Unpublished translation (without the footnotes) of a chapter from my book Det förlorade landet, Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1996 (The Lost Land). The book has been published in German as Das Verlorene Land, Suhrkamp Jüdischer Verlag, 1998, and in French as L’utopie perdue, Denoël, 2000.

THE LAND BENEATH THE RUBBLE

I shall carve my name in every stolen plot of earth
and all along the former borders of my village,
which houses were blown to pieces,
what kind of trees were torn up,
what wild flowers were crushed,
just in order to remember. And I shall carve
every act of my fateful drama, every phase of the catastrophe,
everything, large and small,
in an olive tree in the back yard of my home.

Tawfik Zayyad 

I remember Tetleys raising its shutters early in the spring of 1967, which doesn't necessarily mean that it was unusually warm that year, just that it wasn't particularly cold. The owners of the little outdoor cafe under the towering elms in Kungsträdgården in Stockholm proceeded from the assumption that if it wasn't too cold to sit outside without freezing your ass off, there was no place you'd rather do it than right there. So there I sat the whole afternoon, drinking tea and watching the days get longer and longer. In Vietnam the NFL was about to give the U.S. a run for its money, in China the Cultural Revolution was gearing up to rescue Communism from the blind alley of Soviet revisionism, in the West monopoly capitalism hung by the fragile thread of false consciousness, and in the bright Stockholm evenings, the world seemed transparent and crystal clear. By the end of May it must have grown quite warm, because I have a definite recollection of the burgeoning elm trees that cast their restless, murmuring shadows over the ever gloomier news reports from the Middle East.

***

At that time I was studying mathematics at the University of Stockholm. Several months earlier I had joined Clarté, an old leftist student organization that had turned Maoist and was now leading the growing movement against the war in Vietnam. You might say that my joining the group was pure coincidence (although even a coincidence has its causes). But in retrospect it was inevitable that I would eventually link up with the revolutionary Left. Barely three years had passed since my involuntary "descent" from my pioneer life in Israel, and I missed the wide panoramas, clearly articulated goals and ideological fellowship that society had to offer. The ordinary challenges and expectations of everyday life in Sweden appealed neither to my sense of dedication nor to my enthusiasm. For at least six months after my return, I had spoken Swedish with a Hebrew accent, and long after that I regarded my native country as a mere way station on the road to greater heights. I was actively involved in the Zionist Youth Movement (Ha'bonim -- the builders). The first two summers I made my way back to Israel by train and boat masquerading as a travel guide (may the travel agency and my poor travelers forgive me), doing my little part to keep the Zionist dream alive.

The antiwar movement, with its palpable strains of idealism, self-sacrifice and collective goals, both challenged and strengthened my pro-Israeli convictions. It challenged them by broadening my perspective from Israel to the entire world. It strengthened them by propounding an ideology so reminiscent of the beliefs I had embraced in Israel. In fact, many people talked about Israel in the same breath as Cuba, a country that also boasted of collective agriculture, a socialist economy and a democratic people's army poised to beat back any and all external threats.

I had little reason to question my image of Israel. The Swedish political establishment -- particularly the Social Democratic Party and its Christian Brotherhood Movement -- still viewed the new state and its institutions with utopian awe. The remainder of the Left was absorbed by other issues. European intellectuals and opinion makers looked at Israel as the happy ending to the Holocaust nightmare, a way to absolve their guilty consciences, a laboratory where the dreams of post-war reconstruction had been fully realized . To the extent that the Palestinian refugees were mentioned at all, they were generally seen as being directly or indirectly responsible for their own fate; in any case, the state of Israel could hardly be held accountable. The Palestinians were an Arab problem, pure and simple. The very real and occasionally bloody conflict between the Zionist pioneers and the native inhabitants of the land quickly faded from memory. New realities and borders were soon taken for granted. Nobody could possibly picture the tiny, pencil-thin country as a threat to Arab security interests. Quite the contrary.  The Arab countries threatened to destroy the Jewish state, refused to acknowledge its existence or even mention it by name; nor did they think twice before engaging former German Nazis as military advisers.

From time to time someone tried to paint a more subtle and ominous picture of Israel, employing terms like conquest, colonization and expulsion, but few Europeans took them seriously.

Least of all I.

***

I was hardly the only one who feared for Israel and its very existence. For the better part of May the headlines were dark and foreboding. On May 14th, Egyptian president Nasser dispatched two army divisions across the Suez Canal into Sinai, where they amassed on the Israeli border. On May 17th, he called on the U.N. to pull back its observation force (UNEF) from Sinai, Gaza and Sharm el-Sheikh (at the Tiran Sound by the entrance to the Gulf of Akaba). Two days later, to most everyone's surprise, Secretary-General U Thant acceded to Nasser's demands. On May 22nd, Egypt blockaded the Sound, cutting off all transit to the Israeli port of Eilat, and the "moment of truth" approached ever closer. The Egyptian and Syrian rhetoric turned openly belligerent. On May 30th, Jordan joined the Egyptian-Syrian military pact, and on June 4th Iraq signed on. News reports from Israel spoke of astonishment, trepidation and rising tensions as reserve units mobilized and the country fell into a de facto state of emergency. What had begun in April as a serious but limited military duel between Syria and Israel (leading to the shooting down of six Syrian warplanes before thousands of onlookers on the outskirts of Damascus) had escalated to the brink of a major war in an ill-fated tragicomedy of insulted dignity, military distrust, inept machinations on the part of the big powers, strategic miscalculation and political stalemate. Regardless of where you stood on the historical roots of the conflict and the plight of the Palestinian refugees, it was hard to shake off the apprehension that Israel was about to be militarily defeated and politically annihilated.

Among my political friends at Tetleys, these trepidations were mixed with guarded suspicion. They were slowly catching on to the fact that the revolutionary vanguard in Peking backed the Arab countries. Cautiously they began to suggest that the news reports of the Arab troop buildup were lies, that Israel was out to start another war of conquest, and that Israel was on the side of imperialism in its crusade against the peoples of the Third World. In other words, you couldn't back the NLF in Vietnam at the same time as you defended Israel in the Middle East. The fact that my friends made their case so circumspectly was no doubt due to their not being truly convinced yet. And there was always that troubling question about how a war between Israel and the Arabs actually would turn out. What's more, regardless of the longer historical perspective on Israel's alleged role in the great scheme of Western imperialism, it was hard to interpret the events of May 1967 as anything other than unilateral Egyptian-Syrian aggression with Soviet Union pulling the strings. Nor was the chief source of  anti-Israeli propaganda noted for its objectivity: the Peking Review, which plopped down once a week in the mailboxes of my most politically conscious friends. On page after page of flimsy rice paper with a distinctive, faintly sweet aroma, the self-appointed avant garde of the international proletariat expounded on the current state of the world in a style so abstruse that it could persuade only the most devote believers. That the information provided in this journal could ever offer the basis for reasoned political argument may seem incredible in retrospect, but you have to remember that we read it only to confirm what we already knew.

But when it came to Israel, I wasn't at all convinced. In the articles on the Middle East I detected the rhetoric of revolution in all its cold, uncompromising, cliché-ridden rigidity, and my flimsy Maoist ramparts began to sway along with the elms in the chilly spring breeze that wafted over the city from the river. It was beyond my comprehension that the same people who up until recently had been totally unconcerned about Israel, or even had vaguely supported it, could execute such an about-face without even batting an eyelash.

After the spectacular and overwhelming Israeli victory (spectacular, I believe, even for those who secretly had hoped for a defeat) had relieved the emotional tension a bit, the discussion of Vietnam and world revolution continued. But somehow the issue of Israel seemed settled. With a sigh of relief, we went on to broader and less complicated items on the political agenda. Only a few people within the revolutionary Left were prepared to examine the Arab-Israeli issue impartially. China wasn't the only socialist society that backed the Arabs; it was joined by the Soviet Union and all the anti-imperialist liberation movements of the Third World, creating an extraordinarily broad front against the Jewish state. According to accepted doctrine, Israel was the creature of colonialism and must be eliminated. Or as our oracle Jan Myrdal wrote in Stockholm's Aftonbladet, "There has always been but one solution: a Palestine free from the ideology of race, acknowledging the equality of all people regardless of religion or nationality. This leads inevitably to the dissolution of the state of Israel, the return of the Arab refugees..."

In the complacency that followed the war, even those on the Left who had supported Israel closed ranks around what I regarded as a simplistic and dogmatic critique of the Jewish state. Here and there you ran into a genuinely well-informed critic; the young Folk Party activist Per Gahrton was one of them. But not even Gahrton was prepared to embrace a Jewish state in Palestine, only a "guarantee that the people who currently live there will be able to remain and look forward to a secure future."

For my part I was firmly resolved to do all I could to rescue my embattled view of the world, to prove that support for the Israelis was wholly consistent with the great causes to which I had pledged my energies. Before the outbreak of the 1967 war, I wrote an article on Aftonbladet's editorial page, arguing the Israeli side in the conflict:

Did not the Israelis engage in a bitter struggle against the British throughout the colonial era? Have they not revitalized the area with immense energy and dedication? Israel is far from a perfect country, and there is no need to shroud it in a romantic glow in order to convince people that it must be allowed to exist. As a committed socialist, I do not believe that supporting the Arabs on this issue promotes our cause in that part of the world. The only thing it can possibly lead to is a bloody massacre of people who are struggling to live a decent life.

