http://www.ipsjps.org/jps/118/br_pappe.html
Vol XXX, No. 2, Winter 2001, Issue 118
ERASING PALESTINIANS' PAST
Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, by
Meron Benvenisti. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 340
pages. Notes to p. 352. Index to p. 366. $35.00 cloth.
Reviewed by Ilan Pappé
Ilan Pappé is professor of political science at Haifa University and
academic head of the Institute for Peace Research, Givat Haviva.
Israeli Zionist intellectuals who are located on the most leftist pole
of the political spectrum continue to produce bizarre books navigating
carefully between self-criticism and justifications. This is an
intriguing genre, characterized by careful deconstruction of the
Zionist past and present, which was recently exposed to its widest
audience in the treatment of history in the Israeli television series
"Tekumma"--yet another intellectual exercise of self-criticism without
violating the basic Zionist consensus. Meron Benvenisti's book is very
much in this vein. These books are very informative and full of
intriguing facts about callous Israeli behavior in the past, but they
are wrapped in Zionist ideology that leaves the question of Israel's
moral responsibility intact. Morality should be an integral part of
historical research, but it is not in these books in general, nor is
it to be found in the book under review. Nevertheless, Benvenisti's
book is somewhat exceptional in this respect because he does not
pretend to write a purely scholarly work. He is a journalist and
writes like one. Therefore, this is an opinionated book with a clear,
undisguised ideological agenda. This transparency makes it a bit
easier to examine the connection between what happened, the author's
interpretation, and the moral and political conclusions driven from
the historical analysis.
On the factual level, readers will find much in this work that is
novel. The book in essence looks at the way the Israelis transformed
the "human geography" of Palestine after the 1948 Nakba. It examines
in a detailed manner the renaming of the land and its human sites as
part of the antirepatriation policy that Israel adopted after the war.
Benvenisti is one of the few Israelis who dare to describe the policy
that was pursued as "ethnic cleansing." According to this book, the
"ethnic cleansing included Hebrewizing [sic] Arab names, the building
of Jewish settlements over deserted Arab villages, and the refusal to
allow a collective return." The worst episode in this operation was
what the author calls "the atrocities." These included massacres,
rapes, and expulsions of Palestinians, but, according to this book,
these "atrocities" were few in numbers and limited to the last phases
of the war, around October 1948.
At this point the readers will get the impression that this is an
explicit challenge not only to mainstream Israeli historiography, but
even to "new historians" such as Benny Morris. But it is not.
Admittedly, the term "ethnic cleansing" is provocative from a Zionist
point of view, but its explication in this book would lead the average
Zionist reader to exhale a sigh of relief. According to Benvenisti's
narrative, the cleansing was not premeditated, the indigenous
population left and was not expelled, and atrocities were on the level
one would expect from a "modern" nation in a conventional war. The
worst part of the narrative is the takeover of the abandoned villages
and their resettlement by Jews. Indeed, if there are no war crimes and
the "ethnic cleansing" amounts to the renaming and resettling of
uninhabited villages, then the Israeli conduct sounds less ignominious
in retrospect.
The Nakba is presented here as loss of land and houses. Nothing is
mentioned about careers, normal life, cultural production--in short,
the brutal termination of human existence in one's own land. The
limits of the
soul searching in this book emerge starkly when one reads the author's
political conclusions today in light of his version of the "ethnic
cleansing" of yesterday. The answer to the question Quo vadis? is
quite short: "What was lost needs a tombstone." This is a distorted
paraphrasing of a piece written by Azmi Bishara and adopted wrongly by
Benvenisti as the end of the story. Bishara wants a tomb on the way
to repatriation; Benvenisti wishes for a tomb instead of repatriation.
After reading the book, one gets the impression the Nakba was a
nonevent. Benvenisti would have been perfectly right if all that had
happened in Palestine was destruction of villages and urban centers in
the aftermath of the war as part of an Israeli antirepatriation
policy. His remorse then would be respectful and his call for
forgetfulness reasonable. But the destruction of the deserted villages
pales in comparison to the real "ethnic cleansing" not mentioned in
even one word of this book. This is the vision that Nur Masalha
describes in his recent book Imperial Israel. The destruction of
deserted, uninhabited villages was a final act in a plot written in
the 1880s. Zionist ideology purported and advocated the depopulation
of Palestine. The contingency that developed in 1948 enabled this
movement to implement this old desire to cleanse the indigenous
population. Such heinous ideas could have been legitimized in the eyes
of liberal-minded Europeans, such as the early Zionists, since this
was the age of colonialism, when genocide and ethnic cleansing were
part of the legitimate means for expanding European power into Asia
and Africa. The rise of the European Left in the 1920s and the decline
of the colonial powers after World War I almost brought to a stop
these acts of depopulation. Zionism was lagging behind because it had
to wait until it had the power to act, and it could not have done so
before 1948. It also would not have escaped the wrath of the
international community had it not been
for the Holocaust. These last sentences, if accepted as reasonable
analysis of historical development, exclude their author from the
Zionist consensus. Benvenisti chooses to stay within it. To his
credit, one should say that he does not hide behind scientific truth
to claim the rightness of his position. It is difficult for him
emotionally to cross over to the non-Zionist bank of the river.
