Did Israel plan to expel most of its Arabs in 1948?

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Gershom Gorenberg

An excerpt from my new book, The Unmaking of Israel, now up at Slate, brings new evidence that recasts the story of 1948. Additional excerpts will be appearing tomorrow and Wednesday.

The most basic question about Israeli democracy has existed from before its birth: What would be the status of Arabs in a Jewish state? The answer is riddled with contradictions.

On the surface, the partition of Palestine approved by the United Nations in November 1947 offered a straightforward way to deal with two national groups claiming the same territory: Each would get part of the land. The problem with that solution was the same one faced in drawing borders between nation states in Europe after both world wars, or in partitioning the Punjab between India and Pakistan in 1947. No clean geographic line separated the groups that were to be divided. They lived among each other. The U.N. plan for Palestine gave 55 percent of its territory to the Jewish state and 40 percent to the Arab state, with Jerusalem as an international enclave. In the area designated for the Jewish state lived 500,000 Jews and 450,000 Arabs. Another 100,000 Jews lived in Jerusalem, and a small number in scattered communities in the land assigned to the Arab state.

Given those numbers, and given what happened to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948, it is easy to conclude that the founders of the Jewish state adopted a policy of expulsion and proceeded to carry it out. The conclusion, however, suffers from the fallacy of intent—assuming that if things turned out a certain way, someone planned it that way. More subtly, it fails to distinguish between political mood and explicit policy.

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The Truth About Dave — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

I think it was my senior year in high school in which my friend Dave first discovered the truth. And since I was his best friend, he was determined to impart the truth to me as well.

It was a cover story in Time magazine, I’m pretty sure, that set Dave off. It was a big spread about the Shroud of Turin, a cloth that many Christians believe bears an image of the crucified Jesus. New research, the magazine reported, proved that the cloth and the image indeed dated from the first century AD.

illustration by Avi Katz

“Wow,” said Dave, putting down the magazine and digging into the chocolate ice cream I’d dished out to him in my family’s kitchen. “We all gotta become Christians now!”

“Ha,” I said. Dave had, after all, been in my Hebrew school car pool. His Mom made a mean kugel and his older sister was going out with the son of the military attaché at the Israeli embassy.

“I’m serious,” said Dave. “It says here that it’s Jesus on the shroud. That means you have to believe in him.”

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Condi the Zombie Killer

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And News From the Road

Gershom Gorenberg

Greetings from New York. I’ll be speaking tonight at Mechon Hadar on the Upper West Side and on Saturday night at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. If you’re in the neighborhood, or who have friends who are, I’d love to see you and them. My new book, The Unmaking of Israel, will be in bookstores next Tuesday, but if you come tonight, you can get an early copy.

Next week’s stops include Brooklyn, Boston and Michigan State University.

And in the meantime, my new column is up at The American Prospect:

She killed the lie, I thought, as I read Condoleezza Rice’s semi-revelations about the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that was really almost nearly reached three years ago.

The lie says that Israel’s then-prime minister, Ehud Olmert, offered everything the Palestinians could possibly expect, and Palestinian Mahmud Abbas said no because he isn’t interested in peace. Rice was secretary of state at the time and seems to have believed in peacemaking, despite serving under George W. Bush. In her new memoir, she confirms an account of why peace slipped away that fits evidence and logic much better than the lie does.

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Team Niot Update

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Haim Watzman Here’s a brief update on what’s going on with Team Niot, the project to help learning disabled students that my family and I are setting up in memory of my son Niot. We are working on the project in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Education, an organization that runs Dror, … Read more

A Jew of No Particular Religion

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

Yoram Kaniuk has won: The prominent Israeli novelist is now very officially a Jew of no religion.

Hundreds of other Israelis, inspired by his legal victory, want to follow his example and change their religious status to “none” in the country’s Population Registry, while remaining Jews by nationality in the same government database. A new verb has entered Hebrew, lehitkaniuk, to Kaniuk oneself, to legally register an internal divorce of Jewish ethnicity from Jewish religion.

Kaniuk is 81 years old, one of the surviving writers of Israel’s founding generation. His latest and most lauded book is a memoir about fighting in the country’s 1948 war of independence. He’s also a veteran and sharp-penned critic of Jewish religion, which he has at times represented as an amalgam of the national religious extremism of the settlements, ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism, and the state’s clerical bureaucracy. During the escalation of the secular-religious kulturkampf that followed the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Kaniuk penned a furious article proposing a two-state solution: a political split between the Israelis of the Mediterranean coast, supposedly all secular, and the Jews of Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements, purportedly all religious.

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Three Bedrooms. Mountain Air. Spectacular View of Arena of International Conflict

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect. The neighborhood covers the hilltops. Beyond the last row of apartment buildings, the slope descends steeply, carpeted in loose rocks, olive trees, and brutally thorny shrubs. A long bridge, part of the highway linking Jerusalem to West Bank settlements to the south, sweeps across … Read more

Plane Story — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman 

    illustration by Avi Katz

“The air is unexpectedly cool and damp for early September when I emerge from Terminal 3 and cross over to the AirTrain. I’m alone and there are no human sounds, only the roar of traffic on the highway. Even that is muted as the elevator door shuts.”

I look up from 60C on my Delta flight from JFK to TLV. A pudgy young guy in a white shirt and a beard is standing over me.

“I’ve got the window,” he says apologetically.

I snap my laptop shut and squiggle out of my aisle seat.

“Sorry,” he says. “You were writing something.”

“It’s ok,” I say as he squeezes past me with a hat box and a large plastic bag full of cookies. He places them on 60B.

“I saw at the desk that no one’s sitting here,” he explains. He points at the computer. “Work?”

“Yes,” I say. “A story. I have a column in a magazine and the deadline is coming up. I’m just trying to get it started before takeoff.”

“Well, don’t let me bother you. By the way, I’m Yehuda.”

“Haim,” I say. “Thanks. Actually, I’m not sure if I want to write it.”

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Two States or One: A Debate

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Gershom Gorenberg At bloggingheads, Dimi Reider of +972 Magazine and I debate whether the direction forward for Israelis and Palestinians is a two-state arrangement or a single state. In the segment below, I argue that most of the diplomatic obstacles to two-state agreement would pose even greater problems for a single shared state. Dimi, naturally, … Read more

A Place Against the Nations

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Gershom Gorenberg

My preview of Netanyahu’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly is now up at The American Prospect:

… Returning to the U.N., Netanyahu is going back to an easier time in his life, when he did not have to worry about an unsteady coalition in parliament, constant resignations from his feuding staff, or hundreds of thousands of demonstrators opposing his economic policies. In comments to his cabinet this week, he said he would “represent… the truth” to an organization capable of deciding “that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.” His truth, he said, would include “The fact that [Jews] are not foreigners … that we have rights in this country that go ‘only’ 4,000 years”—an argument not likely to convince U.N. delegates that the Palestinians do not also have a right to self-determination. Nor will his claim that “the Palestinians are doing everything to torpedo direct peace negotiations” erase his own refusal to stop settlement construction. His rhetoric, like his presence, fits the 1980s better than today.

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