Special Document File an INDICATIVE ARCHIVE: SALVAGING NAKBA DOCUMENTS
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Special Document File AN INDICATIVE ARCHIVE: SALVAGING NAKBA DOCUMENTS ILAN PAPPÉ This Special Document File examines the closure of documents on the Nakba in the Israeli archives and argues that this closure must be juxtaposed with recent Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jps/article-pdf/49/3/22/405154/jps_49_3_022.pdf by guest on 17 July 2020 intensified U.S. and Israeli attempts to depoliticize the Palestine question and to delegitimize the Palestinian narrative in general, and that of 1948 in particular. The documents are important because they expose the systematic nature of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, both in planning and execution. Many of these documents have been copied and scanned by scholars over the years, but they are now no longer accessible to the public or to researchers. Collating, digitizing, and archiving these documents is the best response to the attempt to cover up the crimes against the Palestinian people in 1948. STARTING IN THE LATE 1980S, a group of Israeli scholars known as the New Historians published several monographs challenging the Israeli/Zionist narrative of the 1948 war that led to the dispossession and expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians and the destruction of more than five hundred villages and localities in what had been Mandate Palestine. Palestinian historians had already written about the Nakba extensively prior to that, but never before had the narrative been substantiated by declassified archival material. The research made possible by such material, which constitutes the main contribution of the New Historians’ historiographical effort, categorically refuted a foundational Israeli propaganda claim that during what Israel calls its “War of Independence,” the Palestinians left their homes voluntarily to make way for the invading Arab armies coming to their rescue, thus becoming refugees by their own hands. The documents on which this new historiography was based were housed in several archives, most important among them the Haganah Historical Archives, the Ben-Gurion Archives, the army archive (also known as the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] archive), and the Yad Yaari archive—the last being especially significant for the New Historians’ early work, since the army would not declassify relevant military documents until later in the 1990s. The Yad Yaari archive houses the documents of the Mapam Party and its youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, whose members formed the nucleus of the Palmach (the Haganah’s commando units), which spearheaded military operations in 1947–49. Since Mapam had been a major partner in the provisional government formed on 14 May 1948 and in Israel’s official government formed after the first elections held in January 1949, the Yad Yaari archive included otherwise inaccessible copies of early Israeli cabinet Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLIX, No. 3 (Spring 2020), p. 22, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2020 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2020.49.3.22. 22 || Journal of Palestine Studies Special Document File: Salvaging Nakba Documents meeting minutes (in addition to providing access to documents that the IDF and Haganah archives had yet to declassify). Palestinian historians with knowledge of Hebrew added their own input and highlighted the usefulness of such documents for reconstructing the dispossession of 1948. Both the extent of Zionist brutality and the struggle against it have been fully exposed in the works of historians such as Nur Masalha, Mustafa Kabha, Mustafa Abbasi,SalehAbdelJawad,AdelManna,andothers.1 Many scholars view the Nakba as a structural catastrophe (typical of settler-colonial projects such as Zionism) in which Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing, whether in 1949 or in 2020, is part and parcel of the same history and tragedy. The historiography of the Nakba, whether produced by Palestinian historians or others, is not validated by the presence of documentation in the Israeli archive; but the Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jps/article-pdf/49/3/22/405154/jps_49_3_022.pdf by guest on 17 July 2020 value of such documentation is to expose the nature of the Zionist project’s violence as structural, rather than incidental, and to discredit official Israeli discourse around the establishment of the state. Given the formative role of the Nabka in Palestinian identity and aspirations, as well as its ongoing nature—what Palestinians refer to as al-nakba al-mustammira—future generations of scholars, journalists, and researchers will undoubtedly want to revisit this rich documentation. Revisiting this archival material has become increasingly difficult, however. As Seth Anziska analyzed in the pages of a recent issue of this journal,* a joint investigative effort between Haaretz and the Israeli research, documentation, and human rights organization Akevot has exposed the very deliberate hindrances to archival access in Israel resulting from an official policy to withdraw pivotal archival documents from the public domain. Included in the exposé was Akevot’s publication of a twenty-five-page document detailing the Zionist military’s record of events in April and May 1948, which demonstrates that expulsion and intimidation were tactics deliberately deployed by Zionist forces to induce the exodus of large numbers of Palestinians.2 In addition to presenting six Israeli documents, the originals of which are now no longer accessible despite being declassified, this Special Document File has a three-fold purpose: to analyze the reasons behind the State of Israel’s intensifying clampdown on archival research, to assess the policy’s implications for both future scholarly work and the broader struggle for justice in Palestine, and to challenge this new archival reality, so to speak, by creating what I will call an “indicative archive of the Nakba.” Shuttering the Archives As reported in the 2019 Haaretz/Akevot exposé, Israel’s restriction of access to archival material is part of an official operation headed by Malmab, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s secretive security department.3 The Israeli Defense Ministry organization which goes by the Hebrew acronym Malmab is a clandestine unit whose activities and budget are classified and whose existence was first exposed by Israeli historian Avner Cohen in an effort to shed light on Israel’s nuclear policy.4 In the course of the investigation, Haaretz found that Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades until 2007, had begun working on removing documents from the archives when he was at the helm of the secretive department, a practice continued today by his successors. (Horev was also responsible * See Seth Anziska, “The Erasure of the Nakba in Israel’s Archives,” JPS 49, no. 1: pp. 64–76. –Ed. Springer 2020 || 23 Special Document File: Salvaging Nakba Documents for preventing Cohen from publishing and accessing archival material for his research on Israel’s nuclear arsenal.) Speaking to the newspaper, Horev argued that shuttering the archives was justified on the grounds that uncovering Nakba documents would, in the newspaper’s wording, “generate unrest among the country’s Arab population.”5 The argument is farcical on two counts: first, Israel’s Palestinian minority, whom Israeli officials refer to as “the Israeli Arabs,” have, since the mid-1980s, been among the most active and conscious groups to engage with—and protect—the memory of the Nakba. The Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced, which represents displaced Palestinians inside Israel, alongside local Palestinian scholars and activists, has sustained public interest in the Palestinians’ narrative of the 1948 events with no need of Israeli documentation to confirm their own experience of ethnic Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jps/article-pdf/49/3/22/405154/jps_49_3_022.pdf by guest on 17 July 2020 cleansing; second, as Haaretz pointed out, many of the documents now being reclassified had already been published, notably by the New Historians. Horev’s comeback to the latter argument was that removing such documents would, in the newspaper’swords,“undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem.” Settler-colonial movements such as Zionism are informed by what Patrick Wolfe defined as “the elimination of the Native.”6 Implicit in Israel’s existence as a settler-colonial state is the expectation that it would want to hide evidence of its acts of elimination, particularly in an era that looks unfavorably on colonialism and in the context of a country that purports to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” and a “Jewish and democratic state.” The 1948 Nakba is thus not only an act of elimination, but its erasure from the archives is also part of that act. As Wolfe points out, not all acts of elimination are genocidal, as they were in North America or Australia. In Algeria and South Africa, for example, the removal of the indigenous population was achieved by a combination of land expropriation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. In Palestine, too, an incremental ethnic cleansing, which began in the mid-1920s, has been the principal means pursued to bring about “the elimination of the Native.” Wolfe’s comment that settler colonialism is not an event but a