Soon after the war I went to Israel in order to gather evidence in support of my assertions. I showed up one day in late June, at a time when the presence of Israeli troops along the Jordan River, the Suez Canal, and the Golan Heights near Damascus was still a new and unaccustomed fact of life. With the exception of Jerusalem, these conquests seemed anything but permanent. On June 19, a week after the end of the war, the Israeli government even adopted a proposal whereby most of the occupied territory would be returned to the Arab countries in exchange for recognition and peace. Perhaps the Israelis knew in advance what the answer would be. In any case the logic of peace was soon a thing of the past and the logic of occupation began to take over. New geographic and demographic realities emerged, especially in and around Jerusalem. The Palestinian neighborhoods near the Wailing Wall were torn down. Villages that were in the way disappeared from the face of the earth. Maps began to appear on which the 1949 armistice lines had been omitted. I read every newspaper and magazine I could lay my hands on, started up a discussion with anyone who would talk to me, rode around the still smoldering and deserted Golan Heights, heard rumors of the new refugee camps on the west bank of the Jordan River, ran across more and more people who defended the right of the Jews to Greater Israel, got to know Jewish Israelis who criticized both the ideology of Zionism and the fact of the Israeli state, and made my first Palestinian acquaintances. New versions of history demanded my attention, old truths were thrown into doubt, and unknown vistas opened up. I recall that first post-war summer in Israel as a time of relief, hope, confusion and a haunting sense of having been deceived.

That was the summer I discovered the land beneath the rubble.

***

There was a paradox that came with the new Israeli occupation: it highlighted the fact that the question of Israel wasn't simply a matter of land. Before 1967 it was possible to believe that once Israel obtained secure and recognized borders, the conflict would be over and peace would reign. After 1967 it became obvious that the geographic aspects of Jewish territorial claims had always been subservient to the ideological. The essence of the Zionist project was the "Jewishness" of the land, not its extent. Those who were against holding onto the occupied territories were generally concerned about the dilution of Israel's Jewish identity. On the other hand, those who wanted to annex the territories were also anxious to colonize and "Judaize" them.

Before the 1967 war, the appropriation of land had been limited to the area within the "green" armistice line. One means of acquiring territory was through the quiet "Judaization" of the Galilee, where Palestinians had remained in the majority after 1948. An even more effective method was the irrigation and cultivation of the northwest Negev Desert from Beer Sheba to Gaza. This kind of colonization was part and parcel of domestic Israeli politics. The demand for secure and acknowledged borders entailed the claim that Israel had the right to engage in territorial Judaization.

In the wake of the 1967 war, Israel found itself in possession of areas with every bit as much emotional, historic and religious significance as the Galilee and the Negev. If the Jews had an historic right to the former Arab cities of Haifa, Tiberia and Jaffa, what was to prevent them from staking an even greater claim to Hebron and Jerusalem? And conversely, if they had no legitimate title to Judea and Samaria, on what basis could they demand the Galilee?

Those who feared the unsettling implications of these questions simply didn't ask them. Those who wanted nothing more than to pursue the questions to their logical conclusion asked them with that much greater insistence. "The land becomes ours as soon as we occupy and cultivate it" read one of the many proclamations that reflected the changing mood in Israel following its military triumph. Thus the war, fought in defense of what most of the world had come to view as Israel's rightful territory, led to conquest and occupation of land that clearly belonged to others. And with the increasingly forthright claims on the new territories, the demands for annexation of the old ones gained fresh legitimacy.

Before 1967 the Zionists could convincingly defend the building of a Jewish state with reference to the Holocaust, Europe's betrayal of the Jews, the responsibility of the world community, Israel's vulnerability, the inflexibility and military superiority of the Arab countries, and the profound admiration felt by people everywhere for the vitality of Israeli society. The scrupulously cultivated Zionist myth that the Jews had come to live in peace with their neighbors, that Jewish colonization had raised the living standard of the Palestinians, that the Arabs were responsible for the refugee problem, that Israel's enemies had forced it to fight against its will, and that there was no conflict between the claims of Zionism and the welfare of the native population, was still credible to much of the outside world.

After the 1967 war, Israelis increasingly framed the question of colonization, Judaization and annexation in terms of power, mission, and historic right. What's more, the messianic-religious undertone was now unmistakable. The conflict between Jewish and Palestinian interests was laid bare for all to see. For a while the new territorial claims were garbed in the need for enhanced security and defensible borders. Furthermore, the Labor Party mitigated the impact of these claims by means of rhetorical caution and a certain degree of ambiguity. But the genie was already out of the bottle. In 1967 it was respectable to say things in public that had previously been uttered only in hushed tones. Cryptic and anomalous justifications for the pre-1967 land confiscations were dusted off in the service of the occupation. The war, which to all appearances had been an international conflict, disclosed with inexorable clarity the underlying irreconcilability between an ideology built on colonization and the interests of the people whose very existence blocked its path. The war turned Palestinians into refugees and peace-loving pioneers into armed settlers.

Those Israeli Jews who grasped the historic dilemma (and perhaps had always done so) were anxious to make a clear distinction between the new territories and the old ones, lest the entire ideological edifice of socialist Zionism should come crashing to the ground. If the religious settlers in Hebron were accorded the same stature as the Zionist pioneers, the initial state-building project would be irrevocably defiled. 1967 was not to be a repeat of 1948. These liberal Israelis did all they could to insulate the old Zionism from the contagion of the new, but their efforts were doomed to failure. The moment they managed to flee a confrontation with their own history, they were assaulted by the new reality emerging around them. In the years following 1967, the Zionist ideology that had constructed the Jewish state was rent asunder by its own inner contradictions, leaving in its wake an undisguised conflict of interest between Jews and non-Jews, naked military occupation, ethnic and Messianic claims to the land, cynicism and self-deceit -- and occasional re-evaluation/resistance on the part of a few Israelis.

***

For me it was all a profoundly unnerving experience. Of course, I had already realized that my adolescent perception of Israel was limited and naive, that there were things there I had never even dreamed of looking for, much less taking to heart. Even before going back in 1967, I understood on a theoretical level how serious the refugee problem was. I had begun to wean myself from the now-sterile conviction that the Zionists had rebuilt a deserted land -- or at least a land where they were welcomed by the native inhabitants. I was ready to acknowledge the flaws in my mental picture, to look at Israel with greater objectivity, to meet the critique halfway -- if for no other reason than to salvage as much as possible of my own past.

But no inner concession could ward off the sense of emptiness and bitterness that overwhelmed me as my ideological veils fell away and one myth after the other was shattered to smithereens. Not far beneath the soil I had once flourished in and loved lay a land beset by violence, injustice and hatred. And between the visible and invisible kingdoms was an ever thicker layer of lies, falsifications of history and homes razed to their foundations. I felt cheated, deceived, robbed of my memories. I had fallen from a great height and I was badly bruised.

Nothing in Israel appeared as it once had. The carefree, sunny, shimmering Tel Aviv of my youth had been transformed into a strange and inhospitable city. People I had been close to avoided me. All the political lies made me sick to my stomach. The indifference and lack of historical consciousness was unbearable. In extricating myself from the circle of unstated codes and signals, I had become an outsider with dangerous, unacceptable ideas, nervous for every new encounter and conversation. Gradually I began to live a double life; I behaved properly and correctly with those whose opinions I no longer shared, and I spoke in conspiratorial whispers with the few friends who were also beyond the pale. No longer could I travel in Israel without seeing black holes all around me, without noticing what was missing rather than what was there. Once upon a time I had hiked from one end of the country to the other without once catching sight of the mossy boulders, the crumbling gravestones at the edge of the pastures, the ruins of walls and facades. Now I saw the stones everywhere. And turned over each and every one of them. I was obsessed with discovering the names of the villages that were buried beneath the houses, groves and fields of the Israeli kibbutzes and moshavs. Not long ago these agricultural cooperatives had enticed me with their placards bearing the emblem of Keren Hayesod (Jewish Land Fund), the symbol of community and a glorious future. Suddenly I saw them as the ideological bastions of a system erected on conquest, segregation and expulsion. Everything which had once drawn me to the ideals of Zionism now consigned me to the ranks of its critics.

My re-evaluation was certainly a radical one, but it didn't occur overnight. For over a year I suffered severe stomach aches. My new consciousness brought with it turbulent personal conflicts. It  was one of the most excruciating, complex and earth-shattering challenges I have ever had to face. What I discovered during my frantic fact-finding tours in the summers of 1967-70 was to permanently immunize me against every form of patriotic rhetoric, every demand for blind allegiance. In retrospect, I realize that the Palestinian issue was what bound me to the revolutionary Left for all those years, not the other way around. On a matter that was crucial to my own identity, the Left had been right and I had been wrong. Most of my Israeli friends and acquaintances were revolutionaries, a phenomenon that was more sociological -- i.e. the product of conformist ideological pressures -- than a sign of critical thinking. Of course, there was no logical reason why you had to become a socialist or Communist before you could be enraged by the expulsion of people from their homes, the monopolization of land for one population group, the covert and overt discrimination against an ethnic minority. In that sense the critique of Zionism was based on the elementary liberal and democratic principles of equality before the law, the right to own and cultivate land, the freedom to travel and live where you chose.

