http://www.lol.shareworld.com/ZMag/articles/shahak.htm
The Rabin File
By Dr. Uri Milstein
Translated from Hebrew
Gefen Books, Hewlett NY
Review by Israel Shahak, Z Magazine
It is regrettable that most of the information about Israel and the
Zionist movement, whose efforts resulted in the creation of the Jewish
state and whose ideology still dominates it, that reaches countries
like the U.S. and particularly the left, concentrates on what is
considered in Israel itself the left part of its political spectrum,
that is the Labor and Meretz parties, the Arab parties usually allied
with them, and to some extent the very small groups to the left of
this bloc. This bloc can be defined as "the Oslo coalition,"
since after the 1992 elections it was its support that brought Rabin's
government to power and allowed it to persist in its policies until
the 1996 elections, which were, first and foremost, the defeat of this
bloc.
If information about "the other side" of the Israel
political spectrum is published outside of Israel, it is usually done
by its enemies and it is usually a slanderous kind of information. The
result of this continuous disinformation is that when a
"left" Israeli government carries out policies that are
actually worse than those carried out by the right wing one, its
crimes are overlooked while the acts of a Netanyahu are exaggerated.
Milstein justly observed this while participating in Rabin's
government: "Meretz party ministers justified the expulsion of
415 Hamas activists to Lebanon in December 1992 in spite of their
party's fiercely opposing such acts during the Likud government and in
spite of their election platform in 1992. These very same ministers
supported Operation Accountability in the last week of July 1993 and
Operation `Grapes of Wrath' in April 1996, when the IDF (Israeli
Defense Army) bombed and shelled many villages in South Lebanon,
destroyed many houses, and caused half a million citizens to flee
their homes."
Since Milstein's book was published in Hebrew in 1995, let me add
that during the Netanyahu government of 1996-99, Meretz protested
against its policies in Lebanon, which were much milder than those it
approved under Rabin, while the situation in the West Bank was not
very different. However, the hypocritical protests of Meretz and Labor
are being slavishly echoed by the U.S. media and believed by many in
the left. Milstein's book is of great importance in redressing the
picture and in allowing Americans who usually know the Zionist right
only from the slanders of the left to have a valuable glimpse of its
views not only on Rabin, the subject of he book under review, but on
the history of the "Yishuv" -- the modern Jewish community
in Palestine -- from about 1920, through the creation of the State of
Israel in 1948, up to 1995.
Milstein is a military historian who has published many books with
very detailed and highly critical descriptions of the performance of
the military forces of the Yishuv and the IDF. His competence and
factual honesty are fully established, although since he has
successfully demolished one of the most sacred items of Israeli
mythology (accepted by the U.S. media), that the IDF and before this
the Palmach [the elite strike force of the pre-State Haganah] are and
were of good or even extraordinary quality in military terms, he is
intensely disliked by the Israeli establishment experts (who are
usually of leftist views) and given the silent treatment. I consider
that his general conclusions are valid: the IDF has usually been a bad
army and most of its faults can be ascribed to its generals and
officer corps in general.
Thus we can read in The Rabin File well-substantiated views
that will never be expressed in the U.S. mainstream media. Israel and
before that the Yishuv suffered from "security
schizophrenia." The retaliations, which according to Milstein
were sometimes "not linked to prior Arab attacks," have in
any case "dragged the Jewish Yishuv into an all-out struggle with
the Arab inhabitants of Palestine." The IDF attempted in 1948
"to poison the water in Gaza," but the attempt failed. The
attempt of left Zionists to create "a New Jew" was based on
"an overabundant Aryan aggressiveness." Milstein has no
doubt that the IDF "suffered defeat" in the Intifida. When
describing the IDF conquest of Lydda in 1948 he says that it
"slaughtered" the Arabs and adds that in many Palestinian
villages, for example Bidu and Bet Surik, Palmach troops commanded by
Rabin "blew up occupied Arab houses." But contrary to most
Palestinian historians and certain modern Jewish ones he also
describes Palestinian atrocities without exaggerating them. The
picture emerging from his book is a war between communities won by the
Jewish community because, with all the faults of its military leaders,
it was much more efficient and trained its soldiers much better than
the Palestinians did. Let me add that a crucial reason for the Jewish
victory was the support of Stalin, who early in 1948 ordered
Czechoslovakia to supply weapons to the Jewish forces. Since a few
years later the U.S.SR began to support some important Arab states and
afterwards the PLO, this fact has been suppressed in most histories
written by Arabs.
