18 August 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
History may be written by the victors, as
Winston Churchill is said to have
observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten
a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of
mass graves.
That
danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by
Benjamin Netanyahu, the
Israeli prime minister,
to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s
50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.
The
new 70-year disclosure rule is the government’s
response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking
through Israel’s courts to gain access to documents
that should already be declassified, especially those
concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and
the 1956 Suez crisis.
The
state’s chief archivist says many of the documents
“are not fit for public viewing” and raise doubts
about Israel’s “adherence to international law”, while
the government warns that greater transparency will
“damage foreign relations”.
Quite
what such phrases mean was illustrated by the findings
of a recent investigation by an Israeli newspaper.
Haaretz revisited the
Six Day War of
1967, in which Israel seized not only the
Palestinian territories of the West Bank
and Gaza, but also a significant corner of
Syria known as the
Golan Heights,
which Israel still refuses to relinquish.
The
consensus in Israel is that the country’s right to
hold on to the Golan is even stronger than its right
to the West Bank. According to polls, an overwhelming
majority of Israelis refuse to concede their little
bit of annexed Syria, even if doing so would secure
peace with
Damascus.
This
intransigence is not surprising. For decades, Israelis
have been taught a grand narrative in which, having
repelled an attack by Syrian forces, Israel then
magnanimously allowed the civilian population of the
Golan to live under its rule. That, say Israelis, is
why the inhabitants of four
Druze villages are still present there.
The rest chose to leave on the instructions of
Damascus.
One
influential journalist writing at the time even
insinuated anti-Semitism on the part of the civilians
who departed: “Everyone fled, to the last man, before
the
IDF [Israel
Defence Forces] arrived, out of fear of
the ‘savage conqueror’ … Fools, why did they have to
flee?”
However, a very different picture emerges from
Haaretz’s interviews with the participants. These
insiders say that all but 6,000 of the Golan’s 130,000
civilians were either terrorised or physically forced
out, some of them long after the fighting finished. An
army document reveals a plan to clear the area of the
Syrian population, with only the exception of the
Golan Druze, so as not to upset relations with the
loyal Druze community inside Israel.
The
army’s post-war tasks included flushing out thousands
of farmers hiding in caves and woods to send them over
the new border. Homes were looted before the army set
about destroying all traces of 200 villages so that
there would be nowhere left for the former inhabitants
to return to. The first Jewish settlers sent to till
the fields recalled seeing the dispossessed owners
watching from afar.
The
Haaretz
investigation offers an account of methodical and
wholesale ethnic cleansing that sits uncomfortably not
only with the traditional Israeli story of 1967 but
with the Israeli public’s idea that their army is the
“most moral in the world”. That may explain why
several prominent, though unnamed, Israeli historians
admitted to Haaretz that they had learnt of this
“alternative narrative” but did nothing to investigate
or publicise it.
What
is so intriguing about the newspaper’s version of the
Golan’s capture is the degree to which it echoes the
revised accounts of the 1948 war that have been
written by later generations of Israeli historians.
Three decades ago – in a more complacent era – Israel
made available less sensitive documents from that
period.
The
new material was explosive enough. It undermined
Israel’s traditional narrative of 1948, in which the
Palestinians were said to have left voluntarily on the
orders of the Arab leaders and in the expectation that
the combined Arab armies would snuff out the fledging
Jewish state in a bloodbath.
Instead, the documents suggested that heavily armed
Jewish forces had expelled and dispossessed hundreds
of thousands of Palestinians before the Jewish state
had even been declared and a single Arab soldier had
entered Palestine.
One
document in particular,
Plan Dalet,
demonstrated the army’s intention to expel the
Palestinians from their homeland. Its existence
explains the ethnic cleansing of more than 80 per cent
of Palestinians in the war, followed by a
military campaign to destroy hundreds of
villages to ensure the refugees never returned.
Ethnic
cleansing is the common theme of both these Israeli
conquests. A deeper probe of the archives will almost
certainly reveal in greater detail how and why these
“cleansing” campaigns were carried out – which is
precisely why Mr Netanyahu and others want the
archives to remain locked.
But
full disclosure of these myth-shattering documents may
be the precondition for peace. Certainly, more of
these revelations offer the best hope of shocking
Israeli public opinion out of its self-righteous
opposition to meaningful concessions, either to Syria
or the Palestinians.
It is
also a necessary first step in challenging Israel’s
continuing attempts to ethnically cleanse
Palestinians, as has occurred in the last few weeks
against the Bedouin in both the
Jordan Valley
and the
Negev, where
villages are being razed and families forced to leave
again.
Genuine peacemakers should be demanding that the doors
to the archives be thrown open immediately. The
motives of those who wish to keep them locked should
be clear to all.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are
“Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the
Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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