But what the revolutionary Left seemed to offer that nobody else could was a seductively painless way out of the maze. In a better and more rational society, all conflicts would dissolve, former enemies would embrace each other, and irreconcilable differences would make way for socialist unity. The unjust world of the present would yield to a radically new future, the transition from the one to the other being shrouded in a merciful haze. "A democratic society for Jews, Muslims and Christians" -- that was the gloriously redemptive banner under which we marched, strategized, struggled to develop a coherent  analysis, and felt increasingly incapable of dealing with the gray zones before which the most articulate of slogans is of absolutely no use.

Israel wasn't the only question for which the Left advanced a cogent critique but impractical solution. Its analysis of capitalism was generally succinct and convincing, but its remedies rarely were. Many of us came to the Left via its theory, only to get bogged down in its unworkable practice. The Israeli Left was no exception. To my way of thinking, its analysis of Zionism and the roots of the conflict were impeccable, but it was way up in the stratosphere when it came to concrete proposals. Maybe the stratosphere was the only place that the analysis could breathe freely. To live on the margins of Israeli society extracted a high price, and Israel was an excellent example of the maxim that a valid critique does not always lead to wisdom in the real world. The art of the possible wasn't always an edifying enterprise.

My particular critique was whetted by the total lack of understanding, not to mention outspoken animosity, all around me. Even what I considered to be elementary facts, which I carefully documented and laid at people's feet, were summarily dismissed or ignored. It wasn't long before I was known as a traitor, a self-hating Jew who had deserted my own people and my heritage. Everyone took it for granted that I was critical of Israel because I was a "Leftie," not because I had understood something important. I felt not only betrayed (by my past), but also slandered (concerning my motives). 

***

Once the trapdoor to the land beneath the rubble had opened up, the world could never be the same again. I glimpsed things that I had not seen earlier, and that which I had seen earlier was now sealed in an airtight glass compartment. My painstakingly forged emotional links to the land gradually rusted away. The landscape whose aromas, colors and play of light had so recently evoked memories of cross-country hikes and whispered confidences and wide panoramas now only reminded me that something had been lost forever.

And if I was experiencing that loss, how much worse must it be for those whose land lay under the rubble? During the years that followed I occasionally heard their voices:

We are from Ruwais...
We are from al-Hadatha...
We are from ad-Damun...
We are from Mazraa...
And we are from Saab...
We are from Miy'ar...
And we are from War'at as-Sarris...
We are from as-Seeb...
We are from el-Bassa...
We are from el-Kabri...
We are from Ikrit...
We are from Kufr Bir-im...
And we are from Dair el-Qasi...
We are from Saasaa...
We are from el-Ghabisiy...
And we are from Suhmata...
We are from as-Safsaf...
And we are from Kufr Inan...

What had I discovered? Human nature and the implacability of history -- that was the answer offered by those who knew exactly what was happening but had remained silent for so many years. For them history was one long succession of tribes who had driven out others, peoples who had migrated voluntarily or involuntarily, countries that had been conquered, borders that had been drawn and redrawn. The Palestinians were late comers without deep ties to the land. The Jews had redeemed it, tilled it, built on it, shed their blood for it. What's more, the Arabs had neither the knowledge, skills, ability nor determination to cultivate the soil efficiently. It was in everyone's best interests that the Jews had taken over. Discrimination against the Arabs (to the extent that it was acknowledged at all) was justified on the basis of security needs. Their towns and villages were strategic risks. Their fields could be used as deployment zones. Their olive groves could hide terrorists.

However, what I had really discovered was something very different from history's implacable course. What I had come face to face with was the conscious shaping of history, the deceitfulness of human beings, the prematurely fateful decisions, the debates silenced in advance, the real options masquerading as the force of circumstances. Ein brira, said the Israelis, we have no choice. But what I learned was that they had chosen at every step along the way. Perhaps the apologists who had finally found their tongue were right when they pointed out that the Israelis were simply following in the footsteps of all other nations throughout history. They had treated the Palestinians the way the Russians had treated the Volga Germans, the Poles the East Prussians, the Turks the Greeks, the European settlers the native Americans, the Serbs the Bosnian Muslims. The only difference was that the motives of the Jews were so much worthier.

And maybe that was all true, but it wasn't what I had been taught. I had been brought up with the conviction that Israel was God's gift not only to the Jews but also to the Arabs, that Zionism strove to renew the Jewish tradition, not destroy someone else's. We hadn't stolen anything from anyone, conquered territory belonging to others, cultivated land that wasn't crying to be cultivated. We carried our weapons only in self-defense, not to deprive another people of their homes and their rights. I had been nurtured in the belief that Israel safeguarded the equality and dignity of all people and that if the Arabs hadn't benefited from the Zionist enterprise, it was entirely due to their own unrelenting stubbornness.

But I found out that it was all a lie.

***

The most scrupulously constructed of the official lies concerned the period just before and after Israeli independence in 1948, since that was when the conflict between the theory of peaceful coexistence and the reality of Jewish colonization came to a head. The founding of the Jewish state confronted Zionism with its moment of truth, a chance to make good on its declared ideals of democracy and universalism by proclaiming concrete military goals, geographical borders and constitutional guidelines. Within the matter of two short years, the Zionist leaders faced one crucial choice after the other - and they consistently chose the logic of territorial conquest and ethnic cleansing. The Israeli Declaration of Independence of May 14, 1948 guaranteed "full social and political equality for all citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender." But between these lofty sentiments and the deliberate expulsion of Palestine's Arabs yawned a gulf so wide that it could only be bridged by resorting to an extraordinary distortion of history.

Until 1948 nobody had been challenged to define the parameters of a Jewish state. In point of fact, the very concept of Jewish statehood had been virtually taboo until 1937, when the British government's Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine, with the Arabs to constitute a minority in both areas, at least initially.  Drawing what appeared to be the ultimate conclusion of its own reasoning, the commission proposed that a quarter of a million Arabs be transferred out of the part assigned to the Jews and that a thousand Jews be moved in the other direction. The 1944 opposition platform of the British Labour Party went even further and recommended the evacuation of Palestine's entire Arab population to the surrounding countries. Of course, the idea of excluding Arabs from the future Jewish state was central to the revisionist thinking of Jabotinsky and Begin. Nor was this concept wholly absent from the ideology of the Labor Zionist movement. Berl Katzenelson, one of its leaders, envisioned huge population transfers following the Second World War, including an exchange of Jews for Arabs to create a new order in the Middle East. Ben-Gurion was openly supportive of this idea, most notably in a speech to the 1937 session of the World Zionist Congress in Zurich, but he later backed down for tactical reasons. Nevertheless, the Jews in Palestine who harbored any moral scruples in this regard were few and far between. "The majority regarded it as desirable, albeit something they could afford to forego if absolutely necessary." 

More than any other single concept, the idea of "transfer" illustrated the zero-sum nature of the conflict. One man's meat was another man's poison. Land awarded to Jewish settlers meant land taken from Palestinian Arabs. A Jewish majority assumed an Arab minority. A Jewish state would inevitably accord an inferior status to non-Jews. It wasn't until a special session of the World Zionist Congress at New York's Biltmore Hotel on May 11, 1942 that Ben-Gurion, speaking in the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust, publicly proclaimed the goal of a Jewish state. When he finally took this step, he referred to the Palestinians simply as "our Arab neighbors," not as prospective Israeli citizens. The extent to which Zionists had shut their eyes to the heart of the conflict was all-too evident from the shocked reaction of those who had most fervently internalized the myth that they were engaged in a project aimed at furthering the interests of Arabs as well as Jews: "Ben-Gurion's proposal completely ignores the fact that a million Arabs live here with us -- as if they didn't exist at all," wrote Meir Yaari, the leader of the Ha'shomer Ha'tzair movement.

When the U.N. adopted its partition plan in November of 1947, it was still possible to define the conflict in terms of who was to control what territory. An extremely intricate system of borders were drawn up, replete with special enclaves and zones designed to separate the two peoples as much as possible. The Jewish state was awarded more than half of the mandate despite the fact that Jewish institutions owned only 7% of the land. In the prospective Arab state, Arabs owned 75% of the land, whereas in the intended Jewish state, they owned 33%, representing a slim majority of the population as well. Arabs owned 80% in the proposed international zone around Jerusalem. The Jews owned slightly under 10% of the land that was to constitute their state.

Just how little territory Zionist agencies had managed to acquire during 40 years of colonization was made painfully clear by the fact that even after gaining more through the 1948 war and 1949 armistice agreements, they still owned only a little over 8% of Palestine. A small percentage of the remaining area had been part of the British mandate but consisted primarily of rough terrain, roads and woodlands. Most of the arable acreage was owned by Arabs, either privately or through religious institutions.

But by 1961 over 92% of Israeli territory was de facto in Jewish hands. This huge reallocation of territory was the work of the Zionist movement, which had succeeded in gaining title to land conquered and seized in the 1948-49 war, often through the use of physical force or legal artifice. The widely-accepted claim that the Arabs had voluntarily fled their homes and fields, allowing the newly-arrived Jewish immigrants to take them over with impunity, was a legally correct but essentially inaccurate description of what actually occurred. While true that a great many Arabs fled, just as people always do in times of war, the tens of thousands who attempted to return after the war were confronted by closed-off villages, blown-up houses and expropriated land. What’s more, the distinction between flight and calculated expulsion was occasionally razor-thin. No matter how you looked at it, the interests of the Zionist project clearly demanded that as much as possible of Palestine’s land be opened for Jewish settlement.

