Catastrophic thinking: Did Ben-Gurion try to rewrite history?

[azurnoir]

Ben-Gurion appeared to have known the facts well. Even though much material about the Palestinian refugees in Israeli archives is still classified, what has been uncovered provides enough information to establish that in many cases senior commanders of the Israel Defense Forces ordered Palestinians to be expelled and their homes blown up. The Israeli military not only updated Ben-Gurion about these events but also apparently received his prior authorization, in written or oral form, notably in Lod and Ramle, and in several villages in the north. Documents available for perusal on the Israeli side do not provide an unequivocal answer to the question of whether an orderly plan to expel Palestinians existed. In fact, fierce debate on the issue continues to this day. For example, in an interview with Haaretz the historian Benny Morris argued that Ben-Gurion delineated a plan to transfer the Palestinians forcibly out of Israel, though there is no documentation that proves this incontrovertibly.

Even before the war of 1948 ended, Israeli public diplomacy sought to hide the cases in which Palestinians were expelled from their villages. In his study of the early historiography of the 1948 war, “Memory in a Book” ‏ Hebrew‏ , Mordechai Bar-On quotes Aharon Zisling, who would become an MK on behalf of Ahdut Ha’avoda and was the agriculture minister in Ben-Gurion’s provisional government in 1948. At the height of the expulsion of the Arabs from Lod and Ramle, Zisling wrote in the left-wing newspaper Al Hamishmar, “We did not expel Arabs from the Land of Israel ... After they remained in our area of control, not one Arab was expelled by us.” In Davar, the newspaper of the ruling Mapai party, the journalist A. Ophir went one step further, explaining, “In vain did we cry out to the Arabs who were streaming across the borders: Stay here with us!”

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Ben-Gurion’s unusual request to the Shiloah Institute was accompanied by rare authorization to examine Israeli archives that were closed to the public. The institute’s researchers were allowed to peruse captured documents that had been collected by the Intelligence Corps and, more important material compiled on the subject by the Shin Bet security service, some of which had been transferred from the Haganah after 1948. Gabbay: “We were told, ‘We don’t know what to do with all this material, with this crate.’ So I went to Shin Bet headquarters for three or four days and went through all the material. After that they burned it, of course they didn’t give it to us.”

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Most historians who have researched the subject paint a radically different picture. They present evidence that Ben-Gurion knew in real time about the expulsion of Palestinians and apparently authorized expulsions in a number of cases. In the absence of reliable information from the period, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether Ben-Gurion had actually persuaded himself that the majority of Palestine’s Arabs had left of their own volition, or did not even believe this himself but wanted history to believe it.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/catastrophic-thinking-did-ben-gurion-try-to-rewrite-history.premium-1.524308