The faults of the IDF are greatly increased by organized
glorification of its generals, of which the glorification of Rabin,
particularly by U.S. Jews, when after the Six Day War (with which he
had little to do), he became the Israeli Ambassador in Washington, is
a notorious example. The conclusion from Milstein's thesis, hinted but
not explicitly made in his works, is that Israeli victories are the
result of Palestinian forces and then the Arab armies being even worse
than the Israeli army, and also having faults which the Israeli
soldiers do not usually have, such as being prone to panic.
The Rabin File is mainly a military biography of Rabin,
demolishing the prevalent myth of his "great" performance as
Palmach commander in the war of 1947-49 (called in Israel "the
Independence War"). Although it begins with a valuable
description of Rabin's youth and his parents, and contains interesting
observations of how the leaders of the Yishuv and then of Israel had
come to their decisions and what their aims were, its bulk consists of
a detailed military analysis of battles, often small clashes, in which
Rabin or his colleagues were involved. I will mostly ignore this part
of the book and concentrate on two issues highly relevant for
contemporary readers: the true aims of the Jewish leadership before
and during the first part of the war of 1947-49 when the conflict in
Palestine was between Jewish and Palestinian communities, and the
current world outlook of the Israeli right wing as glimpsed through
Milstein's views.
There can be no doubt that Milstein's views about the true aims of
the Jewish leadership in Palestine in the 1940s, comprised of left
Zionists, based on a detailed analysis of what that leadership said in
its secret debates and ignoring its public declarations, are correct.
The difference between the right minority organization Irgun, headed
by Menachem Begin, and Haganah headed by Ben-Gurion, but then very
strongly influenced by Labor hawks organized in the Le'ahdut Ha'avoda
Party, turns out to be very small if one examines their secret plans
in contrast to their public talk. For example, although the Jewish
leadership headed by Ben-Gurion accepted the UN General Assembly
decision of November 19, 1947, dividing Palestine into two states,
Arab and Jewish (and an international area around Jerusalem), while
Irgun (and a smaller and more extreme organization Lehi) rejected it,
it turns out that what the Jewish leadership really wanted was
"Greater Israel in Stages," or to put it accurately,"to
establish a State with borders as broad as possible, and with as few
Arabs as possible. To that end, the leaders believed that it was
highly desirable to prevent the establishment of an Arab state within
the borders of Western Palestine, despite the UN resolution calling
for such co-existence."
A secondary goal was to disguise this aim and present the war as a
"no-choice defensive effort" so as "to gain the support
of world public opinion." The long-standing attempts of the
Jewish leadership to make an alliance with the Hashemite dynasty
ruling, under British protection, in Transjordan (now Jordan), are
correctly seen by Milstein as a result of a decision to attempt to
conquer the entire Palestine. He even tries to ask whether this
policy, called the "Jordanian option," did not provoke the
leaders of the majority of the Palestinians, the Husseini family, and
contribute "to 46 years of terrorist and anti-terrorist
activities."
Indeed, an important point emerging from The Rabin File is
that Ben-Gurion, who wanted to conquer the entire Palestine, was more
moderate than the Palmach commanders, Rabin's teachers, followers of
Yitzhak Tabenkin, the leader of "Le'ahdut Ha'avoda," who,
exactly like Jabotinsky and Begin, wanted also to conquer the
"East Bank of the Jordan." Let me illustrate the point by
quoting Tabenkin's famous speech, made in March 1944 during Palmach's
formative years, in which he declared: "Our aim is the entire
Land of Israel on both banks of the Jordan, whose borders are: from
Lebanon to Sinai, from the desert to the sea. All this should become a
Jewish state, dedicated to Jewish revival." Tabenkin also
expressed a hope "that some day the Arabs will be content to
change their place of residence and will depart from here to another
place." In 1948 and for some years afterwards, when I lived in
Tel Aviv and was a dedicated follower of Ben-Gurion because of his
moderation (as I saw it), I was involved in many debates with friends
who quoted this speech to me as illustrating the policies Israel
should pursue. There can be no doubt about its influence among left
Zionists of that time and its relevance to the course of the 1947-49
war.