The first military operations to gain control of Arab-owned territory were conducted in the spring of 1948, even before the issuing of the Israeli declaration of independence and the termination of the British mandate. These operations followed a plan designed during the war by Yigael Sukenik (subsequently Hebraicized to Yadin), Haganah’s commanding officer. Dubbed Tochnit dalet (Plan D), its stated goal was to “seize control of all territory within the Hebrew state and defend its borders.“ The plan outlined eight separate offensive maneuvers intended to link the closed city of Jerusalem with the area awarded to the Jews by the UN partition plan while simultaneously extending the borders of the area. Overcoming stiff Arab resistance, the Jewish forces seized a number of areas assigned by the UN to the Arabs, as well as parts of the international zone surrounding Jerusalem. Cities like Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa (which had been accorded the special status of an Arab enclave), Safed and Akko (located in the Arab area) were purged totally or partially of their Arab inhabitants. The plan prescribed that, whenever the Jews met any kind of resistance, “the enemy forces be annihilated and the native population expelled beyond the borders of the city.“ It was also during this period (the night of April 9, 1948, to be exact) that the massacre of Deir Yassein, an Arab village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, took place. Two-hundred fifty men, women and children were murdered in a singularly bestial manner. The atrocity, carried out by members of the armed Jewish nationalist organizations Lehi (The Stern Gang) and Irgun had the calculated and all-too predictable affect of sowing horror in the hearts of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants and escalating the psychological warfare against them.

As late as February 1948, not a single Arab village had yet been evacuated. But throughout March and April, Jewish forces, taking advantage of Britain's gradual withdrawal, initiated offensives to conquer and expel as many Arabs as possible from areas both within and outside the zones awarded to them by the U.N.:

-- April 27, Operation Chametz seized control of the Arab villages surrounding the city of Jaffa in preparation for its final conquest 
-- April 28, Operation Yiftach purged the eastern Galilee of Arabs 
-- May 3, Operation Matateh (Broom) destroyed the Arab villages connecting Tiberias to the eastern Galilee 
-- May 14, Operation Ben Ami  conquered Akko and expelled the Arabs from parts of the western Galilee 

Palmach commander Yigal Allon, the man in charge of these coordinated operations, subsequently summed up their objectives and achievements.  

As a result of these local offensives, the integrity of Jewish territory was assured, as well as the penetration of our forces into Arab areas. The widespread Arab flight made it easier for our troops to win control over large stretches of land, while representing a burden for the enemy, which was forced to focus all its energy on taking care of the refugees. It is not hard to imagine the sense of defeat that these refugees brought with them into the Arab areas. Had not the Arab invasion gotten in the way, there would have been nothing to prevent Haganah's troops from approaching the natural borders of western Israel, since enemy forces were totally paralyzed.

The May 15 attack on Israel by the Arab countries had the explicitly enunciated goal of nipping the incipient Jewish state in the bud and reversing the partition of Palestine. What it actually accomplished was to halt the Jewish conquest and ethnic cleansing of the former British mandate. In September, with a cease-fire in effect, Ben Gurion was still planning to seize the entire West Bank, having "asked Yigal Aolon how many Arabs could be expected to flee the area, to which Allon responded, 'As many as you set your mind to.'" Ben-Gurion's invasion plan called for a large Israeli contingent to sweep around the Arab stronghold at Latrun and descend upon the West Bank in one fell swoop. Once there, it would be met by units that had advanced in a wide arch from the south to surround Jerusalem and Judea. Ben-Gurion wrote later, "I assumed that most Arabs in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron would flee, just as they had done in Lydda, Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias and Safed, leaving us with full control over the entire area north and south of Jericho." Just one day before the operation was to be launched, U.N. mediator Folke Bernadotte was murdered in Jerusalem by members of the Stern Gang and the entire plan came to naught. On more than one occasion Ben-Gurion was to express his view that the thwarted conquest of the West Bank would be a source of "anguish for generations."

Nearly every Zionist military action during this period could, with a certain degree of credibility, be presented as key to the struggle for Jewish survival. The conquests and expulsions could be portrayed as emergency measures designed to avert imminent attack and defeat. In any case, that's how I had been taught to look at the war of independence, and that's what I had continued to believe in the face of growing evidence to the contrary. If pressed, we could admit that war was no picnic, that Jews also committed atrocities, that we had sometimes allowed our lofty ends to justify less than lofty means -- and then excuse it all by reminding ourselves of what had happened to us in the Holocaust.

On the other hand, what I do not believe I ever could have acceded to (assuming I had been privy to it) was the passage of laws and setting up of institutions once victory had been assured and the state of Israel was a fact, the sole purpose of which was the transfer of land to Jewish towns and settlements at the expense of the country's Arabs, binding even government agencies to the principle of not selling or leasing land to non-Jews. Though the Judaization of land may have been a perfectly understandable objective for a struggling nationalist movement, it was hardly defensible in a democratic country whose declaration of independence avowed the equality of all human beings.

It was the same country that a mere ten years later, after employing a system of overt and covert discriminatory laws, had wiped out something like 385 Arab villages located within its borders, radically shifting the balance of land ownership from Arabs to Jews. What's more, these laws and practices were to constitute the ideological basis for the arbitrary, anti-Arab territorial policies implemented in East Jerusalem and the other occupied territories in the years following the 1967 war.

***

In the late Sixties I translated a depressing book by Arab-Israeli attorney Sabri Geries. Titled The Arabs in Israel and originally written in Hebrew, the book was filled with statistics and legal references. Reading it for the first time, I was accosted with a growing sense of shock and disbelief. It was just too much. Was this the same country I had been brought up to respect and love? Was it really true that there were laws permitting Arabs to be classified as "missing" from their own homes and villages, thus authorizing an administrative order to seize their property? And how about the allegation that the Israelis had passed emergency legislation sanctioning arrests, curfews, isolation of Arab villages, expulsion of Arabs and destruction of their property without the benefit of a court order? An entire group of the Israeli population deprived of its elementary democratic rights -- how was it possible?

It didn't take me long to verify most of Geries' claims. It was all there in black and white, assuming you were willing to look for it. When I went to see Geries in January of 1970, he had been placed under house arrest in Haifa. Pursuant to the emergency laws then in effect, an administrative order issued on April 25, 1969 by David Elazar, commander of the northern military district, had enjoined Geries

-- not to reside outside the municipal limits of Haifa
-- not to change his place of residence in Haifa without permission of the police
-- not to leave the Haifa area without permission of the police
-- to report to police headquarters at 3:45 every afternoon
-- to return home no later than one hour after sunset and remain there until sunrise the next day

On February 20 Geries was arrested in accordance with Section 111 of the emergency statutes. Some time later the Israelis permitted him to go into exile. My suspicion is that, at least when it came to prominent Palestinian intellectuals, the emergency laws were intended for exactly that purpose. Administrative rulings based on these laws required neither explanation nor court approval, could not be appealed, and were indefinitely renewable.

In my journeys through the "land under the rubble," I saw evidence of the emergency laws at every step along the way. I'd be willing to bet that there wasn't a single Arab family in Israel that hadn't been affected by them in some way, shape or form. You could live an entire life in the Jewish areas of Israel without having a inkling that the laws existed, despite the fact that they were theoretically applicable there as well. Those Jews who were aware of them either didn't pay any attention to them or felt that the they were essential for the security and survival of the Jewish state.

It had been an entirely different story when the British instituted the Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945. At that time, armed Jewish nationalists were the chief target. Leading Jewish attorneys condemned the regulations as "legalized terror." Ya'akov Shimshon Shapira, later to become Israel's attorney general, protested that "the system established by the defence laws in Palestine are unprecedented in the civilized world. Not even Nazi Germany had anything like it... There is really only one kind of regime reminiscent of what we have now -- that of an occupying power... It is our duty to tell the world that the defence laws implemented by the British government in Palestine undermine the foundations of justice in this land."

In 1948 the state of Israel adopted the British mandate's Defence Regulations, the essential features of which have remained in effect ever since. Something which initially appeared to be a sensible emergency measure (after all, the country was in a state of declared war) has come to constitute the basis of a legal system characterized by administrative abuses aimed at safeguarding Jewish colonization and squeezing out the Arab minority. The adoption of the emergency laws removed all legal and democratic obstacles to a system of overt discrimination against Israel's non-Jewish citizens.

Among the most important powers granted to the military authorities was specified in Section 125 of the emergency laws, authorizing the closure of designated areas and restrictions on the mobility of their inhabitants. Throughout the Fifties, Section 125 was invoked on a routine basis to exclude Arabs from territory earmarked for Jewish settlers. Based on the definition of national security then in effect, any Arab village was a considered a threat and any Jewish settlement a safeguard. In 1953, the Israelis supplemented Section 125 with a special land acquisition act, the primary purpose of which was to retroactively approve de facto seizure of Arab land and establish guidelines for financial compensation. The law sanctioned confiscation of any land "not in the hands of its owners on April 1, 1952." No mention was made of the fact that these same people may have been dispossessed of their land through the implementation of Section 125. The law could also be applied to any land that had been expropriated by Jews between May 14, 1948 and April 1, 1952 "for the purpose of promoting essential development, settlement or security."

