almost every place they created starting in nineteen oh nine when the first city and the first kibbutz or agricultural settlement hello even the ganya were created what distinguished them from previous jewish settlements was that they were by law or by their bylaws exclusively jewish no arabs could live there right and as territory was purchased usually from absentee owners or village heads they began to push and push out more and more palestinians that led to the violence of nineteen twenty one of nineteen twenty nine nineteen thirty six right so forty eight couldn't happen without this history that's why to me while it's a fulcrum it's still the real thing is at the
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beginning you know as i was listening to your answer there i started to think of ben gvir smotrich and any number of others israeli political figures and media commentators today who talk of driving all the remaining palestinians out of our midst you mentioned benny morris i have an article open here from the journal of genocide research dirk moses our friend edits it's an essay by martin shaw
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i'm on the board actually of it
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so i'm sure you've read this essay that martin shaw wrote about how what's happening to the palestinians and a slow motion genocide that's been happening for eighty years in that essay he has a footnote citing benny morris in the book you mentioned the birth of the palestinian refugee problem for zionists the logic of a transfer solution to the arab problem remained ineluctable without some sort of massive displacement of arabs from the area of the jewish state to be there could be no viable jewish state and you know that's the weird thing about this erasure you can just go back and find without much difficulty any number of major zionist figures i have ilan pape's book here he quotes them chapter and verse talking about wanting to do this that we have to do it to have a jewish state we must get rid of as many arabs as possible
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again if you have a state defined by ethnonationalism ethnoreligious nationalism there's only two ways to have that state in a specific territory one there is no competing population to worry about and if they're there you've got to get rid of them or two the south african model you rule over them in a kind of apartheid colonial system where they're herded into bantustans have very few rights which is the kind of way that israelis especially on the right imagine whatever palestinians remain in the west bank or gaza would exist and kind of bantustan as a kind of tertiary labor force doing all the menial work and that's certainly how it was after nineteen sixty seven for example or for the palestinians within the borders in nineteen forty eight israel after the war we need to remember something this is something to me that always strikes me as funny you have so many israel supporters and israelis who say we are indigenous we're the indigenous population palestinians early zionists used to call them renters they said they are the renters on the land we are the original owners and we've come home and just like your own house if you're going to come home you the renters got to go that's sorry but we're home find somewhere else to live but what's almost funny to me is that that's the literal opposite of the biblical narrative the biblical narrative starts off in southern iraq you know in mesopotamia god literally tells to abram he hasn't even had a covenant yet right he hasn't even changed his name leave this land and go to a land i will show you and i will make of your descendants you know innumerable and this will be a land of milk and honey and all that and then literally hebrew means to cross over i mean the whole narrative is that this isn't their land and it belongs to someone else and god doesn't like these pissed off at the people who live there because he doesn't like how they worship and he's going to kick them out i'm going to give you the land now so how are you indigenous this if literally your origin story is that you came in and conquered land blew down the walls of jericho with a trumpet and so on and so forth never mind that never happened but in reality we know from archaeological evidence but the narrative is so clear right this whole conquest narrative of we were not from there god gave this to us in a covenant multiple covenants and then we came in and conquered it so it already says you're not indigenous so when they use this idea of we were always here i just have to laugh like don't you even read your own bible you know your own religious text that's insane to make this claim
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i had forgotten all about that as an atheist i don't pick up a bible too often anymore but you know there's no excuse i think even atheists need to be familiar with what's in
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there it's an amazing work of literature
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that's for sure one of my old friends used to say it's a greatest work of fiction ever written he was also an atheist but yeah i mean these are part of what you just said is part of an origin story so why don't we get into some chronology here we're not going to start in biblical times we'll go to the early twentieth century when zionist immigration starts to pick up when did the arab population begin to notice or complain about the possibility that zionist immigrants weren't just coming there to assimilate they were coming there to colonize and even displace them
