What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited - Part 2

What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited

by Michael Palumbo | September – October 1990

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Sources avoided by the revisionists include the BBC and CIA broadcasts monitoring of the Middle East, which have greater reliability than the highly selective Israel State Archives broadcast monitoring used by Benny Morris. This is no small oversight, since most of the central questions concerning the exodus of Palestinians in 1948 involve radio transmissions. These include the Arab attempts to convince the Palestinians to remain in their homes and the Zionist campaign of psychological warfare designed to persuade the Palestinians to flee. Both the BBC and CIA records show that broadcasts by Palestinian authorities and Arab governments urging their people to stay and Zionist psychological warfare radio transmissions urging Arab civilians to flee were very common in 1948. Benny Morris, who uses the radio transcripts from the Israel State Archives, mentions few such broadcasts in his works. Ironically, the BBC and CIA monitoring services are an important source of information for every major newspaper. As a former journalist for the Jerusalem Post, Benny Morris is certainly familiar with them.

Equally disappointing is the failure of the Israeli historians to use the U.N. archives, especially the reports of the United Nations observers in Palestine in 1948. Though they all came from western countries such as France and the USA, which were pro-Zionist, the U.N. observers filed objective field reports which describe the expulsions being carried out by the Israelis during the latter part of the war.

All archives, of course, are censored, but on different subjects. The U.N. archives are censored in order to protect the reputation of the organization and prominent personalities associated with it. It is unlikely that American, British or U.N. archives would censor material on the Palestinian exodus of 1948, which is of no direct concern to them. Clearly, both Arab and Israeli sources on the 1948 exodus must be used with great care, particularly if the information is self-serving.

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Clearly, the testimony of Arab refugees must be used with great care. Initially, I decided not to use the memoirs of Palestinian survivors of 1948, but I soon realized that their testimony was verified by non-Arab sources. For example, there is the case of Amina Musa, an Arab peasant woman from Kabri, a small village in Galilee, who described the devastation of her village on May 21, 1948, during a Zionist attack aimed at apprehending Faris Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist leader in the area. Within the diary of General McNeil, a retired British officer with large landholdings in Galilee, the entry for May 21 reads: “Every house in Kabri demolished. Faris Sirhan's big new house was the first to go up. He is a member of the Arab Higher Committee in Damascus." On other occasions I found that the refugees' estimates of casualties in Zionist atrocities was lower than those of the U.S. and other neutral observers, who, in some cases, counted the bodies of victims. Of course, not all Palestinian testimony is without error. Taken together with non-Arab verification, however, it can be a useful source for students of this period, particularly since 1948 is not just a historical controversy but also a human tragedy.

Segev's book has a definite human dimension, providing much personal testimony that brings the story to life. His reliance on Israeli sources is understandable, since his central focus is the Israeli domestic scene. But the first section of his book, which deals with Arabs in the new Jewish state, suffers from a lack of sources which reflect a Palestinian perspective. Arab memoirs or oral testimony would have been highly appropriate here.

Flapan's book is the most disappointing with regard to sources. Based largely on the document collections published by the Israeli Government, it contains only a small amount of new material from Israeli archives and U.S. State Department files. In addition to neglecting the U.N. Archives and BBC and CIA monitoring services and the testimony of Israeli veterans, Flapan has failed to utilize the British Archives. This is a major shortcoming in a book which is supposed to cover the whole range of diplomatic, military and political aspects of the war and pre-war era. The only original research in Flapan's book is a statistical analysis by one of his graduate students, indicating that most of the Israelis killed in the “War of Independence” died in offensive operations.

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