The list of Arab villages that were wiped off the map during Israel’s early years is a long one. Perhaps the bad faith inherent in the legal process is most clearly symbolized by what happened to the Christian Maronite villages of Ikrit and Biram near the Lebanese border in the northwest Galilee. Neither village had been involved in hostilities or shown the least sign of animosity toward the Jewish troops. Nevertheless, both were forcibly evacuated by Israeli soldiers in November of 1948. The residents of Ikrit willingly agreed to go by truck to Rama, an Arab village to the south, having been explicitly promised that they would be allowed to return in 15 days. The military authorities instructed them to take along only the most essential items, assuring them that their houses and fields would be well-guarded by Israeli soldiers. The villagers of Biram, on the other hand, were asked to leave their homes for a couple of days “in order for the area to be purged of hostile elements,“ which they did without the slightest suspicion, since they were already lodging many of the soldiers that were to evacuate them. Handing over the keys to their houses, they strode off to their olive groves, where they slept on a little promontory and watched the soldiers moving around in the village below. Being the middle of November, it rained a lot. After two weeks, they began to wonder what was going on and sent down a delegation of elderly men to ask for permission to return. But to their shock and dismay, all the men saw were houses that had been ravaged and plundered, with remnants of furniture and fixtures littering the streets. The soldiers promptly informed them that the land no longer belonged to them and chased them off at gun point.

A year and a half later it finally became clear to the residents of Ikrit that they weren’t going to be permitted to return home, whereupon they filed suit against the minister of defense and the military commander. On July 31, 1951 the Supreme Court ruled “there is no legal obstacle to the demand of the villagers“ that their homes and property be restored to them. The government had claimed that since the plaintiffs were living outside of Ikrit, which had been closed off in accordance with Section 125 of the emergency laws, they were no longer residents of the village. The villagers pointed out the obvious, i.e. that the reason they weren’t there was that the army had told them to leave. The Supreme Court’s verdict read, “In our opinion, the defendants can no longer deny that the plaintiffs reside in the village.“

When the Ikrit residents, verdict  in hand, jubilantly went to the military commander, he referred them to the minister of defense, who sent them back to the military commander. In early September it appeared that the court’s decision was about to be carried out despite the government’s stalling tactics. But on September 10 the military commander, invoking a 1949 emergency statute, issued a decree to the effect that Ikrit was to be evacuated due to security considerations, after which all of its inhabitants were summarily deported. Once again the villagers appealed to the Supreme Court, which planned to take up the case on February 6, 1952. But on Christmas Eve 1951 (the irony was surely not lost on the Israelis), army units entered the village and blew it up house by house.

Unlikely as it may seem, the inhabitants of Biram were victims of an even more grievous fate. Almost five years after they had been beguiled into leaving their homes, they also won a suit in the Supreme Court, only to stand on a nearby hill several days later and watch the Israeli infantry and air force level their deserted village to the ground with dynamite, bullets and bombs. What remained of the two villages was immediately confiscated by agricultural collectives that the Israelis had erected a short time before. Ikrit now consists of stones, a graveyard that was re-opened in 1972, and a lone, restored church. Rescued as well, the church in Biram is now surrounded by a national park dedicated to a painstakingly excavated and well-preserved 4th century synagogue.

In January 1970, many years after the destruction of Ikrit and Biram, I found myself wandering around the ruins of a similar operation. A two-phase offensive in the days immediately after the formal cease-fire of June 10, 1967 went into effect, had totally leveled the Arab villages of Yalo, Emmaus and Beit Nuba (all located in the Latrun region between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem). Two and a half years later, the white stone of the shattered houses still glittered behind the wild eucalyptus and twisted reinforcement rods. A nature preserve to be called Canada Park was being built. Within a couple of years all traces of the three villages would be completely effaced.

Somehow we tracked down a few of the former villagers in the Kalandia refugee camp outside of Ramallah. Ibrahim, a man in his mid-40's, his face wrinkled with sorrow, had managed to salvage a photo album. He showed us pictures of sturdy stone houses, blossoming fruit orchards and smiling people -- what had once been Yalo. One photo was of a white-haired man in traditional Arab garb. "That's my father. He was killed when they destroyed the village. He was old and couldn't walk without assistance."

Amos Kenan, a well-known Israeli author and journalist, had been a member of the Stern Gang. One of the soldiers who carried out the action, he subsequently jotted down his recollections.

Our squadron leader announced that orders had come down to blow up three villages in the area: Beit Nuba, Emmaus and Yalo. He told us to search every house for armed men and take them prisoner. Unarmed villagers were to gather up their belongings and go to the nearby village of Beit Sura.

The houses of Beit Nuba were built of finely hewn stone; some were truly magnificent. Each and every one was enclosed by a fruit grove, olive trees, apricot, grape vines, cypress. It was all painstakingly cultivated. Between the trees were well-tended vegetable plots.

In one of the houses we found a wounded Egyptian commando officer and some very old people. Around dinnertime, bulldozers arrived and demolished the first house on the outskirts of the village.

Within ten minutes the house and all it contents had been reduced to a pile of rubble, the olive trees and cypresses had been pulled up root and all... just after the third house had been destroyed, the first group of refugees approached from the direction of Ramallah. Instead of shooting, we assumed our positions, and a few soldiers who knew Arabic issued warnings to the villagers. There were elderly people who could barely walk, mothers with babies in their arms, muttering old women, young children. The children cried and pleaded for water. Everyone was carrying a white flag of surrender.

We told them to go to Beit Sura. They responded that they had been chased off wherever they went, that they hadn’t been able to get into a single village, that they had been wandering around for four days, without food, without water. Some of them had collapsed and died by the side of the road. They pleaded with us to allow them back in their village, saying that we might as well shoot them otherwise. Some of our soldiers started to weep.

More and more groups of refugees arrived, at last there were hundreds. They couldn’t understand why Israeli radio had urged them to come back, considering that they were forbidden to set foot in the village. Their entreaties were unbearable. One of them asked why we destroyed their houses instead of confiscating them for ourselves.

We drove the refugees off. They continued their southward march. Like lost cattle. The feeble ones died. That evening we realized for the first time that we had been deceived. The authorities had also begun to bulldoze Beit Sura and forbidden the refugees to enter.

Everyone in our squadron was beside himself. Late that night we were ordered to place sentries at the caterpillars, but we were all so furious that nobody would accept the assignment. The next morning we were transferred away from the area.

None of us could grasp how Jews could behave in that way. Nobody could understand why these poor peasants weren’t permitted to keep their stoves, blankets, a little food.

The poultry and pigeons were buried under the ruins. The fields were devastated right before our eyes. The crying children who disappeared over the horizon will be guerrillas in 19 years, just in time for the next war.

And that’s the story of how we forfeited our victory.

Village after village was to be wiped out in the areas occupied by the Israelis after the 1967 war, and for a time military considerations were able to camouflage ideological factors. It was considered strategically important to control the Latrun area, as well as the road between Telv Aviv and Jerusalem, along with Syria’s Golan Heights, where over a hundred deserted villages were eventually destroyed. Annexed soon after the war, the Golan was an immediate target for classic Labor Zionist colonization. Secular Jewish agricultural collectives were erected on the ruins of Arab villages, often after only a superficial Hebraicization of their names. The village of Khipsin became the Kasrin kibbutz, Ain Ziuowans turned into Ein Ziwan, the tourist resort of Neve Ativ was built on the remains of Jobata. Traveling through the Golan these first momentous years after the war, I saw abandoned toys littering the ghostlike villages that dotted the harsh but fertile landscape.

When it came to the West Bank, it was clear from very early on that security considerations were deeply intertwined with the ideological assumptions that had always justified the colonization of Israel, i.e. the Judaization of the land. Be that as it may, those within the Israeli government (led by Allon and Dayan) who had tried to hold these two set of assumptions apart quickly succumbed to the ideologues. The ideologically motivated construction of settlements at Hebron and Kirjat Arba, provocative by virtue of being located in the midst of an Arab population center and lacking any strategic significance whatever, immediate obtained the Labor Party's tacit approval. The same applied to a host of new religious settlements, all of which unabashedly went beyond the security map of the "Allon Plan" by laying claim to any and all Arab land.

Quite simply, the distinction between security and ideology was impossible to uphold. Based on the definition of security that had emerged in the years before 1967, Jewish settlements enhanced security by their very existence in that they made Israel more Jewish, i.e. more able to withstand threats to its survival. Israeli law professor David Kretzmer put it this way: "The concept of 'national security' in Israel... is intimately tied to the definition of the state as Jewish... State security is synonymous with the collective security of the Jewish people, which in turn is seen as contingent on the furtherance of 'Jewish national goals.' Acts that strengthen the Jewish collective automatically lead to greater security."

In order to illustrate the implications of such security considerations, Kretzmer describes a 1978 Supreme Court decision to forbid the showing of a movie it regarded as a one-sided defense of the Arab position on the question of territory and the Palestinian refugees. The court argued that "due to the persuasive power of its visual material," the film could be used to incite and "legitimize the murderous deeds of terrorist organizations in our country."

Given that security was defined and interpreted in this way, it was hardly a coincidence or a simple oversight that the Arab population on both sides of the 1967 borders was squeezed out.