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you could make a case rashid khalidi also makes this case a bit and i certainly did in my first book overthrowing geography that already in the late nineteenth century you had local palestinians or if you could call them palestinians palestinian nationalism hadn't really emerged yet fully but certainly in the eighteen seventies or so there were colonies that were being established the german colony for example an american colony but they were very small they were for religious reasons they were coming to live there but how are they going to get the land they're going to buy the land sometimes they would displace the arabs who were on that land or they would come into conflict with them so people were thinking and this was very different than the jews who lived there who were ottoman jews north african or arab or levantine jews who spoke arabic were completely integrated who lived there for for a long time these people not all of whom were jews who were from other places in europe or the us they're like what's going on with these people but it wasn't at the level where someone could see there's a grander design then you have really the movement of zionists in larger numbers beginning with the second aliyah or wave of immigration nineteen oh six or so and you start seeing significant numbers of jews who had no previous attachment to the land who didn't have the training or the religious commitment were suddenly showing up here and needed lots of land and services and money and jobs and that's when you start seeing palestinians and at this point by the first decade of the twentieth century you can start talking about palestinians because there was a particular imagination of the arab speaking non jewish population of palestine that this territory was somehow unique from other parts of the larger region from the area around damascus there were still people who thought there'd be a greater syria even in palestine but in palestine people were starting to talk about palestine the newspaper palestin is founded in nineteen eleven for example so we know by nineteen eleven they're thinking this so i would say by the first decade again right when zionism becomes really organized right when the colonization process begins in earnest right when these technologies of conquest labor market and land begin to take off you could see it even in the newspapers i'll just give you one example very quickly when tel aviv was born the local ruler of jaffa created a waqf religious endowment that could never be sold a kilometer and a half north of the old city of jaffa in an area that why would he do that he did that to block the further expansion of tel aviv and its ability to control more territory between where it was founded and the old town of jaffa so it's clear that people at different levels from peasants to urban dwellers to local leaders understood that zionism was trying to take territory and claim it for exclusive jewish settlement and ownership so anything goes back to there once the british take over you start to see it pick up nineteen twenty one you have the first thawda or revolt in nineteen twenty nine the major riots whatever you want to call them explosion protests violence the reports that the british government did afterwards said that it was because of the increasing landlessness of the palestinian population that led to this violence so already by the twenties it's a national
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conflict well your comment is really interesting because the problem begins even before the balfour declaration you say palestinians started to see already that this was going to be a problem for them then of course with the balfour declaration during the first world war now it's official there's going to be a jewish homeland and i think there was an understanding that that meant a state there are dreams
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there are maybe maybe i don't know
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that well the british changed their minds
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it's a question of whether you know a jewish homeland in palestine meant a state or something some kind of autonomy certainly the zionists hope for a state
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the present arab attack on the jews is another and unhappily periodic attempt to undermine the right of the jews to resettle in palestine the main case of the arabs is against the british government's policy in palestine we are persuaded that the ruinous reign of murder ambush arson and poisonous incitement must be dealt with more vigorous by the british government the members of the commission to investigate the situation in palestine lord peel is the chairman i am well aware that we have to deal with difficult and delicate
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problems and as i mentioned the british did change their minds a little bit too late right so after nineteen forty five world war two ends and the jewish groups the jewish militias they understand that if they're going to achieve their goals they got to get the british out and there's the bombing of the king david hotel nineteen forty six that was a terrorist attack by the irgun
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and the result of the crime the tragic scene is like a serious incident during the blitz the hotel housed the british army headquarters and the palestine government offices and casualties were very heavy sixty five deaths are reported and there is little or no hope of of survival for any of the fifty eight missing nearly fifty others were injured the jewish terrorist organization openly admitted responsibility for the
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bombing manakum begin remember that guy he becomes a prime minister a couple decades
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later right so does shamir yir even
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more radical group so i was saying there are dreams and there are intentions and then eventually there could be something called a plan or even a blueprint david ben gurion becomes the unquestioned leader of the zionist movement he wants the british out the british announce in early nineteen forty seven they're going to quit the mandate they're doing a terrible job of maintaining order they refer to the united nations the united nations votes in november nineteen forty seven to partition palestine between the two peoples when did ben gurion and what was called his consultancy when did they sit down and start beginning to plan the expulsion of the arab population that's a really good question you don't have to give me the exact day and like hour on the clock but it was around this time
