Answering the Zionists, David Gilmour says celebration will be appropriate only when the Palestinians are treated as equals
ON MAY 14, as the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of one nation, it should also be mourning the stillbirth of another. In November 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan, but in practice did little to prevent its implementation. The Zionist Jews, by contrast, while officially accepting the resolution, refused to be restricted by the UN's choice of borders.
Israel was thus born, much larger than the plan had intended, while Arab Palestine never breathed: its people were dispossessed and dispersed, their designated territory conquered by the Israeli military or absorbed by Egypt and Transjordan. During the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, that dispossession was completed.
The Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be understood without remembering what happened 50 years ago. Every new stage in the cycle of revenge and retribution stems from 1948 and the making of the refugee problem. As Simha Flapan, the Israeli writer and politician, admitted shortly before his death in 1987: "The refusal to recognise the Palestinians' right to self-determination and statehood proved over the years to be the main source of the turbulence, violence and bloodshed that came to pass."
Our century is the great age of propaganda, of the construction of monstrous myths erected to deceive or to justify the slaughter of millions. But one of the consolations of its demise has been the sight of old myths punctured and destroyed.
Yet Israel still stands by its great founding myth, that the establishment of the state was achieved without harming the Arabs. The claim of its first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, that no Palestinians had been expelled, was exceeded by one of his successors, Golda Meir, who declared that they had never in fact existed.
Members of the Israeli establishment did not, of course, believe in their own myth. How could they, when so many of them had been directors of the expulsion themselves?
Let us remember those prime ministers, Menachem Begin (whose Irgun terrorists blew up the King David Hotel and massacred 250 Arab villagers at Deir Yassin), Yitzhak Shamir (whose Stern Gang murdered the UN mediator, Count Bernadotte, and the British minister Lord Moyne), and Ben Gurion himself, who ordered Yitzhak Rabin, a later prime minister, to expel thousands of Palestinians from the towns of the coastal plain.
And let us remember also those foreign ministers, Moshe Dayan, who, according to official Zionist historians, "drove at full speed into Lydda, shooting up the town" and "herding" its 30,000 inhabitants along the road to Ramallah, and Yigal Allon, who boasted that he had "cleansed" the Galilee and caused "tens of thousands of sulky [sic] Arabs . . . to flee".
Before 1977, during their three decades of hegemony, leaders of the Israeli Labour Party conceded that Deir Yassin had been a "blot" on Israel's honour carried out by their opponents, Mr Begin's Right-wing extremists.
But they refused to admit responsibility for the atrocities carried out by their own troops, the Haganah (which became the Israeli army), in the Galilean villages and at Duwayma near Hebron. They dismissed the findings of Israel Shahak, one of the great humanist figures of the Middle East, who concluded that "most of the worst massacres were committed by the Haganah, by the 'socialist' Zionists who sang about 'peace' and 'fraternity of all workers' before and after the murders".
Ten years ago, a number of young Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe decided to ignore their country's propaganda and re-examine the events of 1948 in the archives. As they did so, they saw the old myths dissolve.
Mr Morris, for example, found Israeli army documents admitting that, by June 1, 1948, 55 per cent of the Palestinian exodus had been caused by its own operations, a further 15 per cent of the refugees had been driven out by the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and smaller numbers had fled as a result of Jewish psychological warfare and expulsion orders.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the political heir of Mr Begin and Mr Shamir, will not accept the findings of the revisionist historians because that would entail, beyond acts of atonement and compensation, an entirely new attitude towards a despised and dispossessed people.
It would require an acceptance of the Palestinians as a nation, with as much right as the Israelis to live in their homeland. It would mean putting an end to settlements and occupation, and allowing the Palestinians a real state in the West Bank and Gaza. It would mean, above all, treating the Palestinians as an equal people with equal rights.
No one would deny that there is much to admire about modern Israel: its music, its literature, its vitality, its technology. But it is impossible to admire the whole while it remains built on an unexpiated injustice, its existence and identity based on denying the rights of its territory's indigenous people.
Most of the Palestinians are still exiles; more than 95 per cent of their homeland is still under Israeli control. Only when Israel faces its past and allows them a future should we be celebrating the anniversary of its creation.
David Gilmour is a historian whose books include Curzon and Lebanon: The Fractured Country