***

Perhaps the most important tool employed by the Israeli government to Judaize its territory was a 1950 law on the property of "absentees," giving it the right to claim land and property belonging to Arab refugees. The law provided for a special administrator of "absentee property" with wide-ranging powers to dispossess the "unlawful" owner and sell the property to a person more suitable for "the development of the economy and the state." An individual Arab or a representative for collectively-owned Arab property was an unlawful owner if, during a specified time period, he had left Palestine or traveled to an area within Palestine "controlled at that point by forces attempting to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel or working against it after its establishment." The law did not take into consideration whether or not the "absentee" was living on his property at the time of the ruling, it being sufficient to show that he had been gone "for some period... after November 29, 1947."

In this way, approximately 75,000 Palestinians (i.e. half of the Arabs remaining in Israel) were turned into what came to be called "present absentees" (the Hebrew terms was nifkadim nochachim, as David Grossman entitled his book about the Israeli Palestinians). Technically speaking, the administrator was authorized to return the property to its owner, but the special committee appointed to deal with such matters consistently refused to restore "land required for agricultural collectives."

Based on this law, at least 70% of Israeli territory could be defined as "absentee property" and gradually transferred to Jews. If you keep in mind that the land taken by the Israeli government from the British mandate in 1948 represented approximately 2% of the country's territory and that an additional 10% was privately owned by Jews (leaving a whopping 88% in Arab hands, much of it desert, of course), you begin to understand the dimensions of the "absentee" issue. According to estimates of the U.N. mediation commission in Palestine, the arable land freed for Jewish settlement in this way represented a 250% increase in total Jewish ownership. Of the approximately 370 new Jewish settlements erected between 1948 and 1953, around 350 were located on "absentee property." By 1954 more than a third of Israeli Jews were living on such property. Approximately 30% of new immigrants were lodged in neighborhoods and towns once populated by Arabs. Agricultural products from former Arab acreage, particularly olives for export, played a key role in the Israeli economy during these years.

The statute on absentee property was employed in combination with the British mandate's emergency laws, an autocratic means of expropriating land for "public purposes" (the original legislation, passed in 1943, was intended for times of war), as well as the land acquisition act of 1953. These three laws taken together enabled Jewish institutions to own or administer 92% of Israeli land. What's more, these same institutions were forbidden to lease or sell property to non-Jews. Not only would the "present absentees" never be able to reclaim their property, they were prohibited from purchasing or renting anyone else's either. An overwhelming percentage of Israeli land was and must remain in Jewish hands for all time. In the decades before the founding of the state, the purchase of land for Jewish colonization was an understandable and arguably legitimate goal of a nationalist movement struggling to achieve a territorial foothold. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a child of the 1901 World Zionist Congress, had been expressly instructed to acquire and manage "the eternal property of the Jewish people," as well as never to resell it. This charge could be questioned and debated on a political level, but there was no doubt that it envisioned legal and proper business transactions. Admittedly, the total effect of the land purchases from large landowners (effendis), particularly in the fertile Yizreel Valley, was that poor earth-tilling Arab tenants (felahin) were driven off and deprived of their livelihood, something that occasioned palpable agony among some of the early Socialist pioneers. However, prior to 1947-48, no Zionist leader advocated the Judaization of Arab land by force. The idea certainly occurred to some of them, and there were extremists who went even further, but such deeds were nigh unto inconceivable given the ideological self-image that the Labor Zionist movement had inculcated in its followers. The perception that colonization was consistent with Arab interests, that the movement promoted socialism and justice, was central to the Zionist discourse, strengthening the morale of the Jewish pioneers and facilitating their mobilization. Whenever the conflict with Arab welfare was impossible to ignore or explain away, as was the case with the expelled tenants, Zionist voices were raised demanding more concern for the plight of the Arabs. One recurring suggestion was that land purchases be restricted to less fertile and not so densely populated areas.

There is no lack of historic evidence that the Judaization of the land before the founding of the state, despite generally circumspect and proper methods, induced guilty consciences in those who realized that ideology was one thing and reality another, that Zionist and Arab interests were on a collision course, that one man's meat was another man's poison after all. David Hacohen, a seasoned Labor Zionist, was chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and National Security Committee during the 1967 war. Later that same year he wrote an account of his student days in the London of the Twenties. He recalled how painful it had been to defend Jewish socialism against the reproaches of his closest friends.

I had to defend the fact that I didn't admit Arabs into my labor union, that we admonished housewives not to buy from Arabs, that we guarded the citrus plantations to keep Arab laborers from being hired, that we poured kerosene over Arab tomatoes, that we harassed Jewish housewives at the market place and broke Arab eggs in their baskets, that we supported the JNF and sent Joshua Hankin to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendis and give the felahin back home a kick in the butt, that we were allowed to buy dozens of acres of land from an Arab but forbidden, God help us, to sell a single Jewish acre to an Arab... It wasn't an easy task.

Before the state of Israel was founded, the JNF and other Zionist organizations could be seen as acting in accordance with civil law, possessing the legal right to engage in land transactions with whomever they chose. And the Zionist movement as a whole could be convincingly portrayed as a defender of Jewish national interests, as an independent party in the battle for Palestine. But after 1948 the situation was altogether different. Logic dictated that any land taken from allegedly absentee Arab owners through the invocation of the emergency laws would now accrue to the state, i.e. to all of its citizens. But the law on absentee property meant in practice that all arable land was resold on a large scale to the JNF. Within the course of a few short years, the JNF was to own over 140,000 acres, as compared to barely 35,000 prior to independence. All land ownership was duly registered by a newly-instituted fund (Keren Kajemet Leisrael), the charter of which, in collusion with the state, pledged that the land would be used "for purposes that in the opinion of the association directly or indirectly benefit people of the Jewish race, religion or ancestry." To put it bluntly, all former Arab land sold by the state to the JNF was permanently set aside for Jews. The ideologically-based discriminatory practices so essential for the construction of a Jewish society in Palestine were now part and parcel of the Israeli state, undermining the very democratic and universalistic principles it claimed to cherish.

A the result of a 1961 deal between the Israeli government and the JNF, over 90% of Israel's land has been made unavailable for purchase or lease by non-Jews. The agreement specified that a new state agency, Minhal Mekarke'ei Israel, would assume responsibility for all land belonging to either the government or the JNF, in exchange for which the former JNF land would continue to be administered in accordance with its original charter. In other words, the government acceded to an arrangement by which a large percentage of its land was reserved for Jews only. For all too obvious reasons, the Israeli Supreme Court has never probed the legality of this agreement. A state whose declaration of independence proclaims the equality of all its citizens cannot in good conscience turn around and declare a portion of its land off limits for a national minority.

In reality, most of the remaining land controlled by the government has also been earmarked for Jews. With the exception of those areas of the Negev heavily populated by nomadic Bedouins, Zionist-run agricultural collectives (which support themselves nowadays on many non-agricultural ventures as well) have been granted long-term leases to all land not administered in accordance with the JNF charter. The leases contain explicit guarantees that the land will remain in Jewish hands. In addition, a 1967 law on agricultural collectives bars Jews from sub-leasing to non-Jews. In a fact-filled study of the land issue and its legal implications, David Kretzmer concludes that "this law reinforces the legal and administrative framework by which virtually all [state] arable land outside the Negev is leased to Jewish collectives and cooperative settlements, and sees to it that Arabs cannot take over Jewish leases."

The preposterousness of the whole system was brought to light in 1980 when newly-appointed Egyptian ambassador, Sa'ad Murtada, was refused residence in the exclusive Kfar Shmaryahu neighborhood north of Tel Aviv. Ironically, it was not his neighbors or prospective landlord (a respected businessman and brother-in-law of Yitzhak Rabin) who objected to his living there. Instead, it was the fact that the house happened to be on absentee property that had been sold to the JNF and thereby could not be leased to non-Jews. Murtada's problem wasn't that he came from Egypt, Israel's former arch enemy, but rather that he didn't have a Jewish mother. Only after the Israeli Defense and Foreign Departments had intervened could a way be found to circumvent the regulations. The authorities finally approved the lease and Murtada could move in.

Long before 1967, most Israelis had forgotten all about the issue of land. For one thing, a conscious attempt had been made to erase it from general awareness. What's more, the redistribution of land was basically complete. Whatever expropriations remained, primarily in the Galilee as new Jewish cities and settlements were built, received little attention and were attended by only feeble Jewish protest. And as far as the Israeli Arabs were concerned, nobody spoke of them any longer. Now that virtually all traces of Arab Palestine had been physically and psychologically effaced, the hatred felt by Palestinian refugees toward Israel seemed increasingly irrational and inexplicable. That was particularly the case for the up-and-coming generation of Israelis who had been persuaded that the misfortunes of the Palestinians were wholly self-inflicted.

But after the 1967 war, the history of the Zionist enterprise suddenly rose to the surface again. The arguments for and against building settlements in the newly-occupied areas of Judea and Samaria echoed the debate of the Thirties and Forties. The "miraculous" conquest of "new" territories churned up painstakingly suppressed elements of Zionist state building. Suddenly groups emerged that openly advocated discrimination, colonization and expulsion on the basis of religion or ethnicity. And unfortunately, there was a ready-made tradition to which they could appeal.