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i don't think anyone could i think in forty six and early forty seven there is enough intercommunal violence happening palestinians are attacking jews in different places the haganah and let's remember the haganah worked very closely with the british after the great revolt so while the zionist movement wanted to get rid of the british when it knew it could win the war right i mean it didn't want the british out so quickly because it wasn't in a position right away after the war at all to achieve independence and hold territory so i think there was a calculation among the zionist leadership and especially those who really understood the situation and those who who had military training that the british were leaving and they needed to prepare for war because they were not willing to live in a bifurcated palestine they were not willing to live with a large arab minority or palestinian minority in whatever territory was assigned to them because they knew even if it was you know two thirds to one third they could do the math in twenty thirty years there would be parity and then it couldn't be a jewish state anymore so there was an understanding that there was going to be violence and that they had to plan for when that moment came removing as many people as possible by mid forty six through mid forty seven is when you get that so that by the time the civil war part breaks out in november you really see the movements of troops the purchasing of arms and so on to prepare for that
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B
yeah november forty seventh the partition vote the expulsions of the arab population begin in december so there was something called the long seminar right the long seminar this was ben gurion and his co leaders of the zionist movement the antecedent to plan dalit plan d what was the long seminar could that be considered a plan for expulsion yes a plan
- [38:05]
D
for expulsion it was definitely a way to cement a reality that if this comes to violence which it was going to they had to remove as many palestinians as possible from whatever territory they could conquer and i think that becomes the basis of what in hebrew is tokhni dalet which becomes plan dalet which begins in the spring of course so several months later you know on the one hand it can be a practical response you could say to a situation where a civil war was starting and the zionist leadership knew it had to plan for even more fighting once the mandate officially ended but for others it was also the opportunity right and i think they knew also by the beginning of forty eight they were in a strategic situation where they could actually win this thing and the one thing we know is that by the time the actual war started in may by the time independence was declared they had had secret agreements of course especially with the trans jordanians right golda meir did this famous secret meetings which basically said that with the exception of jerusalem they would not fight over the large body of territory that constituted the west bank and therefore jordan would be able to claim the west bank and conquer it and they wouldn't go further more or less than what the geography of the west bank ultimately became i think they understood that the egyptians and the syrians and lebanon lebanese and iraqis did not constitute a force that was capable of actually defeating this rapidly growing zionist and then israeli military you know we could look at a map and say oh my god it was a miracle or curse whichever side you're on this tiny little country defeats these surrounding countries that had ten times or more the population in reality the the number of men under arms was greater within the zionist movement and then israel than the total number of surrounding arabs and palestinians and their weapons were ultimately superior so the outcome was not really in doubt the conversation
- [40:11]
B
continues but you know you never have to listen to ads again and you can support the show tap subscribe now in the show notes or go to history as it happens dot com and the initial arab force prior to may forty eight that went in there was to stop expulsions right right well everyone
- [40:43]
D
had their own reasons i think if there's a common thread to why the arab armies were intervening there were two things first yes to prevent a large number of refugees from going into their territory which would destabilize them but also because they did not want a palestinian state created i mean one of the ironies of this is that the arab leaders including abdullah in jordan they did not want a palestinian state on the third most holy territory in islam to exist because that would have been a state that had more symbolic power than any of them and it would also be a state that would be very strategically placed to challenge their supremacy so palestinians were really fighting against everyone in that sense they're fighting directly against the zionist forces but also against other forces that didn't have their interest at heart
- [41:40]
B
because you know until recently it was never entirely clear to me why the arabs boycotted the partition or voted against partition but there are a lot of
- [41:48]
D
reasons there's a lot first of all most indigenous populations as jabotinsky and others even ben gurion said you know why would they who votes to give away more than half their country to a foreign occupation whether or not the foreigners claim the right to be there of course no one was going to do it second of all the way the partition was structured besides the fact that jews were a small percentage of the population relatively speaking with only six percent of the territory they were given more or less half or more and it was the best land the plains and the you know the most fertile land