Milstein denies the myth that "the Jews had no interest in
war," because "the war enabled the Jews to expand their
borders" and "reduce the number of hostile Arabs within
those borders." He conclusively shows that during the crucial
initial months after the outbreak of hostilities on November 30, 1947,
the actual policy of Jewish military forces was to aggravate the
conflict. (This was also the policy of the Palestinian leadership
headed by Haj Amin Husseini, who spent the last years of World War II
as Hitler's guest). Two cases in which this policy was carried out
will be quoted.
"Two weeks after the UN resolution, on December 12, 1947,
soldiers of the Palmach 3rd Battalion attacked an Arab bus near Nab
Yosha, killing six passengers, wounding three and burning the bus.
`Order restored on the roads', were the words used in the report on
this action by the Battalion commander, Mula Cohen. On December 18,
1947, three Arabs from the village Kela on the Lebanese border clashed
in the Hula valley with two Jewish men and a boy... One of the Jews
was killed, apparently when his gun backfired. The incident took place
not far from the Arab village of Chasas. Without bothering to check
from where the attackers had come, soldiers of the Palmach 3rd
Battalion carried out a reprisal raid against the village of Chasas,
blew up two houses and killed three men, a woman and four
children."
"This retaliation," comments Milstein, "intensified
the enmity between the Jews and Arabs in the Galilee." I have no
doubt that it was the calculated policy of the two leaderships, Jewish
and Palestinian, that caused the outbreak of the 1947-49 war in
Palestine. Milstein's book shows the Jewish side of that grim
decision, with whose consequences both peoples and the entire world
still have to live.
Together with remarkable clarity of thought and absence of
hypocrisy, The Rabin File, like most books by Israeli right
wingers, is characterized by a mythological approach and chauvinism
(in this case a Jewish one); qualities common to most right wing
movements. However, because of the PC influence in the Western world,
Jewish chauvinism is quite unknown, especially among the left.
Therefore even Milstein's chauvinistic mythology, more or less common
to all right wing Jews in all countries (it can be found in the
largest Jewish paper in the U.S., The Jewish Press), is useful
for knowledge of that section of Israeli Jews. Milstein, who in spite
of not being Orthodox considers all figures of the Old Testament as
being historical, regards Abraham as a great strategist. According to
Milstein, "Human culture evolved from Abraham's victory -- the
triumph of pure reason over the Devil's Trinity." I will not
attempt to explain what "the Devil's Trinity" means, but the
anti-Christian tendencies so strong in the Israeli right wing (in
spite of great support of many Christian fundamentalists for Greater
Israel) are illustrated by the statement that "the Devil's
Trinity," after being created "together with the world...
Later in the Holy Land gave birth to the Holy Trinity of
Christianity." The book is full of similar statements and of
belief in Jewish superiority.
Another tendency common to most right wing movements, and very
prominent among Israeli right wingers, is Milstein's repudiation of
justice (except in relations among the Jews), even as an ideal to be
pursued, and its replacement by the "Principle of Survival,"
which can justify anything. It should be emphasized that Milstein,
contrary to vulgar right wingers, justifies "cruel acts of
slaughter and destruction" whether ordered by a Jewish or
Palestinian leadership. His scorn is reserved for "the twisted
intellectuals of our time whose physical survival is secure" and
who aspire to "unbiased justice" or "seek justice for
others." He ascribes this to "megalomaniac sources,"
and claims that such "twisted intellectuals" had, by their
manipulation of public opinion, corrupted human life "during
human history." This is an obvious echo of Nietzsche's views,
very popular among the Israeli extremists now and in some Palmach
circles in the 1940s, which admired the "Aryan virility of which
Nietzsche had spoken, the Superman, full of vigor and energy."
Without understanding the prevalence of such views in a large part of
the Israeli Jewish society and among influential parts of U.S. Jewry,
one simply cannot understand the history of the State of Israel.
I consider The Rabin File, in spite of its tedious stories
of battles and clashes, to be a valuable book for anyone who wants to
understand those aspects of Israeli and Zionist history, which the
U.S. media, and in particular liberal U.S. media, almost always omit.
This judgment applies both to the correct parts of the book and to
those which I oppose and consider to be pernicious nonsense, but
nonsense which continues to be highly influential in important Jewish
circles, not only in Israel but in other countries as well.