One of the first indications that history was repeating itself was increasing talk of the “demographic problem,“ a concept that emerged in response to the fact that so many Palestinian Arabs now lived on Jewish-controlled territory. The idea of a Jewish state, so diffuse up to that point, had always assumed either that Israel would retain a Jewish majority (which was consistent with democracy) or that the Jews had an absolute right to the land (which was not). Now that the Jewish character of the state began to come into conflict with democracy, more and more voices were heard demanding government measures to limit the high Arab birth rate or simply expel them to other Middle Eastern countries. Joseph Weitz (1890-1973), one of the stalwarts of the Zionist movement and long-time director of the JNF settlement program, wrote in September 1967 that Israel could remain Jewish only if its Arab inhabitants were forced to leave. Apparently his views on the matter had been formed as far back as 1940, when he wrote in his diary:

Among ourselves we must be clear that there is no place in this country for both peoples... As long as the Arabs are still here, we can never reach our goal of being an independent people. The only solution is a Land of Israel, at least the western part, completely free of Arabs... and there is no other way of achieving that other than by transferring the Arabs to the surrounding countries, each and every one of them without exception, not a village or a tribe must remain.

***

On my visits to Israel in the years following the 1967 war, I continually ran into an obsession with population statistics, ethnicity and Judaization of the land, all of which was quite shocking at first. Occasionally this obsession assumed such proportions that it provoked heated debate, such as when a secret government document on the Arabization of the Galilee was leaked in the fall of 1976. Written by Israel Koenig, the official in charge of the Galilee, the paper recommended that Arab villages be strangled economically, that Arab land be expropriated, that Jews step up their settlement efforts, that Arab organizations be discredited, and that Arab intellectuals be induced to emigrate. However respectable such views might have been within closed government circles, they could not be expressed publicly. The Hebrew press howled and Koenig was dismissed from his post. But soon afterwards his co-author Zvi Aldorati, the Interior Ministry's leading Arab expert, was appointed to the Labor Party’s office of Arab Affairs.

There were many things I witnessed first hand during these years. Jewish settlements were built around Arab villages in the Galilee. Deir el-Assad was slowly squeezed out by Karmiel. Civil "observation posts" sprouted up on the hills around Sachin. Already cramped Arab villages were further deprived of land, building permits and the means of supporting themselves. The Arab opposition was neutralized by emergency administrative decrees. The Galilee was Judaized, first by the Labor government and finally -- when all ideological and political barriers had been removed -- by Prime Minister Begin government and Ariel Sharon, his "Minister of Agriculture." Sharon's most effective weapon was the "Green Patrols," which were responsible for blowing up "illegal" Arab homes, burning "illegally" cultivated Arab fields or spraying them with toxic chemicals, and confiscating livestock that grazed on "Jewish land." It might be argued that Begin acted more consistently than the Labor leaders, since he had never accepted either the 1948-49 armistice lines or the Jordan River as Israel's borders. Be that as it may, he still faced the problem of what to do with the non-Jews.

Thus there was a clear continuity between the policies that kept the Jewish state afloat in its early years and the post-1967 demand that Jewish colonization be extended to Judea and Samaria. The new settlement movement didn't have to go far to find historical precedents. Josef Giller writes of his experiences as security officer in the Jewish agricultural cooperative of Mazkeret Batya just south of the city of Rehovot. In April 1948 he was ordered by the Haganah to seize and evacuate the neighboring Arab village of Aqir: "We piled the villagers onto the backs of trucks and took them to the border at Wadi Sarar, which was an Arab Legion post. That meant the end for Aqir, as well as years of friendship between us and them." The Jewish settlement of Kirjat Ekron was built where Aqir once stood. David Grossman offers another historical example in his interview with Giora Ben Dov, a resident of the Jewish artist's colony at Ein Hod, once the Arab village of Ein Hud. The original inhabitants still live on the outskirts of the colony as "present absentees," hoping to recover their graveyard, if nothing else. No doubt Ben Dov doubt expresses the sentiments of many in the colony when he frankly advocates the denial of history: "I agree with you that conditions must be improved for the Arabs, but the most important thing is that they abandon their demands to recover even an inch of their territory. Give them the slightest foothold and our entire right to this land is called into question. By even acknowledging the situation before 1948, you wipe out the basis for this entire project."
"The entire project, Giora?"
"The entire project, the entire state."

*

Once I had begun to notice the land under the rubble, I also detected the well-entrenched stakes of forgetfulness and denial with which Israeli society had secured its conquest. To tell the truth, I was less disturbed by my discovery of historical injustice than the state's unwillingness to even acknowledge its existence. An injustice can be discussed, even righted to some extent, but mendacity seeps into the very foundations of a society and rots them. If you deny another people's history, if you literally refuse to acknowledge that they are "present," you can't respect them either. And eventually you start to despise them. In the early Sixties, the country's Palestinian Arabs became invisible and anonymous, their hatred toward Israel was made incomprehensible, their status as citizens was formally and methodically circumscribed. They were regarded as an eternal burden on Jewish society, not as a potential asset.

After a while even my own sensibilities were blunted. It seemed perfectly natural that no Arab could be entrusted with a ministerial post (still the case), that the Prime Minister's advisor on Arab affairs was always chosen from the Israeli intelligence establishment, that any party which asserted the Palestinians' right to self-determination was promptly outlawed (with the result that the Communists eventually had a monopoly on all Arab opposition in Israel). Arguments proceeding from the unstated assumption that power in Israel was purely a Jewish concern were my daily fare.

For someone who had never heard such arguments or seen where they could lead, the first exposure to them could be devastating. In November of 1995, just a few days after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, a Swedish co-worker and I fell into a conversation at Kennedy Airport with a properly-dressed Israeli on her way back to Tel Aviv. It goes without saying that the discussion immediately turned to what had happened, and why.

"You have to realize that Rabin didn't have the majority of the population behind him in the peace process," she said.

"What do you mean?" asked my colleague astonished, "I thought he had the support of the cabinet and Knesset?

"Sure, but not a majority of Jews in the country," she clarified, "he had to rely on Arab votes."

I understood her reasoning perfectly, but my colleague was baffled. She didn't know what to make of a democracy where a person's rights and dignity were defined in terms of ethnic and religious affiliation. Like so many others, she was unaware of the quasi-legal discriminatory practices when it came to land and property. Nor had she given much thought to the basic conflict between Israel's commitment to equal rights for all its citizens and its pledge that all Jewish immigrants would be admitted and granted immediate citizenship. Under the 1950 Law of Return, a non-Israeli citizen with a Jewish mother had more of a right to live in Israel than a Christian or Muslim Arab born there (a newborn Arab baby did not automatically become an Israeli citizen). The law was embraced by the guilt-ridden Western democracies as a morally justified, not to mention politically expedient, departure from the commonly accepted definition of citizenship. In the years immediately after the Holocaust, a genetically based citizenship test could be defended as a necessary emergency measure.

But how long could a country reconcile the theory of constitutional democracy with the practice of awarding special privileges to Jews? At some point demands for democratization were bound to come into open conflict with the tenets of a Jewish state.

*

The Israeli approach to resolving the contradictions inherent in the state was to ignore and conceal them. Even in the earliest Zionist literature, the Palestinian Arabs were depicted as anonymous shadows hovering on the periphery, forming a kind of immutable, occasionally exotic, backdrop to the momentous Jewish drama. They were strangers to be tolerated and lived with as long as the proper distance was established and the fiction of harmony preserved. Each time the fiction was shattered, such as at the time of the recurring Arab revolts in the Twenties and Thirties, a great ideological effort was required to restore it. Ben Gurion’s unwavering strategy (as opposed to that of the revisionists) was to avoid confrontation at all costs, to solidify the Jewish presence step by step, to acquire land one acre at a time. By denying the conflict all the way to the very end (or by blaming everything on the forces of Arab reaction), the Zionist leaders won time, land and moral leverage.

In retrospect, we know that they were fully aware of how deep the contradictions went. Arthur Ruppin wrote as early as 1913 that “every inch of arable soil“ that was privately owned had already been cultivated, “albeit not always intensively.“ David Hacohen and his radical classmates in London had no illusions that their dream could be achieved without treading on the rights of others. Shlomo Kaplansky, a delegate to the 1924 Conference of the Zionist Labor Party, asserted that they faced two choices: either acknowledge the Arab problem and craft a political strategy to deal with it, or else ignore it altogether. When he proposed an arrangement by which the Arabs would have something to say about the course of events, he was met by furious resistance from Ben-Gurion and the other party leaders. For them, there was no alternative to a gradual strategy of solidifying the Jewish presence in Palestine until the power balance had shifted to their advantage. If you read Ben-Gurion’s statements from that time, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that he realized the dimensions of the conflict: “Let us not fool ourselves. What we’re talking about here is not what form of government we should adopt, but rather who will hold the real power and control.“ It was rare that such an acknowledgment was made so explicitly, either by Gen-Gurion or anyone else around him. No one felt called upon to recognize, and thereby exacerbate, a conflict that just maybe could be avoided by skillful political maneuvering. Thus, the short-range goal of solidifying the Jewish foothold in Palestine was padded with the long-range goal of creating a Socialist paradise where Arabs and Jews could live in peace and harmony. The reasoning was that it was not yet possible to share power with the Arabs due to the reactionary rule of their kings and sheiks, but that the Arab proletariat would one day join the ranks of their Jewish comrades. In addition, various Socialist ideas were tossed around concerning what constituted the right to land ownership. The unstated assumption was that the hard-working and efficient Jews had a greater right to the land than the Arabs, who employed primitive methods of cultivation and had little interest in improving its yield. Finally, the Zionists appeased their consciences by claiming that the introduction of modern agricultural methods in Palestine would lead to higher living standards for the Arabs as well.