- [42:23]
C
and everything at flushing long island the general assembly of the united nations has made its decision on palestine the map shows what partition means the jewish state colored light the arab state dark jaffa to go to the arabs jerusalem internationalized
- [42:39]
D
and of course let's remember the entire palestinian leadership had been decimated after thirty six right they were sent into exile they were jailed they were killed and then the palestinian leadership that was still around husseini you know obviously made the choice to once he was exiled to work with hitler which of course once hitler lost that was definitely a bad bet he was in no position to lead the movement in any meaningful sense so that's that's the problem for them they had no one that would actually be supporting them that they could trust
- [43:13]
B
yeah i just recently did an episode on the first palestinian uprising so to speak nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty nine because anyone listening to this might be wondering well okay there was a civil war that broke out in forty seven after partition there had already been violence then you get the war for israel's independence starting in mid may nineteen forty eight you have all these expulsions where people might be asking well why weren't the arabs fighting back why couldn't they defend themselves well they did have military forces or militias but their leadership had been utterly destroyed by the crackdown the british crackdown on their revolt a
- [43:47]
D
decade earlier yeah and then world war two happened and world war two gave the british the excuse to crack down even harder and and securitize population even more and then in the wake of world war two when it's clear what happened to jews and you know it became even harder even though they tried to prevent jews from coming officially so they just never had the chance but again this goes back we can't talk about these last four years three four years we need to go back to the origin of the mandate to the balfour declaration which becomes enshrined which says that her majesty's government looks favorably to the establishment of a jewish national home in palestine as long as it recognizes the civil and religious rights of the local population paraphrase i don't think that's the exact words but it's pretty close it's civil and religious rights for palestinians or arabs or non jews not even a positive designation just none jews and then jews get the political rights so because of that the jewish agency was able to create an entire paris state structure beginning in the twenties because it was bringing in so much money from the global jewish community it was looked on very favorably by the british because you know the british taxpayers did not want to be paying for palestine so for so many reasons the jews in palestine were the natural allies of the british they were european they more than paid their way they were institutionally promised palestine and the local palestinians were arabs who were colonized already by the british in other places and the palestinian executive the arab executive never had the rights never had the political power legally enshrined that their jewish counterparts did so they were already hands tied behind their back at the beginning of the mandate and and then with the land purchases especially throughout the twenties and through thirty six they were losing more and more territory and more and more power and once the revolt occurred and was then crushed and then world war two happens there was no way to recover and equalize the terrain so to speak even though numerically they were far obviously far superior and in terms of territory they theoretically controlled more but in fact they didn't because the british controlled the territory so
- [46:09]
B
in all about eight hundred thousand seven hundred fifty thousand to eight hundred thousand palestinians either fled or were expelled the key point is they were not allowed back and that'll be the final thing we discuss here right which is the key yes i just want to offer up some more of alain pape so eight hundred thousand people hundreds of villages wiped off the face of the earth urban centers cleansed five hundred more or less cleansed of palestinians here's pape january ninth nineteen forty eight so the expulsions are already underway he says units of the first all arab volunteer army entered palestine and took on jewish forces in small battles over routes and isolated jewish settlements the jewish forces won these engagements easily and then according to pappe coerced expulsions followed in the middle of february nineteen forty eight jewish troops succeeded in emptying five palestinian villages in a single day march tenth nineteen forty eight so we're still two months away from independence plan dalit is adopted the first targets urban centers of palestine which had all been occupied by the end of april two hundred fifty thousand palestinians were uprooted in this phase alone already and it was accompanied by several massacres so before we wrap up i have another question before we get to the most important thing of all that the people weren't allowed back what did this all physically entail showing up at people's doors with weapons and saying get the hell out of here just bulldozing people's homes down bombing them massacres i mean what what was happening keep going okay all of
- [47:44]
D
