Revisionism on the West Bank

by Benny Morris

06.22.2010

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Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010),
336 pp., $32.50.

EFRAIM KARSH’S title is, of course, ironic. For close on a century, Palestinians
and other Arabs have accused Britain of “betraying the Arabs” and, particularly,
the Arabs of Palestine. In the wake of World War I, the British (“Perfidious
Albion”), so the charge went, failed to uphold their wartime promises to Hussein
ibn Ali, the sharif of Mecca and leader of the anti-Ottoman revolt in Hijaz,
regarding Arab self-determination and independence. More specifically,
according to this interpretation, in a letter from October 1915, Britain promised
Palestine to the Arabs—and then went ahead and gave it, in the Balfour
Declaration of 1917, to the Jews. The British went on to conquer Palestine and in
1920, to establish a mandatory government that promoted and protected the
Zionist enterprise and suppressed Palestinian Arab nationalism, thus paving the
way for the coup de grâce of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when the Jews trounced
the Palestinians and established Israel over 78 percent of Palestine’s landmass,
and the Jordanians, with British encouragement, took over almost all the rest
(the West Bank).

Karsh, a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College

London, has a radically different take. Palestine Betrayed, a review of the history
of the years 1920–1948, is strongly focused on the 1948 war between the Jewish
community in Palestine, which declared statehood in May 1948, and the
country’s Arab population and the surrounding Arab states. Karsh charges that
both (a) the British betrayed the Jews and ultimately reneged on their
commitment to support Jewish statehood, and (b) the Arab leaders, both inside
and outside Palestine, betrayed Palestine and the Palestinians—by rejecting the
various compromises proposed by the international community and leading them
carelessly into both a revolt against the British (1936–1939) and then eight years
later into a war against the Jews which resulted in disaster for both the
Palestinians and the Arab states. Instead of looking after the welfare of the
Palestinians, their leaders and the heads of the surrounding countries consigned
them to a refugeedom that has persisted for the past six decades.

FOR THE uninitiated, there is something commendable aboutPalestine

Betrayed. For decades a political scientist who, from armchairs in north Tel Aviv
and north London, churned out volume after volume about the geopolitics and
strategic concerns of the Middle East (Soviet-Syrian arms deals, Saddam
Hussein’s ambitions, etc.) based mainly on newspaper clippings and conjecture,
Karsh has now graduated to historiography based, as it should be, on archives.
This change of habit or discipline was apparently precipitated by his now-famous
assault in the 1990s on Israel’s revisionist “New Historians,” which somewhat
preceded his actual descent into the bowels of the contemporary documentation.

Now, instead of merely taking to task this or that New Historian, Karsh has put
together a “history” of his own which, by the way, serves also as a full-throated
rebuttal of the Israeli New Historiography of the late 1980s, which tried to show
that the Middle East conflict wasn’t a simple struggle between good (Zionists)
and evil (Arabs), and that the Zionists and Israel also had a share in bringing
about the tragedy of 1948 and the events on either side of that revolutionary year.
Prominent among the objects of Karsh’s attacks—let me put the cards on the
table, face up—are Avi Shlaim, an Iraqi-born British historian from Oxford
University; the explicitly anti-Zionist Ilan Pappé, formerly of Haifa University
and now a teacher at Exeter University; and, of course, yours truly.

In Palestine Betrayed, Karsh takes his readers back to a pure Manichaean view of
the past, but this time with extensive endnotes. Karsh marshals a vast panoply,
which refers the reader to documentation in Israeli, British and American
archives. (Occasionally, he culls also from Arab memoirs and newspapers.) Many
readers, I fear, will feel stifled by the sheer weight of dusty memoranda and
correspondence, if only because each of Karsh’s endnotes, with few exceptions,
refers to anywhere between five and twenty particular documents. This
uncustomary method of piling up the references usually obviates any possibility
of identifying the source of any specific quotation carried in the text. Which is
very annoying.