During these early years, the Zionist movement constructed what historian Anita Shapira has called “a defensive ethic,“ a self-image characterized by vulnerability, innocence and noble intentions. According to this ethic, the Jewish pioneers weren’t attacking or threatening anyone, they were simply defended themselves against forces that, for any number of irrational or malicious reasons, were out to destroy them. This self-image pervaded both the public discussion and the writings of the time. “We are the victims of evil,“ wrote influential author Josef Chaim Brenner after the first Arab attacks of the early Twenties, “victims of the depraved lust for power and riches, victims of imperialism... Not our own imperialism, we had no such motives... We only wanted to settle on unpopulated land, to build a Jewish community side by side with the Arabs. The Arab worker is our brother... Someday there will be a great bond between us and them.“ Brenner was later killed in an Arab attack.

When the British passed a law in 1936 restricting the right of Zionists to purchase land from small Arab farmers, the Zionist leadership argued that the legislation would be detrimental to the Arabs cause, that the little plots were too small to support a family in any case, that the Arabs could make better use of the money they received for the land, and that the modern agricultural methods introduced by the Jews were necessary if Palestine's rapidly growing population was to be fed. Moshe Shertok, president of the Jewish Agency (later to become Israel's first foreign minister after having Hebraicized his last name to Sharett), wrote in his diary, "Can you imagine what would have happened if such restrictions had been put into effect when the Jews first began to settle in Palestine, or even right after the First World War? If the British had decided back then to guarantee the Arabs who lived here all the land they required to support themselves, the logical conclusion would have been that there was no room left for Jewish settlement."

Some of the constant reiteration that there was no real conflict in Palestine stemmed from sincere conviction, or at least decent motives. The faith in the ability of modern technology and economic principles to solve all problems assuaged the qualms of such essentially democratic leaders as Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Sharett. Many of them succeeded in persuading themselves that an essentially nationalist struggle for land and power was in reality a social conflict between old and new, reaction and progress.

But much of the Zionist self-image was based on a conscious or unconscious falsification of history. When the idea of expelling a quarter of a million Arabs gained currency in connection with the Peel Commission's partition plan of July 1937, leaders like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann realized that such a an approach would be looked upon as morally unconscionable and logically inconsistent with the ideals of Labor Zionism. Despite the fact they personally favored both partition and removal of the Arabs, neither man was willing to provoke public controversy. On the rare occasions that they crossed the line and suggested that Arabs would be unwelcome in a Jewish state, as they did at the 1937 World Zionist Congress in Zurich, the evidence was quickly effaced from the record. Israeli historian Benny Morris documents the way in which the minutes of the Congress were scrupulously purged of any utterances by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann that could be interpreted as advocating expulsion of the Arabs. According to shorthand notes of Ben-Gurion's August 7 speech, he argued that, when it came to many areas in the proposed Jewish part of Palestine, "the orderly removal of Arabs was a necessary precondition for further Jewish colonization." He even went into some detail about how such a large-scale transfer could be implemented. Nevertheless, none of these remarks appeared in the official minutes of the Congress. On the contrary, a statement was added promising that "the Jewish state will be a shining example for the rest of the world with regard to the treatment of minorities and aliens."

Weizmann's comments on the transfer issue were also removed from the minutes, with the exception of a few references to his speech by other delegates. Ussishkin's reaction was particularly pointed:  "When I heard the remarks of our leader, Dr. Weizmann, supporting the transfer of 300,000 Arabs out of the Jewish state... I said to myself, 'My God, how deeply this psychosis must be entrenched now, even among our most distinguished leaders.'"

Morris cites another case of historical distortion by the Zionists, this time involving the posthumous publication in 1969 of Josef Nahmani's diary. Nahmani (Hebraicized from Agronovsky), a veteran of the pivotal second aliya, was a key figure in the work of the JNF. Between 1935 and 1949 he kept an extensive diary. In the early years the diary reveals an unyielding attitude toward the Arab claims. Like Joseph Weitz, his boss at the JNF, he supported sending the Palestinians to "thinly populated Arab countries." Though he rejoiced at the U.N.'s recognition in 1947 that the Jews had a right to their own state, he lamented that "we have lost half our land (Judea and Samaria), and that which we have been given is encumbered by 400,000 Arabs." However, as the struggle for land grew fiercer and fiercer in the months preceding the founding of the state, Nahmani became increasingly ambivalent and critical of Zionist policies. His diary from that time offers shattering eyewitness accounts of murder and expulsion, including Haganah's attack in April of 1948 on Hirbat Haser a-Din, an Arab village west of Tiberia: "I don't know if the assault and murder of so many Arabs can be justified. I was shocked by the sight of women and children fleeing the village in panic. I saw it all out the window, and it disgusted me." In another entry, he relates the story of what happened to the mukhtaren (alderman) in the village of al-Husseyniya during a Palmach attack: "He was one of our friends, and when we entered his house, he begged for his life, 'For 28 years I have been your friend, I have always gotten along with you and we have helped each other. Let me live.' Don't worry, said our men, just go outside, but when he walked through the door, they shot him to death. I was deeply shocked."

Nahmani's diary contained many other detailed accounts of Jewish outrages against Arabs during the 1948 Galilee operation, but none of them were included in the published edition. Weitz, who edited the diary, wrote in his foreword that he had left out some parts that were "outdated or could damage people involved." After the war, Nahmani reverted to his demands for a total Judaization of the Galilee. In fact, he was among those responsible for the destruction of Tiberia's Arab quarter. In addition, he firmly opposed all demands that the refugees be allowed to return home. Both his diary and the manner in which it was published reveal how sensitive the contradictions between the ideology and practice of Zionism could be for its leaders, how far they were willing to go in order to cover their tracks. Morris sums it up: "Speeches, debates, diaries and memoranda, all of which the Zionist bureaucracy published in great quantity, were subjected to censorship, in the course of which much of the original disappeared or was severely distorted."

Little by little books and articles have brought previously well-concealed incidents to the light of day. These publications include material from the archives of the morally righteous left-wing Kibbutz movement, which had been particularly anxious to hide its past deeds. According to a Haaretz article in  September of 1993, "The best kept secret among the kibbutzes of Wadi Ara [an 'Arab' valley in central Israel] is the name of the man from Ha'shomer Ha'tzair, a member of the Maanit kibbutz, who plowed the much discussed line, to the west of which all Arab land had been confiscated by the surrounding kibbutzes." Aaron Cohen, who was in charge of Arab affairs for the left-wing kibbutz movement in Israel's early years, received a letter from one of its members:

Wherever I go, I admonish people about our treatment of the Arabs, and somebody always comes up and asks, 'Why don't you write an article about what's happening at the Yechiam kibbutz? Its members have taken over fields that belong to Arabs who are still there, who have never the country, and have begun to cultivate it for their own purposes.' When I talk to the residents of Yechiam, they say that they will leave if forced to return the land.

For two decades after the founding of Israel, a host of dark shadows were temporarily dissipated by the myth of a wholly innocent and beneficent state.

***

I could feel the shame rise in my cheeks when all of this came back to me in the turbulent fall of 1993. The Israeli weekly Haolam Haze had published an interview with Yossi Genosar, the man in charge of combating terrorism for Shabak, the Israeli intelligence service, from 1968 to 1987. The interviewer, an Israeli journalist born in 1948 (the same year as I) asked whether they could trust Arafat, the PLO, or the Arabs in general:

Let me say this to you and your entire generation: you most certainly cannot trust them. I understand that. You have been brainwashed. And I share the responsibility for that. We traumatized you. We frightened you. It was a intentional scare campaign. We taught you that Palestinians are liars, swindlers, deceivers. We taught you not to trust anything they said. The political system demanded that we do so, and we placed ourselves at its service. It was a line of defense and we were forbidden to take a single step back. Forbidden to talk with the PLO. Forbidden to trust them. Give them an inch and they would take a mile. We were trustworthy, we and nobody else. Only our words and promises could be counted on. And the people had no choice but to believe us.

When I began to man the barricades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the years after the 1967 war, I found myself enmeshed in a web of lies and irreconcilable claims. It was a war in which no weapon was barred. Intellectual analysis, judicial forbearance, and the diligent search for truth were unknown commodities. The barricades were defended by the policy of shoot now and ask questions later. There was no time for reflection, patience or altruistic considerations.

————————

The epilogue to the third Swedish edition of The Lost Land 2007. Back in the Ghetto.
The epilogue to the 2nd edition.
The first chapter, Ascent, published in Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World, ed. Peter Stenberg, University of Nebraska Press  (2005). Also in Nothing Makes You Free, writings by the descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, ed. Melvin Jules Bukiet, W.W. Norton (2003)
Das Verlorene Land, Suhrkamp Jüdischer Verlag 1998. 
Review of Das Verlorene Land in Neue Züricher Zeitung 11.8.1998 (pdf-file)
L'utopie perdue, Denoël 2000.