the above and more as occurs i mean this is not unique by the way right it really depends on the area there the most interesting thing and terrible thing perhaps is there were many villages where the villagers have made agreements with local zionists and then israeli forces to be spared but because ben gurion and leadership understood that they couldn't remain or they believed they shouldn't remain they were forced out anyway and there was a lot of villages where they were just shocked because they thought if they stay put that's what they were told by the zionists and then the israelis after may fourteenth if you stay if you don't fight us you can stay and they couldn't stay many of them the vast majority of them because again the goal was not to not fight with the palestinians the goal was to expel the palestinians because you couldn't have long term a viable jewish state with a significant palestinian minority it's just very simple because they would not agree long term to a jewish state that ruled over them in a non democratic manner benny morris and others are right it was inevitable we may not agree with the morality of it but it's certainly true they were never going to allow this to happen so they found every excuse and the closer you get to may fourteenth and then after the full war starts now between states and palestinian arab irregulars quote unquote you get more and more extreme violence against civilians because that's the most effective way to clear territory one deir essene could clear out twenty villages do you want to be the next deir essene and we know that was done and they would leave or you take out and you shoot a certain number of people and the rest leave look at israelis a couple of rockets from hezbollah and they're running down to the south today i don't blame them by the way i've been there during rocket fire i'm certainly not going to stick around that's what people do when they think they're going to die they leave unless they're fighting unless they're part of a military force so of course they left also because they had somewhere to go and this is a big thing also people don't realize most of the israelis you know this is not today where you could say go back to brooklyn you know to half the settlers right or wherever they're from so many are from the us these people were refugees many of them or they came from russia or wherever decades ago or their parents did this was it yeah they couldn't get on a boat in jaffa and go to beirut or go to gaza they come
- [50:10]
B
from displaced persons camps after the end of the second world war they weren't wanted in europe the few who survived the holocaust so and as you mentioned before how the british tried to restrict immigration many jews after world war two had to quote unquote illegally immigrate to
- [50:24]
C
palestine as germany and other nations increase their persecution treat them as carriers and outcasts beat them down and trample on them the jews are turning more and more to their promised land the land which they were told once would be flowing with milk and honey on the quayside of the jewish port of tel aviv more and more families are being reunited more and more children who have come to prepare the way are welcoming mothers and fathers turning with them towards the new light in the only land in the world where there seems a hope of living in peace
- [50:55]
D
most people had in living memory world war one the ottomans and even the british forced people out of their homes but they did that said this is a war zone you have to leave once the war was over they were allowed back so it was within living memory that whoever wins they could come back right so and most people were not active fighters they were not part of irregular because they never had the chance to do what the haganah did and what what the jewish forces did so they assumed even if the jews won they would just go back they'd have to figure it out under jewish law but guess what no no they weren't coming
- [51:29]
B
back yeah that'll be our final point here i just want to mention one other thing here just to complete this we were discussing before about intentionality and we wanted something to become an intention or a dream and then become a plan when we were discussing when ben gurion and his consultancy started formulating plans to expel the arabs pape says before forty seven there were other more urgent agendas they had to worry about the primary mission being to build a political economic and cultural zionist enclave within the country etcetera etc prior to nineteen forty eight march of nineteen forty eight the activities the zionist leadership carried out to implement their vision could still be portrayed as retaliation for hostile palestinian or arab actions however after march forty eight this was no longer the case the zionist leadership openly declared two months before the end of the british mandate it would seek to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force plan dalit something else i didn't know until fairly recently that shortly after the establishment of the state of israel ben gurion floated a plan to bring back some of the palestinians as a way of trying to solve what everyone could see would be a problem forever you have a population that's just been driven out of their homes they're right over the other side right there was no militarized border offense separating gaza from israel proper people could see in their refugee camps where they had lived right on the other side in ben gurion very close by yeah ben gurion wanted to bring back some palestinians as a way of trying to solve this problem the plan did not go anywhere i don't want to oversimplify things mark but here we are some eighty years later we still have palestinian refugees palestinian statelessness is still the fundamental issue here ben gurion made
- [53:18]
D
