Benny Morris The birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem 1947-1949. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987

Muhammad Muslih The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism. Columbia University Press. NY, 1988

(This review was commissioned by the review editors of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Its publication was made conditional on certain "corrections" to the text, which I declined. It was not published).

The Palestinian Israeli conflict is not unique in the number of myths and counter myths it has spawned. What is remarkable is the length of time it has taken serious scholarship to make itself felt in the field. Palestinian writing on "the catastrophe" have been, on the whole, polemical in nature, and primarily concerned with establishing the justness of the Palestinian cause. Israeli writings, while embodied in a more scholarly guise, have been in the main apologetic products of a breed of "warrior scholars", highly selective in the use of the archival sources at their disposal, and striving to remain well within their own national consensus. More recently, a spate of revisionist historical works have appeared, based on Israeli archival source. Both Morris and Muslih have embarked on a voyage of re construction of the historical record, the first destroying a myth, the second, trying to construct a new one.

The establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 was accompanied by the destruction of Palestinian society, transforming eight hundred thousand people into refugees. Even in the heat of battle, a great deal of effort and energy was invested by Israeli political leaders to show that the refugee problem was the making of the Arabs themselves, and concomitantly that they should shoulder the responsibility for resolving it: the Palestinians had left their towns, villages, homes, fields, etc., at the behest of their own leaders who ordered them to pack up and leave to facilitate the military onslaught on the fledgling Jewish state. Protestations to the contrary by the Palestinians themselves were more often than not brushed aside, and attempts to show that their expulsion was the logical outcome of Zionism's resolution to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, were dismissed as nothing more than self fulfilling prophecies. A rather curious formulation conveying within it a moral judgement.

Morris's book does not engage the issue head on. Its main pre occupation is with examining the political decisions that the leaders of the new state took in order to safeguard its existence in the face of unanimous Arab hostility. Viewed from this perspective, the birth of the Arab refugee problem is regarded as the outcome of "military considerations", and not part of a pre meditated plan to create an Arab-free Jewish state. The facts as produced by Morris do not however support this conclusion. It remains necessary to place the events of 1948 within the wider historical context. The political thinking that guided the military strategy pursued in 1948, the settlement impulse, and the demographic considerations which had never been absent from the deliberations of the Yishuv, possessed their own internal dynamic. The actual unfolding of events, and the balance of forces on the ground, provided a historic opportunity not only to establish the Jewish state, but to flout the provisions of the partition resolution, and to strive to implement the Zionist program in its maximalist form.

As the author himself makes clear, a main aim of the earlier phase of military operations was to win "the battle of the roads". In order to do so, the Haganah had to "pacify" the Arab towns and villages that dominated the roads, and "pacification" meant "either surrender of the villages and towns or their de population and destruction". With few exceptions the inhabitants of the towns and villages that surrendered were expelled. This was true not only during the actual fighting, but long after hostilities had ended, and after the "heat of battle" had abated. The IDF continued through the second half of 1948 "to haphazardly destroy conquered Arab villages..usually during or just after battle, occasionally weeks or months later". Expulsion was not limited to "hostile" elements, in the sense of members of armed militias, or even men of fighting age, but to men, women, and children of all ages. In many cases, there were always a number of inhabitants who managed to stay put, invariably, these were expelled. Even in the rare case where villages were spared expulsion, refugees from other towns and villages were forced to leave. The remaining two thousand odd inhabitants of the Arab town of Majdal in the South wre expelled to the Egyptian controlled Gaza Strip as late as 1951. The logic of expulsion was all encompassing: some villagers were expelled because they defended their villages, some because they were in strategic locations, others because of hostile acts carried out by some of their members at sometime in the past, others because nearby settlements vied for their lands, others because it was decided that no Arab villages would remain close to the borders, while others because this was the whim of the local commanders ( thus Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach, "tended to expel Arabs and to let his subordinates know what he wanted". According to Morris, in the South of the country where Allon was commanding officer, " almost no Arab civilian remained anywhere").

Under the direction of BenGurion, the IDF employed various means in its successful efforts to rid the areas under Jewish control of "hostile" elements. In practice this was a military campaign waged against the Arab civilian population of Palestine. Even friendly villages did not escape the ravages of the campaign. Physical expulsions, massacres, whispering campaigns, assassinations, car bombs, artillery barrages…all were employed as means to dislodge the civilian population, both in the towns and in the villages. While until recently it has been common to point an accusing finger at such organisations such as IZL and LEHI for such "un military" conduct as the massacre at Dir Yassin, it is becoming evident that the Haganah and the IDF indulged in similar acts, and the much vaunted myth of "purity of arms" does not stand serious investigation.

The overwhelming majority of people termed refugees, did not initially cross Palestine's borders. Many merely moved to neighbouring Arab locations in Palestine; some moved to other villages, while others stayed in the vicinity of their villages waiting the end of hostilities. As larger areas fell under Jewish control, the refugees prodded by the threat of advancing military units move to more secure areas. Yet by the end of the war, the majority of the refugees were still in Palestine: in the Gaza strip under Egyptian administration, and in those areas of Eastern Palestine under Jordanian occupation. Israeli legislation however produced a rather ingenious definition of citizenship; anybody who was not in his native town or village at a certain cut of date in November 1948 was deemed to have to right to stay in the country. Those who found themselves in neighbouring villages which remained under Israeli control were now classified as refugees and could not return to their original villages. They were invariably expelled from the country. Already by Mid 1948, policy had crystallised against allowing back Palestinians to their homes and villages, and the process was under way to destroy empty villages. According to Morris, little damage was done to the villages in the actual course of the fighting; this was accomplished later with "deliberate demolition with explosives, bulldozers and occasionally hand tools by the IDF and the neighbouring settlements". The lands belonging to the villages were immediately parcelled out to the collective and co operative settlements who rushed in with claims and counter claims, to enlarge their agricultural holdings. The picture he paints is one of plunder both on the individual and institutional level.

Although in no way exhaustive, Morris's book goes a long way towards showing how and who created the refugee problem. Yet he remains shy to draw the appropriate conclusions from the documents he has unearthed. Tucked away in a footnote at the end of the book we read the following, " if the denial of the right to return to villages immediately after the conquest of their homes by the IDF is a form of expulsion, then a great many villagers ho had waited near their villages for hostilities to end before trying to return home can be called expellees".

Muslih's The Origins of Palestinian nationalism examines the forty year period prior to the establishment of British rule in Palestine. He aims to show that even before the clash with Zionism in the 1920'2 and 1930's the Palestinians had developed their own regional nationalism, as a result primarily of the failure of both Ottomanism and Pan Arabism. The evidence he marshals for this thesis is sketchy and hardly convincing. It was the defeat of the Arab government in Damascus at the hand of the French with British connivance, and the break up of "natural Syria" which forced the Arab inhabitants of Southern Syria( Palestine) to fend for themselves, and which led of necessity to the advent of Palestinian nationalism, which underwent a long period of gestation before making itself felt in the 1970's and 1980's.