But most historians probably won’t bother to work out these interminable
referential puzzles if only because they will have been put off, long before, by the
palpable one-sidedness of Karsh’s narrative. All too often it gives off the smell of
shop-soiled propaganda. And, let me quickly note, I say this despite the fact that I
am in almost complete agreement with Karsh’s political conclusions (which in
some way emerge naturally and, I feel, irrefutably from the history) and in some
measure with his history as well.

FIRST, TO the political implications. Put simply, Karsh argues that throughout
its existence, from (the anti-Semitic) Haj Amin al-Husseini through (the devious)
Yasser Arafat to (the forthright and murderous) Hamas and (the seemingly
benign) Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian national movement has rejected every
offered compromise with Zionism and has demanded all of Palestine as its
patrimony—and consistently rejected partition and a two-state solution, at base
denying the legitimacy of Zionism. This, unfortunately, remains the outlook of
the Palestinian leadership today, as its minor branch, the Palestinian Authority or
Palestine Liberation Organization (which, let’s recall, lost the general elections in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Hamas back in 2006), enters yet another
duplicitous round of negotiations with Israel and the United States.
Moreover, the Palestinians were almost consistently supported in their
rejectionism by the rulers of the surrounding Arab states. Even today, the leaders
of Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994
respectively, have maintained a “cold” nonbelligerency with the Jewish state and
continue to support the “right of return” of the Palestinian refugees. If
implemented, such a refugee return would result in short order in Israel’s demise,
as President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan surely must
realize.

NOW, TO Karsh’s history. In all such works, much depends on the historian’s
selection of documents and on his judgments about where the burden of proof
lies. It is in these that Karsh fails, and fails dismally.

This is what Karsh tells his readers: The Arabs of Palestine were enamored with
the Zionist settlers and appreciated their economic beneficence—but fanatical or
jealous or competitive educated Arabs, clerics, Ottoman officials, urban notables
incited them to resist the Zionist influx, which they wrongly depicted as
minatory. Later, during the Palestine Mandate, British officials struggled against
the Zionist aim of Jewish statehood and pumped up Palestinian nationalism. In
1948, most Palestinians, just as their leaders launched a war of extermination
against the Jewish community in Palestine/Israel, continued to ignore the call of
the extremists. (Indeed, Karsh writes, quoting the Palestine Post, “Arabs joined
in [Jewish] celebrations [of the UN partition vote of November 29, 1947]”—but is
this really representative of how the Arabs greeted the partition vote?) But in the
end, the masses were sucked into the cycle of belligerency. And the Arabs’ war
was supported by the British. What’s more—and this is really the focus of the
book—the Palestinian refugee problem was created mainly by the Palestinian
leaders themselves and by Arab officials who called on the Palestinians to
evacuate their homes; Israeli expulsions, and Karsh concedes grudgingly that
there were a few, had only a marginal effect. Indeed, according to Karsh, up until
May 1948—and even beyond—the Zionist leaders continuously pleaded with the
Palestinians to stay put and enjoy life in the emergent, democratic, egalitarian
State of Israel. Lastly, Karsh argues, at war’s end the Israelis did all they could to
achieve peace, offering concession after concession; they even favored the
establishment of a separate Palestinian Arab state. But the Arab leaders would
have none of it. And of the most peace minded of them, King Abdullah I of
Jordan, Karsh says, “For all his affability, Abdullah was no more accepting of
Jewish national aspirations than any other Arab leader.”

Of course, there’s some truth in all of this; but, to employ an out-of-use British
Mandate word, taken as a whole, it is “tosh.”

KARSH’S PORTRAYAL of Britain’s role is one-sided and without nuance. The

British government, between 1917 and 1937, supported and protected the Zionist
enterprise. In 1938–1939 the Chamberlain government indeed reneged on this
commitment and adopted an appeasing tack toward the Arabs, severely curbing
Jewish immigration (just as the Nazis were closing in on Europe’s Jews, who
were desperate for a safe haven) and supporting Arab-majority rule over
Palestine. But, in the crunch, the British did not vigorously oppose partition (and
Jewish statehood) at the United Nations in November 1947 (Karsh says, for
instance, that then–British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin “fought tooth and nail”
against it; but Whitehall instructed its ambassadors worldwide not to advise their
host countries either way, and Britain itself abstained in the crucial ballot). In
February 1948, the British supported the planned Jordanian takeover of the area
today called the West Bank and cautioned Jordan not to invade the areas
designated for Jewish statehood (except for the Negev, which Britain appears to
have goaded the Jordanians into seizing), and in May of that year, London cut off
arms supplies and ammunition to its Arab client states, in line with the UN-
imposed arms embargo (which Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, arming
Israel, defied).