an offer i forget the exact number it was a significant number but it was still one seventh one eighth of the total number so of course it wasn't going to be accepted but people understood that after a war they were supposed to be allowed back to their homes no matter who controlled the territory this idea that you couldn't be allowed back well first of all was being enshrined now in the geneva convention but it already emerged as part of customary international law out of the hague regulations which are more about armed conflicts between states and militaries and armies but between nineteen oh seven and nineteen forty seven especially with the horrors of world war one and two it was increasingly clear that civilians have to be allowed back otherwise you have long standing problems that lead to more war and there was the historical practice in palestine that civilians would have to leave during the fighting and then be allowed back but with israel there was never going to be the chance for them to return that's why to me the questions of when was it that israel decided to not let them in was it intentional or not that's interesting as a historian it really doesn't matter what matters is that by nineteen forty nine with you have both the un resolutions and the geneva conventions it doesn't matter who's controlling the country civilians are allowed home so therefore israel was in violation of international law as of nineteen forty nine and they had every right to return you could also say it was never going to be honored because if israel let in four hundred thousand palestinians let's say israel would not have been able to survive as a jewish state that's the point of this whole exercise though that the concept of a jewish state can only be achieved through war and mass expulsion continuously which is why you have the leadership today of israel expelling people trying to get rid of a million people from gaza going into lebanon and expelling lebanese going into syria we hardly talk about it but entire villages have been destroyed along the buffer zones by the golan also this is the logic of settler colonialism which you mentioned martin shaw settler colonialism inevitably ends with genocide it doesn't even end with genocide genocide is one of the tools it's the natural tool it's like taking out a red or a screwdriver to unscrew something that's the tool you use what we're looking at now is horrific as it is to anyone who's a historian and familiar with international law it's not at all surprising that what we're seeing now is happening it's not surprising to anyone i know that the moment hamas engaged in this atrocity attack on october seventh that was the trigger israel had been waiting for because anyone who lives through al aqsa the al aqsa intifada anyone who lived through the suicide bombings anyone who lived through any act of palestinian mass resistance whether you want to justify it or not whether you think it's legal or not the reality is it was always met by israel seizing more land and creating more settlement so now this major attack was going to give them the chance to clear out a million people to kill they don't even care anymore whether they kill or clear them out but to permanently alter the population balance in such a way that annexation becomes possible and that's really what we've seen in the last few years since october seventh this dynamic the impulse was there in forty eight with the nakba but it was there in nineteen oh nine and it's there in nineteen twenty nine it's there in twenty twenty six right this is the logic of a settler colonial movement that has achieved the achieved a victory through expulsion through genocide and continues to expand because the whole ideology of settler colonial nationalism has to be expansion it's the oxygen without it it loses its justification so it's horrible it's shocking it's unethical for me it's a betrayal of judaism but it certainly makes sense where we are right now
- [57:30]
B
more than forty thousand palestinians have now been killed in gaza a majority of whom are civilians and these numbers are from the palestinian ministry of health but they are backed up by the united states by international organizations humanitarian conditions in gaza have degraded so much that diseases like polio and hepatitis a are now spreading we have seen countless children be orphaned we have seen countless mothers lose their children how much is too much sir at what point is it time to end this war well we'll end
- [57:59]
E
the war when we achieve our war goals of making sure that hamas can't repeat such atrocities but we're fighting this war in a just war with just means in fact with means that no other army has ever fought no other army has done has taken the precautions that israel has taken sometimes at great risk to make sure that we minimize the number of casualties because we think that every civilian death is a tragedy for hamas every civilian death is a strategy for us it's tragedy there are one point four million people in gaza they moved from the north to the
- [58:34]
B
south
- [58:36]
E
now report honestly because here's what happened they all left they went to the humanitarian zone which is two miles away less on the beach they have tents we supplied tents for one hundred fifty thousand people the aid agencies supplied the rest and some of them carried their own they have a place we supplied water lines sewage lines food there's more to be done medical so now we know how many people were killed how many terrorists because we counted them and we just passed two thousand terrorists body counts of terrorists the people left how many civilians died i asked the commander the commander of the division that did the rafah operation and the philadelphia corridor he said prime minister there are hardly any civilian deaths because everybody left
- [59:37]
B
make sure to sign up for my free newsletter just go to substack and search for history as it happens in my next missive i'll include links to all the recent actions episodes i've done on this subject the israeli palestinian conflict and on the next episode of history as it happens we're heading back to the american revolution kind of it'll be the next installment in my america two hundred fifty series the enduring meanings plural of the declaration of independence what did abraham lincoln think of it that's next as we report history as it happens wallet feeling extra light after the holidays yeah same but recovery starts right now with tiktok slash and free here's how it works pick the products you want in tiktok shop share the link and watch the price drop all the way to zero no tricks no catch just free stuff with free shipping download tiktok search slash free and start slashing today