TWO SIDES OF THE COIN: INDEPENDENCE AND NAKBA 1948 TWO NARRATIVES OF THE 1948 WAR AND ITS OUTCOME وﺟﻬﺎ اﻟﻌﻤﻠﺔ: اﻻﺳﺘﻘﻼل واﻟﻨﻜﺒﺔ ﺳﺮدﻳﺘﺎن ﺣﻮل ﺣﺮب 1948 وﻧﺘﺎﺋﺠﻬﺎ INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION SERIES Published under editorial responsibility of The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation The Hague VOLUME 5 TWO SIDES OF THE COIN: INDEPENDENCE AND NAKBA 1948 TWO NARRATIVES OF THE 1948 WAR AND ITS OUTCOME وﺟﻬﺎ اﻟﻌﻤﻠﺔ: اﻻﺳﺘﻘﻼل واﻟﻨﻜﺒﺔ ﺳﺮدﻳﺘﺎن ﺣﻮل ﺣﺮب 1948 وﻧﺘﺎﺋﺠﻬﺎ Adel Manna and Motti Golani DORDRECHT 2011 Cover Design / Illustration: studio Thorsten / Photograph: Gal Oron, at Kababir, mixed neighborhood in Haifa. Translations: Nawaf Athamnah This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data This book is printed on acid-free paper. This publication has been produced with the assistance of the European Union. 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TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Note xi Introduction: Narrative, National Historical Narrative, and Historiography 1 First Section: Before the War Chapter One: Historical Background: The Path to War 27 Chapter Two: From the Holocaust to the Partition of Palestine, 1945-1947 43 Second Section: The Narratives of the War, November 1947–July 1949 Chapter Three: The Path to Independence and the Nakba, November 1947–May 1948 59 Chapter Four: At the Expense of the Palestinians: The First Israeli-Arab War, May 1948–January 1949 83 Chapter Five: Ended But Not Completed, January–July 1949 125 Third Section: The Aftermath Chapter Six: Post-Trauma, Post-Euphoria, 1949–1956 139 Epilogue: 1948, Here and Now 153 Bibliography 157 Index 167 **** List of Maps and Maps v PREFACE Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba 1948 represents a remarkable cooperative effort of two historians, Professor Motti Golani, a Jewish Israeli, and Dr. Adel Manna, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. Their collaboration produces an intriguing account of the narratives from the 1948 war. Although for over more than six decades, the 18 month long conflict that transformed the Middle East still resonates in historical memory and the social, political and economic dynamics of the region. The two established authors have written extensively on the history of the region. Instead of confining themselves to a more conventional work, they have courageously utilized their professional expertise and confronted contradicting national approaches to pursue a groundbreaking challenge. This two-sided narrative of the war presents the collective experience of Israelis and Palestinians in such a way as to educate readers of key historical facts and developments, as well as different perspectives and perceptions that shaped the nature and course of the conflict. Motti Golani and Adel Manna have worked under the auspices of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR), which has sought to provide resources and to enable a stimulating environment for their work. Despite occasional tense debates, this joint venture allowed for mutual respect and friendship to blossom. This book, originally written in Hebrew, is published simulta- neously in Arabic, English and Hebrew. The IHJR wishes to thank the Salzburg Global Seminar for their ongoing partnership, the European Commission’s Partner for Peace program, Sigrid Rausing Trust and the MacArthur Foundation for making our research possible, and the contributions from Dr. Richard and Priscilla Hunt and Drs. Robert and Marina Whitman family foundations. The IHJR hopes the book will be read in the spirit in which it was written – with a hard eye to the critical issues, but an open mind to the diversity of perspectives. It is our hope that this volume will provide new grounds for enabling people to build peace. Catherine Cissé-van den Muijsenbergh Executive Director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the boundless patience and initiative of the staff of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation to whom we are grateful for the supportive working framework with which they provided us during these turbulent times. We are also grateful to our many colleagues who read, discussed, and responded to the different texts generated by this project during its long metamorphosis since 2004, but who are too many in number to list here. We, of course, assume sole responsibility for the final product. Our research assistants, Matan Boord and Salwa `Alinat, did thorough work and participated in the many different discussions that resulted in this book. Dr. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev and Dr. Mustafa Abbasi undertook thorough readings of the text and pointed out quite a few errors, enabling us to improve the text considerably prior to publication. Dr. Geremy Forman’s translation of the text into English benefitted not only from his insight as a historian in his own right, but from his identification with the overall goals of the project. And finally, without the full support of our respective spouses for this challenging experiment, it could have never been completed. This book is not an attempt to achieve justice, and it is certainly not meant as a source of research-based, precise historiography. The true test of this book’s success will be the reverberations we hope it causes, the debate we hope it sparks, and its contribution, as minor as it may be, to a fruitful and constructive discussion of narrative between the two main parties to the conflict. We believe that such a discussion can serve as a dialogue of the living for the sake of a better life. Both authors are people whose families have had the experience of being refugees. This heritage obligates us to do all we can to ensure that the Jewish experience never repeats itself and that the Palestinian experience born in 1948 reaches resolution. Motti Golani and Adel Manna Haifa, Jerusalem February 2011 ix NOTE In October 2010, Bir-Zeit University in the West Bank hosted a conference on lacunae and new horizons in the study of Palestinian history. At the lectern stood a Palestinian historian speaking about the Israeli conquest of the Galilee during the 1948 war, addressing the question of whether or not the region had been subjected to ethnic cleansing. Members of the audience, which consisted primarily of academic scholars but also contained a smaller number of history students, reacted angrily to the speaker’s use of the term the “1948 war.” They urged him instead to make exclusive use of terms such as “Nakba,” “occupation,” “expulsion,” and “ethnic cleansing.” After all, according to their narrative, the Palestinians were not in favor of going to war at the time; rather, the war was forced on them by the Jewish Yishuv – the organized Jewish-Zionist community in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel. In an effort to justify his use of the neutral term “1948 war,” the speaker explained that as a professional historian, he regards the term “Nakba,” like the many other terms the audience urged him to adopt, as terminological products of the 1948 war itself. He also pointed out that even if the Palestinians lacked an army or an organized fighting force at the time, the Arab countries sent their armies into Palestine in May 1948, and from that point on it was undoubtedly a war in the full sense of the word. For this reason, he argued, the event should be referred to as a “war.” These clarifications only served to further inflame some members of the audience, whose efforts to convince the historian of the error of his ways lasted well into the coffee break that followed the discussion. *** The Second Palestinian Intifada broke out in October 2000. Two years later, after the true dimensions of the uprising became evident and after Israel in general and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in particular had effectively demonstrated their inability to put it down, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, Chief of Staff of the IDF at the time, declared that “the Palestinians have brought us back to the War of Independence.”1 His aim was to illustrate the intensity of the current hostilities to the citizens of Israel, to the soldiers of the IDF, and to himself. To this end, he used –––––––––––––– 1 Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon in an interview with Ari Shavit, Haaretz, 28 August 2002.