Karsh suffers from a clear anti-British bias (though he himself, perversely

perhaps for such a gung-ho Zionist, moved from Israel to Britain in the 1970s).
He calls the British camps in Cyprus where Jewish illegal immigrants bound for
Palestine were incarcerated during 1945–1948 “concentration camps”
(“detention camps,” the common usage, is more accurate).

THIS LACK of nuance extends to the Arab side as well. The Arab objectives in the
1948 war are not entirely clear given the complete absence of access to the Arab
states’ archives. To be sure, the Palestinians sought to prevent the emergence of a
Jewish state, and the Arab countries would have liked to crush the Jewish state at
inception or at least to badly hurt it. And it is quite possible that had either won
the war, the result would have been a massive slaughter of Jews. But was
“extermination” their war aim, as Karsh would have it? There is no knowing.
Indeed, the Arab leaders going to war in 1948 were very sparing in publicly
describing their goals and “exterminating” the Jews never figured in their public
bombast. I myself in the past have used the one divergent quote, by Arab League
Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Azzam from May 15, 1948, in which he
allegedly spoke of a “war of extermination” and a “momentous massacre” à la the
Mongols. But in my recent history of the war, 1948(Yale University Press, 2008),
I refrained from reusing it after discovering that its pedigree is dubious.

ON TO the refugee issue (and in particular to Karsh’s unrelenting assertion that

the Jews had only the most benign and noble desire to incorporate the
Palestinians into their new state). Our author continuously quotes Israel’s first
prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and other Zionist leaders’ peaceful intentions,
desires and policies. For example, there is Ben-Gurion’s statement that “the
Arab[s] [in Israel] will enjoy full civic and political equality,” and so on, as if
politicians’ public pronouncements should necessarily be taken at face value.
Karsh also repeatedly insists that the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem
was mainly the result of orders or advice from the Palestinians’ own leaders or
outside Arab officials, not of Jewish military attacks or expulsions. The Jews, he
tells us, wanted and asked their Arab neighbors to stay, certainly during the first
four to five months of the war. And they were fairly open to an Arab refugee
return thereafter.

We see this one-sided take again in Karsh’s quotation of a communiqué issued

from the main Jewish militia, the Haganah (which became the Israeli Defense
Forces or UN after the founding of Israel), after the notables of Jaffa signed a
surrender accord on May 13, 1948: “We promised the [remaining] residents a
peaceful and dignified life . . . this is a matter of honor and [reflects] the hard
moral core of our army.” What Karsh fails to tell his readers is that the agreement
allowed for the return of the town’s inhabitants, a commitment that Israel failed
to honor, and that Jaffa’s few remaining Arabs were for weeks thereafter
subjected to a regime of spoliation (houses were confiscated, residents forcibly
moved from place to place), vandalism and, on occasion, physical attack, until the
Israeli military police managed to gain full control. There is not a breath of this in
Karsh’s book.

At one point, Karsh tells us:

At the request of the Haganah commander-in-chief [sic], Israel

Galili, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top Arab-
affairs advisors, local notables and municipal heads . . .
traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying at a
staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their inhabitants to
stay put.

A peek at the relevant endnote indicates that Karsh has based this passage solely
on the memoirs of former–senior Israeli intelligence officer Ezra Danin, A Zionist
Under Any Condition (Kidum, 1987). Karsh adds that the Jewish leaders in the
town of Tiberias later that month “famously pleaded” with the Arabs to stay.

