David Ben-Gurion (Photo: Arnold
Newman)
A peek at the archives of Mapai,
the Israeli Labor Party whose current leaders can’t decide if their strategy is
to outflank Netanyahu on the left or on the right, helps confirm my
reservations about its founders and early political figures: They prepared the
ground for Israel’s current slide into fascism.
An op-ed article
in Haaretz quotes directly some of those leaders’ statements in the first two
decades of Israel’s existence as they formally debated the issue of what to do
with us, the Palestinians who remained within Israel’s indeterminate borders.
The striking absence of any Palestinian from all these deliberations must have
permitted the participating Jewish leaders to speak their opinions frankly,
perhaps to a fault. But, again and again, they broached the subject without
reaching a clear and actionable decision.
Their inaction on the matter
became policy and their indecision emerged as the final decision that coalesced
into the practice and strategy of Israel’s consecutive governments regardless
of which party ran the show. One could cut the atmosphere of ill will that the
archives document with a knife. It provided the springboard for all manner of
state legislative and administrative maneuvers that were to follow to
disempower and pauperize us, the subjects of their reported debates.
Such steps have gained in number
and extent under the current administration. Under the current administration,
settler colonialist aggression in the Palestinian Occupied Territories spills
back across the erased Green Line to find us still our old Palestinian selves.
Even if we don’t declare it, most members of our community are in full sympathy
with the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign. Little has really
changed since those archived discussions. Except that the venom is now spewed
openly from public forums and official media instead of the secretive
discussions behind closed doors.
The archives document the clear
split in the views of the Labor Party’s founding leadership on the matter of
how to deal with us, the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Mind you, we were not
called that but rather “Israel’s Arabs.” In a way, that was an indication of
fairness: Calling us ‘Palestinians’ would have prejudiced the discussion beyond
repair. Still, no one is reported to have questioned the expulsion of the
absolute majority of the original population of what became Israel across the
borders. That issue was closed for good. Any member of that group, the majority
of the Palestinian nation at the time, who dared cross back to his home was an
infiltrator who should be shot on sight.
The word ‘Infiltrator’ at the
time was as inclusive of all expelled Palestinians and as threatening as the
word ‘terrorist’ is today in referring to Palestinians. All Israelis and their
leaders took that for granted. Surviving liberal Israelis from that era, such
as the lead peacenik, Uri Avnery, to this day, draw a line after 1948. They see
the problem starting only in 1967 with the occupation of West Jerusalem, Gaza
and the West Bank.
Repeatedly, the Labor Party
leaders returned to debating our future: we the Palestinian minority citizens
of Israel. The dominant stream in the Labor Party, led by David Ben-Gurion,
vacillated between relating to us as dogs or as donkeys. Levi Eshkol saw
clearly where such the discriminatory views of his party were leading:
“It would not surprise me if
something new suddenly emerges: that people will not want to rent a stable – or
a room – to an Arab in some locale, which is the [logical] continuation of this
situation. Will we be able to bear that?”
The present-day answer to this
question– hypothetical and unbelievable in the 1960s– is in the affirmative:
Scores of official Rabbis living on government salaries do order their
followers to practice such racism.
Another minority view at the time
was expressed by Moshe Sharett, a minister in the Ben-Gurion government (and
the second prime minister of Israel), who wanted Jews to accept that “Arabs are
not dogs but human beings.” Others in this minority faction had even more
forthright objections. Pinhas Lavon, for example, in 1955 summed up his
objection to the way Israel treated its Arab citizens by stating bluntly that “Nazism
is Nazism, even if carried out by Jews.”
The dominant faction led by
Ben-Gurion took a dim view of the presence of any Palestinians in Israel
despite the honeyed language about guarantees of equality for all citizens in
the country’s 1948 declaration of independence. Obviously, the father of the
country never trusted Arabs. He kept them at an arm’s distance even when he
politically accepted them as allies in the mini-parties that Mapai created,
financed and managed, to the point that their parliamentary representatives
were known to vote without knowing what subject the vote was about. They didn’t
have the language facility, and their bosses didn’t provide translators. But
the bosses would signal to them when to raise their hands.
Now, finally it all comes out.
Ben-Gurion knew his clientele. As late as 1962, he declared: “We view them like
donkeys. They don’t care. They accept it with love…”
I remember well some of those
donkeys. I can still hear them bray.
Ben-Gurion’s three best known
protégés had to deal with the existential threat any remaining Arabs would
constitute for the emerging state. The one who had it easiest was Yitzhak
Rabin, not quoted in the current article. In his memoirs, he reports that when
he asked his mentor what to do with the civilian population of Lydda when he
conquered it in 1948, the answer was eloquently simple: a flick of the boss’s
hand. They were efficiently expelled. The debate to which we are finally privy
relates to the 15% or so minority that remained in Israel, not to those
expelled.
Moshe Dayan, the West’s beloved
poster boy of Israel’s violent birth, shines again with his unapologetic
aggressive style as recorded in the archival documents. He does not mince
words:
“I want to say that in my
opinion, the policy of this party should be geared to regard this public, of
170,000 Arabs, as though their fate has not yet been sealed. I hope that in the
years to come there will perhaps be another possibility to implement a transfer
of these Arabs from the Land of Israel, and as long as a possibility of this
sort is feasible, we should not do anything that conflicts with this.”
Contingency plans—‘drawer plans,’
they are called in Hebrew military parlance—continue to exist in Israel for
driving us out to a neighboring Arab country under cover of a media blackout in
case of war. ‘Another possibility’ Dayan called it. Perhaps one day, a war
could be started to finally implement such a vision of racial purity in Israel.
Absent such opportunity, Israel’s
current leaders continue to formulate laws to achieve our virtual transfer,
fully neutralizing any influence that the country’s Palestinian citizens may
have had so far while delaying the contentious physical dislocation part for
the time being.
What I find objectionable,
perhaps even more than these war-crime scenarios, is the flippant cleverness of
Shimon Peres, the third understudy of Ben-Gurion and Israel’s famed
international peace advocate who introduced nuclear armament to the Middle
East. His view of the 15% of the native Palestinian population who stayed in
their homes against Israel’s wishes would be entertaining if it were not so
sad; he is reported to have been unimpressed by humanitarian and international
responses to our suffering under military rule (from 1948-1966). In his view
not only was that military government “not a strain on the Arabs,” but it was
effectively created by the Arabs– “who endanger Israel and as long as that
danger exists, we must meet it with understanding.”
That sounds like a mere
explanatory footnote to Ben-Gurion’s statement at the same Mapai Secretariat
meeting on January 5, 1962:
“The moment that the difference
between Jews and Arabs is eliminated, and they are at the same level …
Israel will be eradicated and no trace will remain of the Jewish people.”
Hold your horses, man! How does
that add up? Where is the logic in what you say? Even though you were my enemy
I held your IQ in high regard. But let me translate what you just said for
Americans:
“If the difference between the
white settlers and native Americans is eliminated, and they are at the same
level, … America will be eradicated and no trace will remain of the white
race.”
Or even, “no trace will remain of
followers of the Christian faith.”
Aren’t you saying the Jewish
people = Israel=Zionism=Apartheid?