Karsh provides no contemporary documentation to support the story and, as far

as I know, it is a complete fabrication. And it flies in the face of everything we
know about Danin himself, a preeminent Arab-affairs expert, who from March to
April 1948 was a leading proponent of expelling (“transferring”) the Arabs. In
fact, he was a member of the shadowy three-man “Transfer Committee,” headed
by Yosef Weitz, a leading figure in the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist
movement’s land-holding institution. As to Tiberias, again, there is no
contemporary document asserting that the Jews pleaded with the Arabs to stay,
and Karsh’s story appears to be based (he doesn’t actually give the reference)
solely on the recollections, many years later, of a local Jewish official.

And while there are one or two instances in which second-tier Jewish leaders
actually appealed to the Arabs to stay (most notably Haifa Mayor Shabtai Levy’s
appeal on April 22, 1948), by and large—and with very good reason—the Jews of
Palestine were happy to see their neighbors depart, neighbors who for weeks and
months had been shooting at them.

In fact, from June 1948 onward, Israel’s local and national leaderships were
firmly opposed to a refugee return (in my view, quite rightly; the returnees would
have been a potential or actual fifth column). Karsh’s description of Israel’s
position on this issue is highly misleading and propagandistic. He even quotes
Ben-Gurion as saying in October 1948 “we will not close the door to them”—when
Ben-Gurion is actually on record, time and again during the preceding and
following months, saying flatly that he opposed a refugee return.

Again, leaders say different things at different times to different audiences—and

it is the historian’s task to elucidate when the leader is speaking pro forma and
when he is expressing his real views. If this is a test of the historian’s mettle,
Karsh crashes in flying colors.

Where he is illuminating and persuasive, even if one senses occasionally that he

is beating a dead horse, is on the disintegration of Palestinian society and the
incompetence and venality of its ruling class. Karsh tells us, for example, that the
members of the leading notable families—those who led the Palestinian national
movement—including Husseinis and Nashashibis, sold land to the Zionists while
they were busy castigating Zionism and all its works. In describing the first weeks
of the 1948 war, Karsh relates the story of Jaffa mayor Yousef Heikal’s efforts to
reach a nonbelligerency agreement with neighboring Jewish Tel Aviv, in order to
allow the citrus crop to be harvested and exported. But Haj Amin al-Husseini, the
Palestinian leader, vetoed this and called for “jihad against the Jews.” The cross-
purposes of the national leaders living in exile and their subordinate military
bands inside Palestine and the local leaderships was to seriously weaken the
Palestinian cause.

THE BOOK provides almost no understanding of the war’s military

developments, strategic considerations or operations, from either side (surely the
key matters in most wars). When Karsh nonetheless strays into the military
dimension, he almost invariably gets it wrong. He writes of the last days of the
battle of Mishmar Haemek, named after the settlement in northern Israel which
was the target of the initial Arab assault, that:

For the next five days and nights [i.e., April 11–15, 1948] the two
sides battled over these sites, with the Jews taking them by night
and the Arabs using their numerical and material superiority to
regain them the following day; one stronghold was subjected to
no fewer than eleven consecutive Arab attacks.

Actually, the last five days were characterized by the Haganah simply taking one
Arab village after another. I have no idea what Karsh’s description refers to or is
based on. He ascribes the January 1948 attack on Kibbutz Kfar Szold, on the
border with Syria, to the Arab Liberation Army. Actually, the attack was carried
out by the Arab Fa’ur bedouins.

Karsh tells us that the collapse of the Arab community in Tiberias “triggered”
flight from the neighboring Arab village of “Nasr al-Din.” Actually, it was the
other way around. The Haganah attack and conquest of Khirbet Nasir al-Din on
April 12, 1948, which depopulated the village, helped trigger the flight of
Tiberias’s Arabs six days later.

By “the time of the first truce” (i.e., it began on June 11, 1948), Karsh writes, “only
one Israeli kibbutz (Mishmar Hayarden, near the Sea of Galilee) fell [i.e., had
fallen] to the invading [Arab] forces.” This is a gross piece of ignorance; even
Karsh should know better. The fall of each settlement was a major trauma for
the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), and Mishmar Hayarden—a
moshav (a cooperative settlement), not a kibbutz (a collective settlement)—was
not alone. A cluster of settlements, most of them kibbutzim, had fallen by then:
the four Etzion-bloc kibbutzim, and Neve Yaakov, Atarot, Kalia and Beit
Ha’arava, all taken by the Jordanian Arab Legion; Masada and Sha’ar Hagolan,
taken by the Syrians; and Yad Mordechai and Nitzanim, taken by the Egyptians.

And it’s not just the blow-by-blow that Karsh gets wrong. He also confuses the
players involved. For instance, he repeatedly calls Israel Galili the Haganah’s
“commander in chief.” He was no such thing. Here is how the hierarchy broke
down: Yaakov Dori was commander in chief, or chief of general staff as it was
called. Yigael Yadin, as head of operations, was his deputy and actually ran the
show for most of 1947–1948 since Dori was often away sick. Above them was
David Ben-Gurion, who held the defense portfolio in the Jewish Agency
Executive, which became the Provisional Government of Israel once the country
became independent. Galili actually held a slot titled “head of the National Staff
of the Haganah,” a political function which meant that he served as Ben-Gurion’s
assistant or deputy.

THE MISINFORMATION is endless. Even the geography of Palestine seems

beyond Karsh’s ken (which is surprising as he did spend some years in Israel). He
speaks of “Hartuv kibbutz” (it was a moshava, not a kibbutz) and of “Mishmar
Haemek kibbutz in the western Galilee” (actually it is at the western edge of the
Jezreel Valley). Karsh refers to the Arab villages of “Shumali” and “Mansuriya,”
and to “Ard Saris, north of Haifa.” None of these actually existed nor exist;
neither did “Arab Quz.” (Haganah/IDF documents often misspelled Arab village
names and invented some, but the historian’s task is to check.)

Karsh—and in this he strongly resembles his erstwhile bête noire Pappé—has

scant respect for facts. He says that the Arabs in the riots of May 1921 killed
“ninety” Jews (actually, the Jewish dead numbered forty-seven). He writes of
“scores of Jews” massacred by Arabs in Safad in 1929; actually, eighteen were
killed, and so on. The list continues.
And on the last point—Abdullah’s rejection of peace and Israeli statehood—
Karsh, enthralled by the black and white, clearly has it wrong. Ben-Gurion
himself acknowledged in 1952 that “he [Abdullah] wanted peace with Israel” (if
only because he feared that, in its absence, the Jews would take the West Bank
away from him). True, Abdullah wasn’t a Zionist. Before 1948, he was forever
trying to persuade the Jews to accept “autonomy,” or as he called it, a “Jewish
republic,” within his expanded Transjordanian kingdom. But in 1937 he accepted
the proposals of the Peel Commission (the British board of inquiry charged with
examining the future of the Palestine Mandate), which provided for the
establishment of a Jewish state. And in November 1947, Abdullah reached an
“agreement” (heskem, to use Israel Foreign Ministry official Yaakov Shimoni’s
phrase) or “an arrangement and an understanding” (sidur vehavana, in Golda
Meir’s words) with the Jewish Agency to divide Palestine between himself and a
Jewish state. He did not suffer from the knee-jerk anti-Semitism and opposition
to Jewish nationalism that characterized most of his fellow leaders. True, his
forces occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in May 1948 and fought fierce
battles with the Haganah. But they never invaded Israeli territory as earmarked
by the UN partition resolution of 1947, which divided the British Mandate into
two states, one Jewish, the other Arab (save for some reconnaissance patrols in
the Negev). And during late 1948–1951, Abdullah negotiated with Israel. But his
cabinet and people, now mostly Palestinians, held him back. He refrained from
taking the plunge—and in 1951 he was assassinated by a Palestinian gunman.
Karsh writes that in July, after the 1948 war’s first truce, Jordan “joined the
renewed pan-Arab attack on Israel.” This is simply untrue. In July, it was the
Israelis who attacked, in Lydda, Ramle and Latrun—all within the area of the UN-
earmarked Palestinian Arab state. Jordan, after the first four weeks of the war,
cleaved to a completely defensive posture and nowhere attacked Israel.

Why Yale University Press (which printed my last two books) published this title
is beyond me.